Tips & Tricks

You can display and monitor virtually all essential system activity directly from your Mac OS X menu bar using a great utility called iStat Menu:

If you have a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro, you can check the battery cycle count. This lets you see how many charge and drain cycles have been used on the battery, and gives you an idea of overall battery health. This functionality exists in all versions of macOS and Mac OS X, and … Read More

You can plug any USB hard drive into a Time Capsule and expand the available disk space of the Time Capsule that way. This is then accessible as usual as a Network Attached Storage device for your Mac backups or whatever, and you can then even directly backup wirelessly to that external drive connected to … Read More

Uninstalling applications from Mac OS X is probably the easiest method of removing apps from any operating system, and it’s far easier on a Mac than anything you’ll encounter in the Windows world. Deleting apps is so simple that some new Mac users are left wondering what else they’re supposed to do, I have received … Read More

Did you know you can instantly access a dictionary, thesaurus, or Wikipedia entry for a word or phrase, from nearly anywhere in Mac OS X? All you need to do is remember a super easy three-finger tap trick.

OK so Mac OS X Lion won’t be released until next month, but if you do a little preparation now you should be able to save at least 15% off the already low $29.99 price. How? Simple, buying iTunes Gift Cards on sale and redeeming them on the Mac App Store. Here’s the deal with … Read More

The latest version of iTunes includes the great “Automatic Downloads” ability which automatically syncs your new app, music, and book purchases to all of your other iOS devices. This is the first part of iCloud that is available free to iTunes users, but most users won’t see the benefit because it’s not enabled by default. … Read More

You can set any image on the web as your Mac desktop background wallpaper directly from Safari. This means you don’t even need to download the picture to your computer to set it as the desktop background, you can just find a picture on the web and immediately use it as the wallpaper on the … Read More

You can retrieve extended wireless connectivity data and details from anywhere within Mac OS X by using a nifty trick that toggles the Wi-Fi menu bar item to display additional specifics about any wireless router. To do this, hold down the Option key and then click on the WiFi menu icon found on the Mac.

You can watch what’s going on behind the scenes during a Mac OS X system installation by accessing the Logs window after the installer has begun. From Logs, use the pulldown menu to select “Show All Logs” to see a live stream of all activity pertaining to the OS X installation and/or upgrade process. “Show … Read More

If you want iTunes to take up the absolute least amount of screen space, yet still be able to control music and volume, use the iTunes Micro Player (Yea I just named it that, I don’t know what the official name is). First minimize iTunes so that it’s in the standard mini-player mode, but then … Read More

All iOS devices come with a Unique Device Identifier number, known as a UDID. The UDID is kind of like a serial number for that device, except that it’s even longer at 40 characters. By far the most simple way to retrieve your iPhone, iPad, or iPod‘s identifier number is through iTunes itself.

Apple announced that Lion would be released exclusively through the Mac App Store for $30. This is great because the App Store policy allows a single purchase to install on all your Macs, but what if you don’t have broadband access on all your Macs, or what if you just want a bootable installation disc? … Read More

Rather than disabling Flash completely in Chrome, an excellent option is to enable a hidden “Click to Play” feature that prevents that plugin and all others from automatically loading. With Click To Play turned on, if you want Flash or another browse plug-in to run and load, you simply click on it to play or … Read More

The malware protecting Mac OS X Security Update will automatically download and update it’s malware definitions list from Apple, but if you’re like me you probably want to know how to manually check if the malware list is updated or not. We’ll show you where the malware list is located on Mac, and how to … Read More

Sometimes the easiest fix when troubleshooting an AirPort wireless connection problem is to just turn AirPort on and off. Instead of using the menu item or System Preferences, we can enable and disable AirPort very quickly directly from the Mac OS X Terminal.

If you don’t want to bother with defaults write commands or the terminal, an alternate method to show hidden files in Mac OS X is to simply use the Chrome web browser. Just hit Command+L and enter / into the address bar (alternatively, you can enter file:/// as the address), and you’ll be presented with … Read More

You can give your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch a custom name easily, or change it from its current name to something else if someone else happened to give it a name that you don’t like. This is helpful for when an iOS device transfers ownership, or if the name is perhaps just no longer … Read More