Tips & Tricks

You may have noticed that when you select a song in iTunes a little arrow will appear next to the song name, the artist, album, genre, and every other sort category. If you happen to click on that little arrow, you’ll be directed to the iTunes Store for that album or artist. I’m really not … Read More

iTunes 10 has a cool feature where you can use album art as a HUD mini-player on your desktop, it looks pretty great and reminds me of the iPod music player on the iPod touch and iPhone where it’s centered around the album art, being totally barebones except for when you hover over and click … Read More

Need to change the hostname of a Mac? For most people if you want to change your Mac computer name you just do it through the Sharing system preference, it’s quick and very easy. For those of us that are more geekishly inclined, we like to do things through the Terminal. This tutorial will show … Read More

With the release of iOS 4 continuing on through iOS 6, a new multitasking ability was brought to iOS and the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Basically, multitasking means you can run multiple applications at the same time, which is a standard feature of modern desktop operating systems, and that feature is now ubiquitous in … Read More

Apple took the functionality to buy a ringtone out of iTunes 10 for some reason, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have custom ringtones. You can make your own free iPhone ringtones directly within iTunes 10, iTunes 11, and iTunes 12 this is the best way to go since you don’t have to get any … Read More

Along with new iTunes 10 download came a number of interface changes, ranging from a new icon, vertical window control bars, album art displays, and the greyscale conversion of the sidebar icons. If you preferred the colorful sidebar icons of iTunes 9 and prior, you can swap out a rsrc file within iTunes 10 and … Read More

I’m liking iTunes 10 but I can’t say I’m a fan of the vertical control buttons, which some are calling ‘traffic lights’ since well, it resembles traffic lights. Sure it saves space but it breaks away from the standardized UI convention. Thankfully we can change back to the classic horizontal buttons without much effort. If … Read More

It seems like it was just moments ago that iTunes 10 became available to download, but already there are some complaints about the new blue button icon. 6ix Passions points out that it looks awkward in their Dock and offers a simple solution; revert back to the old iTunes 9 icon. Here’s how to get … Read More

Did you know that you can use Quick Look to zoom in on items within Expose? This is an awesome trick sent in by one of our readers: “While in Exposé in Snow Leopard, press the space bar while mousing over a window. You’ll get an actual-size preview of the window. You can read all … Read More

The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific … Read More

Dan wrote in with the following: “I have a MacBook Pro and I want to make it even faster, what’s the best hard drive upgrade for the MacBook Pro?” This is a great question, and the answer will vary depending on your budget. I’m going to recommend a few options at different price points, all … Read More

If you have MP3’s that are skipping, sounding weird, or that a media player like iTunes won’t open, sometimes you just need to run them through an MP3 validator app to check and repair the files. A great free MP3 checker is called MP3 Scan+Repair, it’s got an easy drag and drop interface that will … Read More

If you want to check out Android OS, you can download and run a pre-configured Android OS Virtual Appliance installation within VirtualBox. You’ll need a torrent client to download the virtual machine itself, and of course Virtualbox to run it. You can download Android OS VM here and get VirtualBox here, both are free downloads. … Read More

Photo Booth on the Mac defaults to flipping your images horizontally, this happens automatically without any user input and without it being noticed, it’s just how the camera within Photo Booth displays pictures, making it function more like a mirror rather than a traditional camera. If you don’t images to flip like that, you can … Read More

Line numbers are so useful to have in a good text editor that I’m surprised they aren’t enabled by default in TextWrangler. Regardless, they’re easy to display so here are two different ways to show line numbers in a text file. The first is through the View menu: In TextWrangler, open the View Menu Navigate … Read More

What is mouse acceleration? Mouse acceleration is something most Mac users don’t think twice about, many aren’t aware it even exists. By default the mouse drivers count the movement of your mouse and depending on your sensitivity settings, the cursor will then move across the screen by a similar and consistent distance. Mouse acceleration is … Read More

Often overlooked, the Terminal can be used to accomplish all sorts of fun stuff. Something that you may find handy, is the ability to Tweet using built in Mac OS X command line utilities like curl. Yes, curl! Now of course this is not a full featured Twitter client by any means, but if you … Read More

If there was one command I would really complain about not being on Mac OS X, it would be “watch”. Watch is one of those great pieces of software that is tiny and completely out of the way, but when needed it will be a life saver. We’re going to show you three different ways … Read More