Tips & Tricks

Have you ever wanted to get a look at the contents of a package file on the Mac, but without installing it? You can do that with the help of an excellent command line. This continues on with our series of inspecting the contents of app installers, and in this case we’ll demonstrate how to … Read More

In nearly all Installer and Package apps, you have the option to view exactly what files will be installed and where the installer wants to place them on the Mac. This is an often overlooked feature of the OS X Installer, and it you’ve ever wondered what and where on earth that random .pkg wants … Read More

If you’ve been using Nocturne to get the black menubar in Mac OS X but don’t care for any of the features outside of the darker menu bar, check out MenuBarFilter. All it does is turn the Mac menu bar color into a dark black gradient, closely resembling iOS. Download MenubarFilter now or head to … Read More

By enabling a hidden debug feature in Disk Utility, you are able to both view and mount hidden partitions on hard drives in Mac OS X. Hidden partitions include things like Linux swap, GUID partitions, a Windows Recovery drive, and the Mac OS X Recovery HD partition, and once they’re mounted they can be edited … Read More

Can’t turn on your MacBook Pro or Air’s keyboard backlighting? No it’s probably not broken, it’s most likely the light sensor. If the ambient light sensor on MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models detects too much light, the keyboard illumination will disable itself and refuse to turn on, showing the above locked image instead. You … Read More

If you spend time customizing the desktop icon placement, it can be pretty annoying to discover that after each restart of Mac OS X, the icons seem to take on a mind of their own and rearrange themselves, usually changing their position so that they are all aligned to the far right of the Mac … Read More

We recently wrote about the dscl utility and how it allows a Mac OS X Lion user to change a password without knowing the existing password. The lack of required admin authentication has since been widely reported as a bug, and a small Security Update will likely be issued by Apple sometime in the near … Read More

A new addition to Safari 5.1 in Mac OS X 10.7 is that web pages auto-refresh if they are left inactive for a period of time. The feature can seem unnecessary and even annoying, but there’s no clear preference option to disable reloading of pages. Thankfully, Stormcloud (via DaringFireball) shows us how to stop this … Read More

A fair amount of users are reporting that upgrading Mac OS X has caused their Macs to run hotter in general and their fans to constantly engage, creating excessive and unusual fan noise. For users who have just performed an upgrade from 10.6, 10.7, or 10.8, this is usually because of Spotlight and the mdworker … Read More

We all know it’s pretty annoying to reading text that is ALL IN UPPERCASE CAPS, but fortunately with the help of text transformation tools, we can instantly convert that obnoxious uppercase text into lowercase caps (or vice versa, if you really want to…).

There are a few ways to reset a password in Mac OS X 10.7 but both of those methods require reboots. This approach is different, it lets you change the password of the user currently logged into Mac OS X Lion, without knowing the user password, and without a reboot: Launch the Terminal, located in … Read More

Whether you just use OS X’s Mail.app on a Mac, or an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, the Address Book in Mac OS X stores a lot of vital information that you don’t want to lose. If you’re going to be making any changes to how you sync this data, adjustments to where and how … Read More

If you accidentally deleted a voicemail on an iPhone, you can usually retrieve these messages by looking through a somewhat unknown “Deleted Messages” list that is part of the Phone app in iOS. Though this feature is little known, it’s quite easy to use, and if you’re hoping to find old or deleted voicemails on … Read More

AirDrop is the extremely easy local peer-to-peer file transfer tool that is built into OS X 10.7 and 10.8 and beyond, it allows you to easily send and receive files wirelessly over a network just by dragging and dropping. It’s a great addition to Lion, but it’s not supported on all Macs (some 2008 model … Read More

If you want to quickly style your folders or Launchpad with Emoji, you can access the Special Characters panel directly from the Finder in Mac OS X and then drag or enter those special characters or emojis into the folder or file names.

We already covered how to install Windows 8 in VMWare, and now we’re going to show you how to get Windows 8 running inside of VirtualBox. If you’re wondering why, well, VirtualBox is advantageous for several reasons, the two main being that it’s free and it’s available for all major platforms including Windows, Mac OS … Read More

Thanks to the inclusion of Emoji in Mac OS X, you can now customize the appearance of Finder items by inserting Emoji characters into file and folder names. This offers yet another way to customize the appearance of a Mac OS desktop, and it can provide an easy visual identifier for file and folder names … Read More

If you find yourself needing to know what the default gateway address is for a Mac, you can uncover this information in a few ways from OS X. For those who aren’t familiar, the gateway address is the IP of whatever modem, router, or switch the computer is using the access the internet, hence, it’s … Read More