Tab completion is a wonderful feature of shells that make power users lives easier, letting you automatically complete commands, paths, file names, and a variety of other things entered into the command line. It works great as is but you can make it even better by enabling a few features; ignore caps lock and casing of commands when completing, remove the necessity to double-tap the Tab key if something is ambiguous, and last but certainly not least, cycle through a menu of all possibilities rather than dumping a humungous list if there is ambiguity.

If you don’t regularly use the OS X Terminal (or a linux terminal) you probably don’t have a use for this tip.

Launch Terminal and be in the home directory to get started:

• Using emacs, nano, vi, or whatever your favorite text editor is to edit .inputrc, we’ll use nano for the walkthrough:

nano .inputrc

• Paste in the following three rules on unique lines:

set completion-ignore-case on
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
TAB: menu-complete

• Hit Control+O to save changes to .inputrc followed by control+X to quit
• Open a new Terminal window or tab, or type “login” to open a new session with the rules in effect
• Start typing a command, path, or something else and hit the Tab key to see the improvements firsthand

This has been tested to work with bash shell and should work with any version of Mac OS X. If you enjoyed this, don’t miss our other command line tips and tricks.

Thanks to Kuthair Habboush for the great tip

OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and sometimes it doesn’t.
Read more »

Remember the old days when someone would send you a text message with a phone number, and you’d either have to memorize it while you dialed or even worse, get a pen and write it down, just to add it to a new contact immediately after? Those days are long gone, and even better with the iPhone you can actually create a new contact directly from any phone number that is sent to you via text message.

The next time you receive a text with a phone number:

1. Tap the blue arrow button alongside that message to be brought to the new contact creation screen
2. Tap “Create New Contact” or “Add to Existing Contact” as appropriate

This works in iOS on iPad and iPod touch too but chances are you’ll get the most use out of it on the iPhone.

If you’re on the other side sending a phone number out, remember that you can directly send contacts from the iPhone through iMessage and email that contain a full address book listing for a person, including their number, name, email address, picture, and whatever other information you have stored in the vcard file.

You can now stream a Macs system audio directly over AirPlay without any third party apps or tweaks. The ability to AirPlay audio is really great, and perhaps the best part is that unlike AirPlay mirroring, the system audio stream should work on any Mac that can run a modern version of Mac OS X, anything beyond Mountain Lion will work just fine, not just 2011 model year and newer Macs like what support AirPlay video.

Read more »

Mac OS X now lets you rename a file directly from the application it’s opened within. This feature is supported in most bundled Apple applications, including TextEdit, Pages, Preview, and many others, including a fair amount of third party apps too. This is a cool renaming trick that’s easy to use, let’s discuss it further.

Read more »

The Mac Mail app received a wonderfully understated change with how it handles deleting mail in new versions of Mac OS X, from Mountain Lion, Mavericks, to Yosemite and beyond.

With the new version, deleting emails works more like Outlook; you delete an email and it then selects the next oldest email rather than jumping to the next most recent message. It’s a subtle change, but it makes a worlds difference when you are clearing out a cluttered inbox, letting you start at the top of a mail inbox and working your way down deleting as you go.

Read more »

If you need to use Java, installing the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in OS X Mountain Lion is necessary even if you had Java previously installed in OS X Lion or Snow Leopard and just performed an upgrade to 10.8. That’s because Mountain Lion uninstalls Java during the upgrade process, this is to insure the newest version of the runtime is installed on the Mac for those who need it and leaving it out for those who don’t, theoretically preventing some potential security problems with Java like the old Flashback trojan.

Installing Java in OS X Mountain Lion is easy enough and can be done two ways:

• When a Java app is opened in Safari or elsewhere you will be prompted to install Java for OS X (2012-004 currently)
• Manual command line method to force the installation

The command line installation is fast and likely preferable for many advanced users since it can be initiated at any time, here’s what to do:

• Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and type the following command:

java -version

• Hit return to see a message stating “No Java runtime present, requesting install” followed by a window prompting you to install Java SE in order to open “java”, click “Install” to get the latest version

Many Mac users won’t ever need to use Java and for the average person it may be best left uninstalled. Disabling java or leaving it uninstalled remains a decent security tip to protect a Mac against some of the rare trojans and viruses floating around out there.

Thanks to Josh Penn for the great tip!

Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X, but the alert sounds coming in with each banner notification from a million and one different Mac apps and updates can be pretty annoying fairly quickly, particularly if you have a lot going on.

Rather than muting all system audio to hush the constant chiming, you can directly silence notifications on a per-app basis in MacOS and Mac OS X. This is done through the System Preferences.
Read more »

The native and already powerful Wi-Fi Diagnostics Tool in Mac OS X got a redesign in modern versions of Mac OS X, and with it came some new features that make the utility better than ever. One of the best new additions is the built-in Wi-Fi scanner tool, which is a full-featured wifi stumbler to find and discover nearby Wi-Fi networks – even those that don’t broadcast their network names.

This is really an advanced feature that has a wide variety of potential uses beyond just locating access points, most users would be best off just using the Wi-Fi menu to find available wireless networks to join. For those that want a wireless stumbler, here’s how to find and use it.

Read more »

Want to see what the weather is going to be like for the next 6 days?

