Tips & Tricks

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

A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, start holding down Option the moment you hear the boot chime sound and while the screen is still black, this will bring up the boot drive manager. From this startup boot disk menu, you can use the mouse or … Read More

For security reasons, it’s always a good idea to lock your Mac screen when you step away from the keyboard. On the other hand, there are times where you’ll be away from your Mac but you don’t want to have to re-enter your password to login, or you just don’t want your screensaver activating or … Read More

If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an iChat conversation you know how distracting it can be to your train of thought, plus it’s also a huge interruption to the flow of conversation. An easy solution to this is to set iChat to keep track of your last messages:

It’s really easy to increase the size of the icons that appear on the Mac OS X desktop or anywhere in Finder by using an adjustable slider. This lets you select icon sizes as small as 16×16 pixels and as large as 512 x 512 pixels, which is really quite big, and of course, you … Read More

Want to erase and reformat an iPad? If you recently upgraded to a new iPad and you’re either selling or passing along your old iPad, you’ll want to reformat the iPad before sending it off to live with it’s new owner so that none of your personal stuff is on the device. There are two … Read More

If you’ve ever wondered how much battery life is remaining on a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air, you should set the battery icon in the OS X status bar to display some additional details, like the percentage remaining. This gives you an immediate idea of how much longer you can use a Mac.

Mac OS X 10.7 Developer Preview can be installed and ran alongside Mac OS X 10.6 on the same drive, all you need to do is partition your existing boot disk and I’m going to show you exactly how to do this in a step-by-step guide (alternatively, you can run it in VMware too). Why … Read More

Some older iPad models have a physical button to use as an orientation lock or mute switch. It might seem mundane, but one of the most appreciated features of iOS for iPad users is the ability to enable the iPad orientation lock switch instead of having it function as a mute switch in iOS on … Read More

Anytime you flip between Spaces in Mac OS X there’s a fancy animation, this is nice and all but it makes switching Spaces slower than it needs to be. You can disable the animation which speeds up Spaces transition a bit. Disable Spaces Animation Launch Terminal and type: defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-swoosh-animation-off -bool YES Then … Read More

Update 9/14/2011: Installing Mac OS X Lion within a virtual machine is made significantly easier with VMWare Fusion 4. All you need to do is: Go to the File menu and select “New” Locate the “Install Mac OS X Lion.app” (here’s how to redownload Lion from the App Store) in your /Applications/ folder and drag … Read More

You can click and drag any URL in Twitter for Mac to another application, this is particularly helpful if you want to open a URL in a different browser rather than the default web browser set system-wide in OS X.

Want to turn an iPhone 4 into a pay go phone? David chimed in on our past prepaid iPhone article to describe how he got his iPhone 4 setup with a pay-go plan by transferring sim cards with AT&T. This method works to get pay-go calling and data use! How to setup an iPhone 4 … Read More

If you have a Mac with an SSD or otherwise limited disk space (like the MacBook Air 11″ with a 64GB drive), you might consider moving your iPhone backup folder to another drive to save some of that precious SSD space. Before proceeding you might want to determine if this is necessary for you. Do … Read More

If you’re a heavy tab user, pay attention. With Chrome 9 or later, you can activate a really cool hidden feature called “Tab Overview” that works great with Mac multi-touch devices. The name Tab Overview doesn’t really describe much of anything, but the behavior of Tab Overview is basically like Mac OS X’s Expose but … Read More