Tips & Tricks

Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a small utility that provides the ability to create an external bootable recovery drive for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This should quell some of the complaints from users who didn’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, or who were otherwise unsatisfied with … Read More

Many users who upgraded to Mac OS X Lion discovered that their Wi-Fi connections were dropping periodically for no apparent reason. We published a reasonably thorough walkthrough with tips on fixing OS X Lion’s wireless dropping issues and that’s a recommended starting point because most tips are easy and less complicated, but among those was … Read More

The problem with traditional solutions like a defaults write command to show hidden files in Mac OS X is that they’re permanent unless another defaults write command is executed, this isn’t a big deal for some users but if you just want a quick glance at invisible files than busting out the command line is … Read More

You can now select any number of files from the Mac OS X desktop or a folder and create a new folder containing those selected items. This is a wildly useful Finder trick for file management and organization, since you can quickly group a collection of files by selecting however many you want to within … Read More

It’s unclear why, but the Mac App Store is running a lot slower in OS X Lion for some users, including myself. By slow I mean you’ll encounter nearly constant beachballs as you click from app to app, with the absolute worst offender being the main category sections. I’m assuming there is an underlying bug … Read More

If you’ve found yourself stuck in Chromes full screen mode, you’re not alone. Chrome has it’s benefits, like syncing and the native omnibar, but unfortunately Chrome does not play well with Full Screen Mode under Mac OS X Lion – at all. You are free to click the full screen button to get in, but … Read More

In Apple’s quest to simplify the Mac user experience, they hid the windows status bar in Mac OS X starting with Lion and continuing through with Mountain Lion, Mavericks, OS X Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. Obviously that change is here for good, and while this definitely makes for a cleaner appearance when looking at … Read More

If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s … Read More

One of the best things about Google Chrome’s user interface is the combined URL and search bar, where a single input bar serves both purposes, but is smart enough to know the difference between a search query and a URL. Safari doesn’t have this feature, but Omnibar fills that gap. Safari Omnibar combines Safari’s URL … Read More

Don’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or DVD yourself? It’s easier than ever, but if you aren’t up for it, you can now get an official Mac OS X Lion USB recovery drive from AppleCare. The word is that these Lion USB installer drives will officially cost $69, but some users are … Read More

You may know already that iOS has the same underlying unix architecture as Mac OS X, and because of this you can SSH into an iPhone or iPad just like you would connect to any other Mac or unix based machine. As it turns out for us nerdier users, this ability is disabled without a … Read More

If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold … Read More

If you ever need to cancel an active download from the Mac App Store, you can quickly do so in OS X (on any version) with a really simple trick. There’s not much to the cancel download trick, here’s all you need to do: Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the … Read More

Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only. First off, you have to use a PNG … Read More

The scrollbars in new versions of Mac OS X are hidden until activated by use, that is, by scrolling, making them invisible by default. This is the new default behavior that works very well if you primarily use a trackpad with your Mac. I use an external mouse with my Mac quite often though, and … Read More

iCloud Beta is now live for developers to access, and we know what the pricing plans look like, but average users are left just looking at screenshots for now. Just kidding! If you want to check out iCloud’s very iOS-like Springboard and web apps, and you don’t have a developer account, you can use this … Read More

Need to redownload Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store? If you plan on making an install drive but you already upgraded to Lion, you’ll need to redownload the Installer so that you can extract the DMG file. This is the sure fire way to do it, in short, hold the Option key … Read More

If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met. In order to use LionDiskMaker, you … Read More