Tips & Tricks

There’s no doubting that the tech world is abuzz about Windows 8, Microsofts upcoming iOS and Mac OS X competitor. If your curiosity is peaked by all the talk, you can easily install Windows 8 and have it running on top of Mac OS X thanks to virtualization. The best part about this particular solution? … Read More

Some MacBook Pro or Air users may want to disable their internal screen when the laptop is connected to an external display, this is generally achieved in two ways but ever since Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, and OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the internal screen is more persistent … Read More

If you’ve been using the iTunes betas and want to downgrade back to a stable iTunes build, or you just want to remove iTunes for another reason, here are two ways to delete the app under Mac OS X 10.7: the easy way using the GUI, and a quick way for advanced users using the … Read More

Apple’s Digital Color Meter utility took a turn for the worse in Mac OS X Lion, inexplicably removing the ability to view color values in commonly used formats like hex. This is a pain for graphic and web designers, and nobody but Apple knows why they removed that feature, but thankfully there’s a handful of … Read More

The font size of the Mac Finder window sidebar is customizable, allowing you to adjust to a larger or smaller font size of both the text and icons found in the Finder sidebars of OS X. If you’ve been busy customizing the Favorites folders and colorizing the Finder sidebar icons, you might want to change … Read More

If you’re going to run something like OpenSSH or MobileTerminal on your iPhone or iOS device so that you can SSH in to it, you’ll want to change the root password for obvious security reasons. Without doing this, anyone can use the default ‘alpine’ password and connect to the hardware, assuming they know an SSH … Read More

If you dual boot Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 then you may have noticed that some apps installed in one OS don’t necessarily work in the other. Some of these are because of 10.7 Lion specific features or Rosetta, but others throw random errors that don’t make much sense. Case in point: Adobe Photoshop. … Read More

If you’re an advanced user and setting up a new Mac, you probably customize the OS with a ton of defaults write commands and .alias adjustments. These are things you can either enter manually, use an easy tool like LionTweaks, or check out this new great script from GitHub called .osx. Note: this is obviously … Read More

If you have a mixed network of Mac and Windows PC’s, chances are good that you’ll be wanting to move files between the two operating systems. The easiest way to share files from Mac OS X to Windows is to enable Samba support for a given user account on the Mac. This tutorial will how … Read More

You may know by now that Mac OS X Lion has Emoji support, which is easily accessible in most applications. This brings a wide range of icons and emoticons to the Mac, and some of them are perfect to customize the appearance of LaunchPad folder names. Here’s how: Open TextEdit and then hit Command+Option+T to … Read More

The Mac App Store has a hidden element inspector that lets you view the source of any page or element drawn within the App Store, letting you extract text or images, and even enter your own code into the console (which can lead to all sorts of fun things). This is probably most useful for … Read More

The Preview image editing and photo viewing app in Mac OS X includes the ability to capture screen shots directly within the application. The resulting images open directly into Preview rather than saving to the Mac desktop, allowing user changes to file size, resolution, color, and file format. There are three different screen capture modes … Read More

Switching between active Desktops/Spaces in OS X with the three fingered sideways swipe is very quick, but an even faster method is by using the Control keys. The first option is to use the Control + Arrow keys, which is enabled by default. As you might expect, Control + Left Arrow switches to the desktop … Read More

Rant time! Waking up this morning to 49 new emails from “Apple Support Communities Updates” was less than pleasant, especially considering I had already unsubscribed from all email notifications the night before – or so I thought. It turns out that you have to unsubscribe to email notifications from each individual thread that you are … Read More

If you’ve used an iPhone or iPad much, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the ‘shake-to-undo’ motion sensing feature that lets you literally shake the device to undo an event or clear a text box. With a little help of a third party tool, we can bring shake to undo to Mac laptops that are equipped with … Read More

Need to move your iPhoto library? No problem, it’s easily done by a two-step process – first you need to physically move or copy the picture library to the new location, and then you have to tell iPhoto where the new location is. This is all really easy to do on the Mac, and it … Read More

If you’re a Mac user that requires the usage of Internet Explorer under Mac OS X, you’ll find your choices are generally as follows: run IE on top of Mac OS X with Wine which can be slow and buggy, dual boot Windows and Mac OS X which is a nuisance because it requites rebooting, … Read More

You may find yourself needing to know what the IP address of an iPhone, iPad, or iOS device is. Fortunately getting IP address info is quite easy, and getting an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPads IP address is fairly straight forward, with the instructions being the same for basically all versions of iOS and iPadOS. … Read More