Tips & Tricks

Do you miss the way Mail used to look, when you used to be able to see many more email messages all at once from the primary screen without scrolling around? As you probably know, Mail.app received a pretty significant makeover in Mac OS X Lion and that new default layout has stuck around in … Read More

Mac users can easily install and use the Lynx web browser in the Terminal. Lynx is a text based command line web browser, it’s relatively popular within unix communities but it also has a variety of general uses too; it’s great if you want to discretely browse the web and read articles at work or … Read More

The latest versions of Mac OS X bring a subtle new window animation, it’s so subtle that many people probably won’t even notice it, but it displays any time a new window is created. It’s better seen than described (the attached screenshot only captures so much), but basically the new window grows to full sized … Read More

Mac OS X includes many high quality voices for it’s text-to-speech abilities, they’re in a wide variety of languages and accents and are probably some of the best computer rendered voices out there. But guess what? Many of these incredible voices are not installed by default on a Mac! Thankfully that’s easy to change, and … Read More

Do you hate the way iCal looks in Mac OS X Lion? The leather interface of iCal looks like it’s right out of an iPad has definitely caused a split with users, people either love the way it looks or hate it with a passion. For the sake of this article, we’re going to assume … Read More

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion both hide the ~/Library directory by default, the reason likely being to prevent accidental deletion of critical files that are needed for apps to run. Since most Mac users don’t ever need to go into the Library folder, this isn’t terribly shocking, but for … Read More

Maximizer is a free utility that brings Full Screen app mode to all Cocoa apps running in Mac OS X Lion 10.7, even if they don’t technically support the feature yet. Lion is needed, as is the following to get this working: Download SIMBL – SIMBL stands for “SIMple Bundle Loader” and basically allows app … Read More

One of the great unsung features of Lion is the personal use license which allows you to download OS X Lion once and then install it on all of your authorized personal Macs. This makes the $29.99 purchase an even better deal than it would be already, because one single purchase lets you upgrade all … Read More

You might have heard that Mac OS X Lion ditches Front Row, the easily accessible media player that was activated by hitting Command+Escape on a keyboard or by pressing play on an Apple Remote. If you like Front Row and are disappointed in Lion leaving it behind, you can easily get it working again just … Read More

First a quick note: if you’re a developer who is running the Lion GM build 11A511 there is technically no need to install the Lion Final, both builds are 11A511 and identical. That said… If you are running the Mac OS X Lion GM build and you want to buy and install the Final release … Read More

Mac OS X Lion is available now and many of us will be upgrading immediately, while others will be waiting. Regardless of when you decide to upgrade to OS X 10.7, you’ll want to update your existing Mac OS X installation, check app compatibility, and backup your data. Recommended Steps for Upgrading to Mac OS … Read More

Your Mac will automatically restart itself if it freezes, thanks to a new feature in OS X Mountain Lion and Mac OS X Lion. Tucked away in “Energy Saver”, the auto-restart ability is an option that can be disabled if for whatever reason you don’t want your Mac to basically fix itself in the event … Read More

If manually deleting specific apps saved Resume states is too tedious for you, you can always choose to just disable the Resume and App Restore feature completely in Mac OS X 10.7. Launch System Preferences and click on the “General” icon At the bottom of the “Number of recent items” list, uncheck the checkbox next … Read More

Using the command line open tool, you can immediately launch any URL from the Terminal into the default web browser of Mac OS X. In other words, you’re launching the specified site into a GUI browser from the command line. The syntax to open any URL into the default web browser like this is remarkably … Read More

One of the new features in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion is the “Resume” ability for all applications to save their last state, meaning when you relaunch the app or reboot your Mac, the application will “resume” and reopen again showing all of the windows and data that was last in use. … Read More

Using curl we can retrieve the HTML & CSS source code of any specified URL and even the http header info, but some sites serve completely different content or HTML to different OS and browser versions, this is done by detecting their user agent. Because of this, we can spoof the user agent of another … Read More

You may know by now that OS X Lion drops Rosetta support, that means old PowerPC apps will no longer run in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. List What Installed Apps Are Incompatible with OS X 10.7 Lion For incompatible applications, all you are looking for is the “PowerPC” designation, here’s the easiest way to … Read More

Have you ever wondered specifically what processor was being used on a Mac, including processor type and CPU speed? It’s actually quite easy to retrieve CPU information from the command line in Mac OS X, though the commands to use to get the processor information may be unfamiliar to many. We’ll show two ways to … Read More