Launchpad serves as a quick way to open applications on the Mac from a familiar iOS-like icon grid interface.

If you’ve customized the way these app icons and arranged in Launchpad, you may decide you’d like to start from scratch and reset their order to how things appear when you first get a Mac.

Resetting Launchpad layout can also be helpful if you want to rearrange the way Launchpad icons show up, but it can also be helpful to resolve some display bugs with Launchpad, particularly if an icon doesn’t show up or is displaying incorrectly.

Read more »

Though most Mac users will want to keep Gatekeeper enabled for security purposes, some advanced users find that Gatekeeper is overly zealous in preventing third party apps from being used in macOS and Mac OS X.

While it’s easy to turn off Gatekeeper through the System Preferences on a Mac, another option is to disable Gatekeeper by using the command line in Mac OS. This can be helpful for scripting purposes, configuration, remote management, and just for those who prefer to use the Terminal.

Read more »

Rarely, Mac users may encounter a random error message which appears somewhat disconcerting, with an OS X pop-up message saying “Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent may only be invoked by Apple software.”

This message can appear at random when using certain apps, or after logging in or a reboot, and is sometimes followed by crashing and other bad behavior. Because the message is vague and mentions SecurityAgent and an ‘unapproved caller’ many users perceive this to be some sort of eavesdropping or attack event, but the good news is that is not the case, and you can fix the error message quite quickly and you will likely never see it again.

Read more »

If you want to place some text onto a video, the iMovie app for Mac is a good place to start. This is good for putting a title onto a movie, placing some basic subtitles on a silent video, captions on a video, or at a specific point in a movie, adding a watermark to video, or the myriad of other reasons you’d want words placed or alongside a movie. You’ll even be able to change the font size, font family, and various aspects of the text displayed on the movie.

Read more »

Whether performing a packet trace or sniffing and capturing packets from a network, the result is usually the creation of a .cap capture file. That .cap, pcap, or wcap packet capture file is created regardless of what you’re using to sniff a network, a fairly common task among network administrators and security professionals. Perhaps the easiest way to open, read, and interpret a .cap file is using the built-in tcpdump utility on a Mac or Linux machine.

Read more »

Extensions are optional add-ons to iOS that can bring additional features from third party apps into the broader iOS Share Sheet menus. Extensions can allow for a wide range of tasks, including interacting with apps, sharing to specific services, photo editing features, uploading, and quite a bit more, and once enabled, they’re easily accessible from Share Sheets found throughout iOS in places like Photos or Safari. In this walkthrough we’re going to show you how to enable an extension in Photos app on an iPhone or iPad, but the process would be the same for Safari and other Share Sheet extensions too.

Read more »

Scrolling through documents, web pages, and other data with a trackpad or mouse is one of the most common computing tasks and used gestures. By default, the scrolling speed on a Mac is not particularly speedy, but with some settings changes you can customize the scrolling rate in Mac OS X for both a Mac trackpad and a two-finger scroll, or a mouse connected to a Mac with a scroll wheel.

Read more »

If you use Messages on the Mac to as a way to send texts, iMessages, Facebook chat, AIM, or whatever else, you’ve certainly noticed that new versions of Messages in OS X will automatically replace an emoticon with an emoji icon substitution. While many users like Emoji characters and they work great when messaging other Mac and iOS devices, not everyone may be thrilled with their text based emoticons getting replaced automatically.

If you’d rather send standard emoticons and not have them replaced with Emoji in Messages for Mac, you can turn off that substitution feature quickly.

Read more »

If you’ve ever waited for an update to appear on the iOS App Store, either for an available app, an app update itself, or for the Top and Featured pages to refresh, you know that sometimes the App Store can sit stale. While you can often trigger an update to show up by changing the date, quitting and re-launching the App Store, or even trashing the app in question, there’s actually a way to forcibly refresh the entire App Store on an iPhone or iPad without having to do any of that. Instead, you just need to perform a curious repetitive tap trick.

Read more »

Apple has released the first public beta of OS X Yosemite 10.10.4 to Mac users choosing to participate in the OS X Public Beta program, alongside the second beta of OS X 10.10.4 for registered Mac Developers. The build number of 14E11f is the same for both public beta and developer releases.

Read more »

Apple has released the first public beta version of iOS 8.4 to those registered to participate in the iOS Public Beta program. Additionally, the same build of 12H4086d has been released to registered developers labeled as iOS 8.4 beta 2.

Read more »

So you want a gold Apple Watch Edition, but you don’t have a spare $12,000 laying around to buy the base model. Well, rather than spend a princely $12,000 on a gold Apple Watch Edition, why not spend $400 on the aluminum Sports model, and invest a couple bucks into some gold spray paint, masking tape, and an xacto knife?

Read more »

Facebook Messenger is a popular means of communicating, but the Mac doesn’t have a dedicated Facebook messaging app like the iPhone or Android does… or does it!?! Indeed, you can use Facebook Messenger to message friends from OS X, and in moments you can set up the Mac Messages app to function as a Facebook Messenger client in OS X.

Using Facebook Messenger from the Mac is really quite simple, but it’s entirely separate from configuring Facebook sharing from the Mac, so if you have done one but not the other, you’d need to complete both to have the full Facebook functions of sharing, posting, and messaging available to you in OS X.

Read more »

Many Mac users may not notice this, but modern versions of Safari support a new feature which automatically stops plug-ins from running in certain situations to save power on the computer. This is kind of like App Nap in OS X, except that it’s limited to plug-ins within the Safari browser itself, which means things like Flash, Java, QuickTime Player, and others, can potentially stop running automatically.

Read more »

Apple has introduced three commercials for the Apple Watch, each with a different focus and feature emphasis. Titled “Us”, “Up”, and “Rise”, the TV advertisements are airing now and are included below for easy viewing.

Read more »

The Mac includes a variety of powerful wireless network tools that offer many features which are helpful for administration and IT purposes, including the ability to sniff packets. Here we will demonstrate how to perform a packet trace in OS X easily by using the built-in Wi-Fi Diagnostics app. Using Wi-Fi Diagnostics Sniffer function is simple, and it requires no additional downloads nor does it require the usage of the command line.

Read more »

For some iMac users running OS X 10.10.3 (even post Supplemental Update 1), a software update is available that aims to resolve a peculiar bug that caused many iMacs to stall or crash when viewing JPEG image files in the Mac Finder or Preview app.

Read more »

The ability to quickly jump to a photo in the Finder file system of Mac OS has changed in the new Photos app. For now, the traditional “Reveal In Finder” option in Photos app for Mac OS X is missing, but that doesn’t mean you can’t show the original file in the Finder or access the photos from the Mac file system.

There are actually a few ways to access the original image file in the Finder from Photos app, and one method works almost exactly to the “Show In Finder” option that used to exist in iPhoto and Aperture. Read on to learn three different ways to reveal an original image file in the Mac Finder from Photos app for Mac.

Read more »