Tips & Tricks

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

In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal. Turn Off … Read More

Launchpad is the app launcher in Mac OS X that is quite like the iOS Home Screen, showing a series of app icons and names on a simple screen making it very easy to launch whatever apps you want to open. It’s a nice utility and feature built into the Mac, but it does have … Read More

Resume is that feature of Mac OS X Lion that causes apps windows to reappear after you have quit and then relaunched the app. It’s a great feature but not one that we want all applications to use, so here is how to disable Resume on a per app basis.

One of the many understated features in Mac OS X is the ability to natively convert audio to m4a directly in the OS X Finder – without any additional downloads or add-ons. Yes, an MPEG audio encoder is built directly into Mac OS X since versions 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 (and beyond of course), … Read More

If you don’t use Safari’s new Reading List feature in Mac OS X Lion, you probably don’t want that little eyeglass icon cluttering up your bookmarks bar. It’s easy to hide though, here’s how: Go to the Safari menu and open Preferences Click on the “Bookmarks” tab and uncheck “Include Reading List” If you don’t … Read More

The Mac now has the highly desirable “Cut and Paste” file feature throughout the Mac OS X desktop and Finder, allowing users to truly cut and paste to move the selected documents or folders to a new location, rather than just making a copy of them. In this sense, the cut & paste ability behaves … Read More

One of OS X’s many great new features are all the new high quality multi-lingual voices (here is how to add them yourself). If you went on a voice adding spree like I did, you may quickly realize that all these new voices take up a fair amount of disk space, each weighing in around … Read More

Want to toss out the windows in your current application session, preventing them from reopening again via the Resume feature in OS X? This is pretty easy you just have to remember to do it, to discard windows as you quit an app in Mac OS X just do the following: Hold down the Option … Read More

If you’ve spent much time using OS X Lion’s new LaunchPad feature you’ve probably noticed that outside of stuffing things into new folders you can’t really hide apps. If you enter the ‘jiggle‘ mode and try to remove an app from LaunchPad, it actually uninstalls the app, which makes it very easy to uninstall things … Read More