Tips and tricks for all things Apple! Whether you want to learn tips for a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or much more, you will find many tricks, tips, tutorials, and excellent walkthroughs for Apple devices and software here.
If opening up Activity Monitor is confusing or intimidating to you, or you just find it hard to track down that errant Chrome Worker process, try sorting the list by “All Processes, Hierarchically”. Sorting by hierarchy breaks the processes down into apps and their child processes, grouping together things like all of the “Google Chrome … Read More
Mac OS X Lion has changed how several helpful troubleshooting tools function, one being the reset password tool, and another is how Apple Hardware Test (AHT) mode works. Gone is AHT’s independent boot mode in favor of an internet based version that is dependent on Lion’s Internet Recovery instead. If you always have access to … Read More
Mac OS X Lion’s App Resume feature is both loved and hated. Most people seem to love the feature for most of their apps, but don’t want it enabled for others. Up until now, you’ve had to issue either app-specific defaults write commands or lock saved states folders, or just disable Resume completely. These are … Read More
Mac OS X and iTunes has been slowly going the way of minimalism with subdued grey interface elements and icons, some people like the change and others don’t. We just showed you how to get color icons back in the OS X Lion Finder sidebars, and in the comments, Prescott Perez-Fox posted a resource file … Read More
Safari in OS X allows you to have greater control over cookie settings as stored in the Mac web browser. There are now options to block all cookies, allow all cookies, or to selectively block third party and advertiser tracking cookies. Each of these choices are easily set or changed within Safaris’ preferences, and if … Read More
You may have noticed that when you log out or reboot Mac OS X, you get a dialog window with a checkbox next to “Reopen windows when logging back in” that restores all of your currently open applications and windows. If you don’t like it and you’re tired of unchecking the box to no longer … Read More
OS X Lion brought greyscale icons to the Mac OS X Finder window sidebar, but if you’d rather have some color back in your desktop window sidebars, you can get this done easily through a third party plugin. If you’ve been following some of our other Lion tips, you may already have SIMBL installed, otherwise … Read More
One of several changes to newer versions of OS X is how resetting passwords is handled, previous versions of Mac OS X would have a password reset tool easily accessible from the Utilities menu but that isn’t available anymore, and for some added security you now must access a password reset tool through the command … Read More
The desktop in latter versions of Mac OS X has simplified the Finder window sidebars by showing just a few choices, with the emphasis on the ‘All My Files’ directory rather than individually pointing to your Pictures and Documents folders. If you prefer to see more options from the Finder and Desktop window sidebars, you … Read More
AirDrop is a great local peer-to-peer file sharing feature in Mac OS X Lion that is surprisingly useful. That said, the ‘pop’ or drop sound effect that you hear when someone AirDrops you a file has always annoyed me because it’s the same sound effect you hear when you get a new iChat message. Like … Read More
Want to open the Finder and your standard desktop Mac OS X windows from LaunchPad? You can, but you have to drag the Finder application into LaunchPad. Here’s how to do this: From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up “Go To Folder” and enter the following path: /System/Library/CoreServices/ Within /CoreServices/ locate … Read More
A common complaint about free app giveaways is that they’re often constrained to the USA based iOS App Store, in other words if you’re outside of the US you don’t get in on deals like the recent Rage HD giveaway and the ongoing myriad of other free app offers. This is a bummer for anyone … Read More
Whether you made a Lion recovery drive with Apple’s Lion Recovery Disk Assistant Tool and you’re booting from that or you’re just relying on the Recovery HD partition, this technique works.
Is autocorrect in Mac OS X driving you nuts? We’ve received a fair amount of complaints regarding Mac OS X spelling autocorrect feature erroneously correcting things like British English words to American English words, and changing the spelling of some words like “colour” to “color” and so on. The reason for this is a language … Read More
Reading App Store reviews and opinions from a variety of websites only does so much, if you really want to know what an app is like, you have to use it yourself. Some apps offer light versions as free downloads on the App Store, but what about the others? What if you’re on the fence … Read More
Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, and now that they are included in modern versions of OS X, the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings. Emoji are quickly taking the world by storm … Read More
Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue! This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of … Read More
If you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, that’s because the new versions of Safari has a separate spelling and grammar engine than the core OS. Admittedly, that’s a little confusing to have an app use it’s own unique spelling correction … Read More
