Update: OS X Mavericks is now available as a free download, you can get it from the Mac App Store. Here is how to make an install drive with it.

Apple has announced that OS X Mavericks will be released today, October 22. OS X Mavericks is the next major release of the Mac operating system, and includes over 200 features and enhancements for the Mac, with significant improvements to power management and memory efficiency.
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You can show the precise last time a specific file was opened, an app was launched, or folder was accessed on a Mac, and the information is visible directly in the OS X Finder. There are actually two simple ways to see this file access information, and both are equally useful though as you’ll see they’re best used for slightly different purposes.

Knowing the last file access time is useful for so many reasons, whether it’s determining the usage history of a file for your own purposes, or perhaps for more mildly forensic intentions, to help figure out more details about someone using a Mac and the specific access times of a file or app that was in use. Because it shows the date and time information, this goes beyond the Recent Items list trick which simply shows what files were opened.
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Apple has started airing the first iPhone 5S commercial, titled “Metal Mastered”. The TV ad focuses on the 5S’s optional gold color, as well as the fingerprint based TouchID sensor. The commercial shows liquid gold pouring into the shape of the iPhone 5S casing, which is then unlocked with a finger to display the iOS 7 home screen. Overall the theme is similar to the liquid plastic iPhone 5C ad that has been running for a while now.
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OS X Mavericks is the newest major operating system release for Mac users, versioned as OS X 10.9, and it’s now available as a free download. Packed with over 200 new feature enhancements and refinements, it includes some very handy new features that will make a lot of Mac users happy, ranging from Finder tags, to tabbed Finder windows, to improved battery life and power management. It’s a great release of OS X and all users that can update their Macs should do so, and that’s what we’re going to help you with; preparing your Mac for the OS X Mavericks update.
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Private Browsing is an optional Safari browsing mode that causes no data from the browsing session to be saved, this means no cache files, cookies, or browsing history will be stored or collected in iOS, making for a fairly anonymous session on the client side.

Using Safari Private Browsing is a popular browsing choice for a wide variety of reasons, and it’s now easier to use on every iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, because you can now toggle the setting on directly in Safari, and without losing all existing Safari browser pages. This offers considerable improvements over what existed previously, but like much of iOS post the major overhaul, it can be confusing to find until it has been pointed out to you.

Using the Private Browsing option in Safari with iOS 14, iOS 13, iOS 12, iOS 11, iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 7, and iOS 8 (or newer) is very easy, and the feature works the same on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use this great feature.

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Many have noticed that iOS 7’s overall appearance is largely dependent on the devices wallpaper, and a good or bad wallpaper can make or break the look of things along with general usability, particularly for the home screen. It turns out that some of the best looking wallpapers on iOS 7 are very abstract, multicolored, blurry images, and that’s what we’re going to focus on making here. I’ve sort of perfected a quick formula for creating nice wallpapers in iOS 7 directly on an iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch, using an excellent free photo editing app called Snapseed. Snapseed is really great at making very nice professional looking photo adjustments on the go, but we’re going to use it to go the other direction; make a bad photo look even worse, thus creating an abstract blurred image that actually makes an excellent wallpaper.

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The iPhone now displays a small contact photo thumbnail alongside contacts in the “Favorites” section of the phone app. This certainly looks nice if you have a lot of custom pictures set for contacts, but having a bunch of goofy contact photos can look unprofessional in some environments, and for users without a contact photo it will make a boring thumbnail based on their initials. Perhaps most problematic is the annoying side effect of truncating longer names, which is shown in the screen shot below.

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Getting comfortable with the command line is often just a matter of learning a few command tricks and finding uses for them, and we’re going to offer six handy tricks that you’re almost certain to find some use out of regardless of your skill level in the Terminal.

Read on, you’ll be downloading files, using a better directory listing, killing processes quicker, re-running prior commands as root, finding past commands, and creating new files on the fly in no time.

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A very welcome change has arrived to the Photos app post iOS 7 that allows you to easily view only videos taken with an iOS device, presenting them in an easy to view and share format. This is a huge improvement to past editions of Photos app, and the new sorting feature prevents you from having to scroll endlessly through a gigantic Camera Roll to see what’s a movie amongst a million pictures.

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Music bought from iTunes and stored in iCloud are part of the iTunes Match service, which basically lets you store all your songs and music in iCloud, and can then be streamed and downloaded to your iOS devices. By default, those songs are shown in the iOS app Music playlist with a little cloud icon next to them.

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Did you remove a file or folder from your Mac drive or an external drive, and now you need it back? Don’t freak out yet because there is some potentially good news; you may be able to recover the deleted files from the Mac with the help of a third party tool called DiskDrill.

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Apple has sent out press invitations confirming the previously rumored October 22 event date. According to AllThingsD, Apple will unveil a new iPad and iPad Mini model, and likely provide a release date for OS X Mavericks and the new Mac Pro.

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Anyone who downloads files from around the web, ftp, torrents, and elsewhere will eventually wind up with a lot of archive clutter sitting around on their Mac in the form of tons of zip, rar, sit, and other compressed file formats. This is because the default behavior is set for archives to maintain their existence even after their contents are extracted, a reasonable but conservative setting that can cause users to forget about the original archive file(s).

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Yes, you can still lock the screen orientation in iOS 10, iOS 9, iOS 8 and iOS 7 to prevent the display from rotating itself when an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch has been physically turned onto its side. The orientation lock is now in a quicker access location contained within Control Center, making it much faster to access from anywhere than it was before. Regardless, if you’re a creature of habit and haven’t found the setting since it has been moved, don’t feel too bad.

Here is how to get to the screen orientation toggle faster than ever with Control Center:
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Spotlight is the wildly useful search feature built into Mac OS X (and iOS) that is accessible by hitting Command+Spacebar. It can seemingly find and do everything, but did you know it also includes basic file system functionality? Using some little known tricks, you can copy and cut files directly from Spotlight, letting you easily make duplicates of buried hard to find files, or even move a file from some deep path location to an easier to access location, like the Desktop. This is done using the handy Finder Cut and Paste abilities, which happen to function directly from Spotlight in MacOS X.

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Personal Hotspot lets you share a devices cellular data connection with other devices or computers by turning a device into a wi-fi router, and it’s easily one of the better features of the iPhone and cellular iPad models (and Android phones for that matter). The iOS Personal Hotspot usually functions without a hitch, but sometimes the connection can appear flakey and connected devices will drop off the network completely, or have intermittent connection drops with significant packet loss.

This is likely a software problem that will be addressed in future iOS updates, but in the meantime there’s a fairly simple fix that seems to resolve the issue completely for clients who are experiencing dropped connections. The trick? Set the network configurations yourself, which prevents Personal Hotspot from assigning DHCP information to clients, and seems to resolve the intermittent connection problems completely.

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One of the most commonly used command line tools is ‘cd’, which stands for change directory, and as you probably know is used to navigate directories and switch between one folder or another within the file system. For those just learning and starting to familiarize themselves with the Terminal and command line, here are five tricks for the otherwise simple ‘cd’ command that are guaranteed to make your life easier at the command prompt.
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The Dock sits at the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and it will stay there unless it has been relocated either with a settings adjustment or a key modifier. If you’d like to switch the location of where the Mac OS X Dock resides, you can easily do so with either method outlined below, using System Preferences which is the better known method, or the faster but lesser known trick of using the Shift key and dragging the Dock handle to a different region on screen.

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