Tips & Tricks

There are multiple ways to convert AVI video files to MOV video format on the Mac. Perhaps the easiest free ways to convert video from an AVI file to MOV format in Mac OS X is bt using an external app like Miro, VLC, or by using the Perian plugin for QuickTime. Here’s a step … Read More

Did you know you can quickly access Wikipedia from anywhere in OS X by using Spotlight? Yes seriously you can, similar to the Spotlight dictionary feature. Here’s how Wikipedia access from Mac OS X works:

Listening to a great song that you think everyone should hear? You can easily share music with your friends thanks to iChat and iTunes, just drag a song from iTunes into an iChat window and off it goes! This may be Snow Leopard and iTunes 9 only, I don’t recall this feature working in Leopard.

Adobe Flash cookies are not deleted when you remove your browser cookies, because they are stored independent of your browser, meaning Flash cookies from Safari are accessible via Firefox, and vice versa. The interesting thing about Flash cookies though is that they could technically track your web browsing long after you have left the site … Read More

Did you know that iChat and iCal work very well together? If you’re having a conversation in iChat and you or anyone else mentions a date or a day, you can hover over that mentioned date/day and add an iCal event directly from iChat without ever launching iCal! Try it out yourself with any iChat … Read More

If you have a large iTunes library it’s really easy to inadvertently gather duplicate songs, thankfully cleaning up and removing the duplicates from the iTunes song library is really easy. Both iTunes for Mac and iTunes for Windows support an ability to easily remove duplicate songs, here’s how to do it:

This works in many versions of Mac OS X I’m pretty sure this only works in Snow Leopard, you can right-click/control-click on many App icons in the Dock to do things like: * Create a New Window in Safari * Create a New TextEdit Document * Launch a New Remote Connection in Terminal * Shuffle … Read More

If you have the Terminal application stored in your Dock on Mac OS X, you can quickly execute any new command by right-clicking (or control clicking) on the Dock icon and navigating up to “New Command” in the popup menu. This will prompt you for a command to run, which then launches into a terminal … Read More

Deleting cookies on the Mac depends on the specific web browser in use, thus if you want to delete all cookies, you’ll want to accomplish this for every browser app. Considering the web browsers most commonly used in Mac OS X are Safari, Chrome, and Firefox, we will show how to delete cookies in each … Read More

You can securely delete files from Mac OS X right from the Finder. This is by far the simplest method to securely delete something on the Mac, and the process is pretty straight forward, very similar to the normal procedure of deleting a file except that you will access a separate option to enable the … Read More

When you’re viewing an image on the iPhone (or iPod Touch) you can tap and hold the image to prevent it from rotating, regardless of the devices orientation. Handy for showing off photos to friends! [ JustAnotheriPhoneBlog via Lifehacker ]

£ – Typing the symbol for the British Pound is done by hitting Option+3 in Mac OS X. The keystrokes for typing the pound symbol (or quid symbol) are standard on all Mac keyboards from the USA, though in another nation with another keyboard layout the keyboard shortcut may differ slightly, or the pound symbol … Read More

€ – If you want to reference the Euro symbol on your Mac, you’ve probably noticed that many keyboards don’t really make it obvious with the euro sign. But typing the Euro symbol in Mac OS X is actually really easy if you know the proper keystrokes. Let’s review how to type the Euro sign … Read More

Want to type the Apple Logo with your Mac keyboard? The Apple logo  is actually a special character available to type rather easily from a keyboard in OS X. This is a fun little typing trick that looks pretty cool too, here’s what it looks like typed out:  Shown larger, it’s the exact … Read More

The next time you need to quickly reboot, shut down, log out, or sleep a Mac, all you need to do is hit the right keyboard shortcut. When we say quick we mean it here too, because these keyboard shortcuts will not prompt you to confirm, they are quite literally instantaneous in their results, and … Read More

Even if you have the Mac Dock icon magnification turned off in your system preferences of Mac OS X, you can still force Dock icons to magnify on the fly by using a simple keystroke. This can be a helpful trick if a Mac Dock is set to be small and you want a better … Read More

You can use Spotlight as a calculator on the Mac, and it actually works impressively well. Yes, the Spotlight search feature can do calculations! While many longtime OS X users probably know this, there are tons who are new to the Mac who aren’t aware that Spotlight is so robust, so the next time you … Read More

The Mac OS X Dock becomes animated when an app is launching, with a continuous bouncing animation, and also when an app wants to get your attention, with a less consistent and more urgent animated bounce. Both of these can be effect alert methods, but they can also annoy some users. Regardless, you can make … Read More