Tips & Tricks

Do you have a large directory of movies? Not sure what each video file actually is? If you’re in thumbnail view at a large enough resolution (looks like 68×68 is the threshold for me) or you’re viewing the folder in Cover Flow view, you can play movie files directly within the Finder of Mac OS … Read More

Want to get a quick glance at a font style or a preview of the appearance of a font face before you install the font on a Mac? There are multiple ways to do this, and we’re going to show you two methods to see previews of fonts using the Finder of OS X. The … Read More

You can view .PSD Adobe Photoshop files directly in Mac OS X with no additional software, thanks to Quick Look and Preview. To get a fast preview of a PSD file, simply select the document within the Finder and hit the Spacebar to launch the PSD file rendered in Mac OS X’s very own Quick … Read More

Did you know you can pause any application download or update on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch? This is great when you’re in a bandwidth bind or have low bars of reception and want to pause an app download so that you can resume it again later. This pausing app download trick is also … Read More

FileMerge lets you select any two files and it will compare the two, pointing out any differences between the files. If you’re a developer you already know why this is wildly useful, as it makes tracking down major and minor code changes remarkably easy. Apparently FileMerge is a survivor from the days of NeXTStep, and … Read More

If you’re tired of having your Mac Dock full of thumbnailed versions of minimized windows, you can change the Dock’s minimize behavior with a simple Terminal command that will minimize windows into the parent applications Dock icon. You can then tell which windows are minimized by looking for the diamond next to the window name … Read More

Converting various filetypes can be a total pain, especially when you don’t know how. But converting file formats is often a necessary task, required for many reasons from preference, to increased compatibility with another Mac, to working with an iOS device or PC, to compatibility with another app, even another operating system entirely. Fortunately, OS … Read More

Would you prefer to use the keyboard to speed up navigation around your Mac? That’s what the Full Keyboard Access setting allows for. Using a Keyboard option, you can have the Tab Key able to switch between dialog buttons, fields, screen items, controls, and anything else in a dialog box within Mac OS X. This … Read More

If you haven’t backed up with Time Machine in a while, the latest backup status will change to ‘Delayed’ and the menubar icon will have an exclamation mark in it reminding you to backup soon. There can be a variety of reasons the backups become delayed, and if you’re curious why this happens we’ll go … Read More

Preview is one of my favorite Mac apps, but recently Preview.app was refusing to open some image files for what seemed like no reason. I wasn’t even able to drag the image file onto the Preview icon to open it, which is usually something that works if the Open menu doesn’t. I know the images … Read More

There’s no shortage of DNS Server options out there, with Google DNS, OpenDNS, your own ISP’s, and the gazillion of others available to use. The question remains though, which of these DNS servers is going to be fastest for you? And how do you know which is fastest? That’s where NameBench comes in. NameBench is … Read More

The bouncing Dock icons are a nice GUI feature that let you know an app is launching on the Mac, but for some people those little bouncing icons are just really annoying. Additionally, Dock icons will bounce to notify you that an alert is active in the app, or the app needs your attention. If … Read More

Mac OS X simplified the font smoothing settings (anti-aliasing) for Mac OS and all apps running within it, but for some the change is unwelcome. If you feel like your screen looks different, or that fonts look a little unusual and text looks different too, it probably does, and the change can be very profound … Read More

Changing the location of your home directory is pretty easy in Mac OS X, and it can be desired for a variety of situations to store a home folder elsewhere on a Mac, or even on another drive. This is valid and works the same in all versions of OS X.

Facebook opened Facebook Chat up to third party instant message clients by using the Jabber protocol, which means you can now use Facebook Chat seamlessly from inside iChat. That means if you have a Mac with iChat, you can easily talk to your Facebook friends without being logged into the Facebook site, and instead communicate … Read More

Are you wondering if your Mac is 64-bit architecture or 32-bit architecture? Well you might not be alone. The good news is it’s pretty easy to determine what CPU architecture your Mac is using. You can either focus on the model year of the Mac, or the CPU architecture and processor chip itself. The most … Read More

At its core, the file and folder explorer of OS X known as Finder is essentially an application like any other on the Mac. Accordingly, users can quit the Mac OS X Finder in a few different ways which we’ll cover here, but perhaps the fastest way is to just launch the Terminal app and … Read More

In some situations, you may wish to disable access to the System Preferences on a Mac. Often this is for lab environments or public use workstations, or perhaps for locking down a particular workstation for various reasons. While a common approach is to create a new user account that has limited access to system features … Read More