Tips & Tricks

Tips and tricks for all things Apple! Whether you want to learn tips for a Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, or much more, you will find many tricks, tips, tutorials, and excellent walkthroughs for Apple devices and software here.

Search Tips & Tricks

5 Useful Mac OS X Command Line Tips Everyone Should Know

Jun 29, 2008 - 12 Comments
Terminal in macOS

Like many other power users, I’m addicted to the Mac OS X command line, any reason at all for me to launch the terminal I take as an opportunity to learn more about the powerful backend of our favorite operating system. Here I have gathered 5 useful commands that will make your life easier when … Read More

Easily Mount an ISO in Mac OS X

Apr 22, 2008 - 88 Comments

If you’re wondering how to mount an ISO image in Mac OS X, it is very easy. For most ISO images you can mount them simply by double-clicking the ISO image file, and it will go through the auto-mounter app within Mac OS X putting it on your desktop. If for whatever reason that doesn’t … Read More

Three ways to change the short username in Leopard

Apr 17, 2008 - 1 Comment

Update – May 2011: We have written an up to date article on exactly how to change a short user name in Mac OS X. Please refer to that for further assistance, it will work on Snow Leopard and prior versions. A while ago I made a typo when creating my short username in a … Read More

How to Flush DNS Cache in Mac OS X

Mar 21, 2008 - 20 Comments
Terminal in macOS

Whether you’re a systems administrator or a web developer, or anything in between, chances are you’ll have to flush your DNS cache every once in a while to get things straightened out server-side, or even just for testing certain configurations. Flushing your DNS cache in Mac OS X is actually really easy, but there are … Read More

How to Spoof your MAC Address in Mac OS X

Jan 17, 2008 - 159 Comments
Mac Terminal icon

A MAC address is a unique identifier assigned to your network card, and some networks implement MAC address filtering as a method of security. Spoofing a MAC address can be desired for multiple reasons, and it is very easy to spoof your MAC address in macOS Monterey 12, macOS Big Sur 11, macOS Catalina, macOS … Read More

Highlight Stack Items on Hover in Mac OS X Dock

Jan 7, 2008 - 28 Comments
A mouse hover effect in Dock Stack of OS X

A little known hidden trick allows for a nice cursor hover effect to follow your mouse as it goes over an application, folder, or item within an opened Dock stack of Mac OS X. This makes navigating within Dock folder items a whole lot easier on the Mac and only takes a moment to turn … Read More

Make Finder Desktop Icon Sizes Huge

Jan 2, 2008 - 16 Comments

The Mac OS X desktop is attractive, highly functional, and very customizable, but by default the maximum icon size is 128×128 as adjusted through the normal Mac icon size settings. While 128 x 128 pixels is pretty large, if you have a huge monitor, or you’re visually impaired, you may want larger icons so that … Read More

Change the Mac OS X Dock from 3D to 2D in Leopard & Snow Leopard

Dec 24, 2007 - 8 Comments

The appearance of the new Dock changed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which has caused somewhat of an uproar in the Mac community, some of whom even claim it looks like it belongs in Windows Vista. That change stuck around in later versions of OS X as well. If you’re totally insulted by the … Read More

Use Quick Look from the Command line with qlmanage

Dec 24, 2007 - 3 Comments
terminal

Quick Look is a nice feature in Mac OS X for quickly previewing documents, images, and other file data before opening it into a designated application. I use Quick Look often for glancing at the content of various documents and it certainly beats launching an application when you just need to take a quick peak … Read More

Instant On-Page Text Search in Firefox with This Easy Tip

Dec 16, 2007 - 2 Comments

Here’s a really cool Firefox tip that was just passed along to me that allows you to instantly search on page text. Here’s how this works: You can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word. So for example, you want to find “Firefox” on … Read More

Navigating Mac OS X with Only the Keyboard

Dec 13, 2007 - 13 Comments
Finder icon on the Mac

Did you know you can navigate Mac OS with only the keyboard? If you’re an avid typer it can be annoying to have to interrupt your flow, lift your hand(s) from the keyboard, simply to use the mouse and navigate around Mac OS X. Instead of dealing with that frustration, try using exclusively the keyboard … Read More

Easily Convert a Boot Camp Partition to VMWare

Dec 2, 2007 - 3 Comments

Many of us intel Mac OS X users installed Boot Camp partitions so we could run Windows or Linux on the same machine as our Mac. Boot Camp is great, but it’s annoying when you have to reboot just to access the other operating system, which is why something like VMWare is so useful. If … Read More

Show Full Directory Path in Mac OS X Finder Window Title Bars

Dec 2, 2007 - 32 Comments
Show the full path in Finder title bars

Have you ever wished you could see the complete file system path in the titlebar of a Finder file system window? Well you can use a secret setting in Mac OS X to display the path in the titlebars of windows. The geekier Mac users amongst us and those familiar with the unix world should … Read More

Read and Write NTFS Partitions from Mac OS X with MacFUSE

Nov 8, 2007 - 7 Comments

Update: The usage of third party tools for NTFS support is no longer necessary, as Mac OS X includes NTFS read & write support natively, here’s how to enable it. While newer versions of the Mac operating system support NTFS without any third party add-ons, older versions of OS X may still find value in … Read More

Adobe CS users: Easily free up 5GB of disk space

Oct 31, 2007 - 2 Comments

If you’re a Mac user and you installed the Adobe CS suite for graphic work or web development, you probably aren’t too interested in Adobe SoundBooth, which is fine because you don’t have to install it. Well, I didn’t install Adobe SoundBooth and I discovered that Adobe still decided to install 5GB of SoundBooth bloated … Read More

How to: Add a User from the OS X Command Line on Mac

Oct 29, 2007 - 53 Comments

Adding a user is something easily accomplished using the built in GUI tools that ship with OS X, however any power user can appreciate the possible efficiency gained from using the command line. So in the spirit of efficiency here are the steps necessary to add a user to your Mac OS X system all … Read More

Fix “Page Up” key in Terminal.app to work with irssi

Oct 29, 2007 - 5 Comments

Recently while using the OS X Terminal I noticed that the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys do not send an actual page up sequence to an active Terminal session. This was discovered with the irssi app, but it actually pertains to the Terminal in general. Instead, it seems that the default behavior is to … Read More

How to Use Secure HTTPS with Gmail Notifier

Jul 12, 2007 - 3 Comments

Gmail Notifier is a great little utility that lets you know when you have mail in your Gmail inbox. What I have always disliked about it though is the apparent lack of the ability to use the secure https protocol. If you’re on public networks, this can be a particularly valid concern for privacy and … Read More

Subscribe to OSXDaily

Subscribe to RSS Subscribe to Twitter Feed Follow on Facebook Subscribe to eMail Updates

Tips & Tricks

News

iPhone / iPad

Mac

Troubleshooting

Shop on Amazon to help support this site