Tips & Tricks

The Twitter for Mac client has a great feature that lets you send tweets from just about anywhere in Mac OS X, including the Finder. I’ve tested this out in the Mac OS X Finder, iTunes, Chrome, Safari, iChat, TextEdit, Terminal, and can confirm that this works all over the place. To access the ‘Tweet’ … Read More

You can turn off the internal MacBook Pro screen and still use the computer as long as it’s hooked up to an external display, and no you don’t have to use it in clamshell mode to achieve this. Here are two ways to keep your Mac laptop with the lid open but the internal display … Read More

Want to update Mac OS software from the Terminal? You can check for available updates, ignore packages, and install any or all Mac OS X Software Updates directly from the command line. To see what updates are available for a Mac, or to install a software update from the Terminal of Mac OS X, amongst … Read More

If you want to quickly access the Mac OS X System Preferences, you can do so with an indirect keyboard shortcut trick by holding down the Option key and then hitting various function keys. This jumps directly to the System Preference panel corresponding to the function key. For example, Option+Brightness pulls up the Display preference … Read More

The Mac App Store includes a hidden Debug menu that can be enabled with a simple defaults write command. The menu includes a variety of interesting options and tweaks that are clearly intended for internal development purposes.

Want to remove and uninstall Flash Player from a Mac? Some users install Flash but later decide they do not want the app and plugin on their Mac, thus will want to remove it. Adobe Flash Player is known to cause a slew of issues, slowdowns, battery drain, crashes, and other problems for Mac OS … Read More

Sometimes things go wrong and you need to put your iPhone into Recovery Mode to restore it and get it working again. It turns out that Recovery Mode is what your iPhone goes into when you are doing a standard iOS upgrade or restore anyway, but you may want to put your iPhone into recovery … Read More

Handbrake is famously known to allow you to rip DVD’s but the new version also works wonders as a video conversion tool to get your favorite videos and movies onto your iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV. If you’re new to video conversion, don’t worry, Handbrake is extremely easy to use and it’s free … Read More

If you want to customize your Mac OS X login screen but don’t feel like getting your hands dirty mucking around in system files the old fashioned way, check out a free app called Ravissant.

You probably know by now that you can zoom into anything in Mac OS X by holding down the Control key and then using the scroll wheel or a two-fingered forward swipe on the trackpad. You’ve also probably noticed that the more you zoom in, the blurrier things get because you’re zooming into anti-aliased graphics … Read More

Did you accidentally close a browser tab or window? The feeling isn’t great, right? You may have lost an important webpage before you were finished with it, or without bookmarking it. Well in Mac OS X you can quickly restore and reopen that last closed Safari window or tab by hitting a a simple undo … Read More

Using a Sleep Timer feature, you can set your iPhone or iPod touch to automatically stop playing music after a given amount of time passes, this allows you to fall asleep to music without your music playing all night. This sleep Music feature is built directly in iOS and you don’t need to download any … Read More

A little known trick allows users to rotate the Mac screen, thereby allowing a display to run in a vertical 90 degree orientation, or even in a flipped mode. Display rotation is possible on any monitor connected to any Mac, whether that’s an external display or even on the the primary built-in screens of a … Read More

Setting your Mac up to print to a Windows print server with Active Directory is pretty straight forward, but it’s really annoying that your network credentials aren’t stored which causes the login popup screen to display. Looking for a solution to this, I came across a post at TheAppleBlog, and the author had the exact … Read More

Sometimes you will run into a song that plays notably more quiet than other music in iTunes. Rather than turning up your speakers for just one song, or getting frustrated at a particular songs audio level, you can manually adjust a songs volume level directly in iTunes. This is by far the easiest way to … Read More

If you want to set your Mac to always have the same IP address (also known as a static IP address), you can easily configure this to be set in the Network settings of OS X. This can be valid for both wi-fi networks and wired ethernet networks, and it can also be set under … Read More

If you want to take a screenshot of an iPhone that has a Home button, then you’ll find the process to be super simple. In fact, taking a screenshot using an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad is really easy, and the process is the same on all devices regardless of which model it is as … Read More

You can save phone numbers that automatically dial extensions with your iPhone. Essentially this allows you to add the extension number to a contact number, and when that contact is dialed, the extension will automatically dial after the call is answered by the automated phone system. There are so many uses for this as you … Read More