Tips & Tricks

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Previews 1 and 2 currently do not install on older Macs with unsupported Core Duo and Core Solo hardware, but by performing a simple hack you can get these machines to boot Lion. Apparently the only thing preventing Lion from working on these 32-bit Macs is a single file … Read More

With the help of the iPad Camera Connection Kit, you can fool your iPad into thinking a connected USB flash drive is a camera or SD card, this lets you pull pictures from the device and onto your iPad. Cool huh? Here’s how to do this: Connect the USB flash drive to your Mac Create … Read More

You can find some interesting things in iOS apps that you’ve downloaded from the App Store, all you need to do is extract the file from its container and then you’re free to browse around like any other application package. This works with any iPhone or iPad app, and you’ll obviously need a Mac with … Read More

You can immediately check or uncheck all songs in an iTunes playlist by holding down the Command key and then clicking on the checkbox next to any song. There is no undo, and it’s universal for everything in the selected playlist, so if you have a carefully curated playlist be careful when you’re using this … Read More

You can start a FaceTime call from any web browser in Mac OS X or iOS with a custom URL structure. Then, if a user or yourself clicks that defined URL, a new FaceTime chat will attempt to initiate automatically to the set Apple ID, email, or phone number. This is a fun little trick … Read More

You can enable video mirroring on the first gen iPad and iPhone 4 by using a pretty simple hack. You’ll need a few things and some patience before you get started, but it’s really not that hard to get this setup and working. Here are the requirements: Apple VGA Adapter or Apple Digital AV Adapter … Read More

If you would like to see the folder sizes on the Mac, you can do so easily by enabling a folder size calculation when looking at directories in the List View of Finder in Mac OS X. What this trick does is show folder sizes on the Mac, calculated in megabytes, kilobytes, or gigabytes, depending … Read More

If you’re trying to access the Mac App Store and you are getting the “Cannot Connect to App Store” error, you can typically resolve the issue with a few simple troubleshooting steps. This article will walk through some simple solutions to reconnect to the Mac App Store.

If you want to quickly backup an entire website through FTP, the absolute easiest way to do this is through the command line using the wget command. In fact, you can backup an entire site (or whatever else is on the entire FTP server) with a single command string.

If you get easily distracted by things sitting around in the background, HazeOver might be for you. It’s a free utility that casts a shadow on all inactive windows, in other words, any window that isn’t in the foreground will be “hazed over.” Windows actually phase in and out of the shadow so it’s a … Read More

In a somewhat hidden feature of iTunes, you can display a music spectrum analyzer in place of the iTunes song info. All you need to do is click on the little play icon in the song info area, it’s highlighted below with an arrow pointing to it: This has probably been around for a while … Read More

Booting a Mac with Verbose Mode can be a helpful troubleshooting trick for some obscure situations where users are trying to determine what is going wrong with a Mac during the system boot process. Just as it sounds, verbose mode is verbose, meaning it lists everything going on behind the scenes, and you’ll watch as … Read More

The New York Times recently put up their paywall, blocking users from reading over a certain number of articles a month. Their pricing scheme is sort of a mess but I can understand charging for quality content. That’s not really the point though, their paywall implementation makes it difficult for paying users to share content … Read More

Want to use a rotated display on a MacBook? You can do exactly that, and the same way that you rotate screen orientation on a display connected to a Mac can be done with the built-in display of a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air (pictured).

If you’re a fan of minimalist workstations and desktops and you have an iPad, you’ll like this trick.

You probably know that Mac OS X Lion will add TRIM support for SSD’s, but what can you do right now if you’re on 10.6? If you’re brave, you can use this unsupported hack that enables TRIM for most SSD devices under Mac OS X 10.6.7. The app is called TRIM Enabler and it works … Read More

Mac users can often reclaim significant disk space by clearing out their Downloads folder. Just how significant depends on the user, what they download, and if they tend to that directory often, but… See that screenshot? That’s my Macs Downloads folder measuring in at a whopping 26.18GB and begging for deletion. I’m a pretty savvy … Read More

Generally speaking, if you kill the Mac OS X Finder it will automatically restart itself as it should. We say “generally” because from time to time things don’t go exactly as planned, and on rare occasions the Finder won’t reopen itself after being killed, restarted, or manually quit. When the Finder doesn’t auto relaunch itself … Read More