Read more »

Mac OS X has a handful of features that are dependent on a constant internet connection, and one of those is the new automatic update feature. Undeniably convenient, Mac OS X and all apps installed from the Mac App Store will automatically download and update themselves, but if you have metered internet or are using Personal Hotspot you’ll probably want to save the bandwidth and stop those updates from downloading themselves in the background.

This tutorial will show you how to change your Mac OS system software update settings to prevent automatically downloading of apps and software updates.

Read more »

Apple will launch the next iPhone on September 12, according to a rumor from the typically reliable AllThingsD. Citing sources, they say Apple has an event planned for an unspecific topic for the second week of September, and suggests the event will be for the new iPhone launch.

Pictures of what is claimed to be the next-generation iPhone have surfaced several times now, indicating components are being manufactured and leaked through various parts of the supply chain. Speaking of components, AllThingsD also posted a chart demonstrating substantial prepayment of component supplies by Apple, further suggesting an upcoming product launch:

The actual release date of the next iPhone remains unknown, but the device will likely ship with iOS 6 pre-installed, and Apple has said iOS 6 is set for a “Fall” release. Fall officially begins on September 22 of this year.

Update: Other media outlets including Bloomberg and the New York Times are now confirming the “iPhone 5” September 12 launch date, with Bloomberg reiterating an earlier rumor that Steve Jobs worked closely on the redesign before he passed away.

Update 2: The Wall Street Journal is also chiming in to confirm the September 12 date, saying the Apple event will discuss “new products” – note the plural, and then mentions the iPad mini:

The company is expected to hold an event on Sept. 12 to discuss new products, according to a person familiar with the matter. A new iPhone is expected later this year and Apple has also been working with suppliers on a new smaller cousin to the iPad.

iPad mini and a new iPhone launched on the same day? That would be something.

Autocorrect in iOS is pretty smart and usually gets things right, it also learns your habits and frequently typed words and will start autocorrecting what you type to the words you have used in the past. This can be a blessing and a curse, because if you accidentally corrected a word to a wrong one or a typo, the iPad/iPhone dictionary will want to use that new erroneous word as the correction. The solution to that problem is to reset autocorrect by clearing out the keyboard dictionary.

Resetting the auto-correct keyboard dictionary is the same on all versions of iOS and on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. Here’s what you will want to do:
Read more »

The hosts file maps hostnames to IP addresses, it’s present in virtually every OS in some form or another and in Mac OS X it’s stored at /etc/hosts, which requires administrative privileges to modify and generally a jump to the command line. Editing the hosts file allows you to do a variety of things like set local test domains, block websites and IP’s, downgrade iOS, troubleshoot weird iTunes errors, and much more.

If you need to edit your hosts file but you’re not savvy with Terminal and you’d rather avoid the command line entirely, check out the free Hosts preference pane. The third party Hosts panel lets you add, edit, and remove host files easily. If an item is checked, it’s stored in the hosts file, if it’s unchecked, it’s removed rather than commented out but continues to be stored in the preference panel for future use. Simple, easy to use, low maintenance, and should be perfect for anyone who needs to modify /etc/hosts but doesn’t want to get their hands too dirty with nano or vi.

• Download Hosts Preference Panel free from GitHub

Hosts works with most new versions of Mac OS x, including OS X 10.6.8, 10.7+, and 10.8 Mountain Lion.

Ideally the Hosts preference pane would include the management and multiple hosts file juggling that GasMask provides, but perhaps that’ll come in a future version.

Update: if changes aren’t taking effect, manually flush dns cache with dscacheutil.

With OS X Lion, Exposé merged with Spaces and became Mission Control, as a result the behavior of one of many peoples favorite window management features changed; you could no longer see all windows from all apps in a single screen. Instead, app windows were grouped by application and stacked atop one another. That incredibly useful old Expose feature of seeing all windows is back in OS X Mountain Lion though, and you just have to enable it to see everything from a single screen again:

1. Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu
2. Click on “Mission Control”
3. Uncheck the box next to “Group windows by application”
4. Do a three-fingered swipe up (or hit F9) to see the traditional Expose-style window manager

With Mountain Lion, you can also continue to perform the app-specific Expose style window view by hovering over the apps Dock icon and performing a three-fingered downward swipe.

Mission Control is very powerful, check out 9 great tips for Mission Control or view our archives on the topic for more.

Pictures claiming to be an assembled next-generation black iPhone have surfaced through Japanese mobile repair shop iLabFactory (their website is currently down, but 9to5mac has posted all images).

The device shown has similar styling to an iPhone 4/4S but with an elongated chasis to accomodate the larger 4″ screen, and what looks like a dark aluminum backplate rather than glass. The photos closely match the appearance of past images discovered a few months ago, and also demonstrate the rumored smaller Dock connector and the headphone port relocated to the bottom of the device.
Read more »

Removing app icons from the Dock has been the same since the very beginning of Mac OS X: grab an icon and drag it off the Dock into a poof of dust, whereby the icon is no longer displayed in the Dock. That behavior has changed slightly with OS X Mountain Lion and carried through to OS X Mavericks, presumably to prevent accidental deletion of Dock apps. There are still two easy ways to remove Dock icons in OS X 10.8 and 10.9 though, pick either approach that works best for you.
Read more »

Apple has started airing three new Mac ads that focus on an Apple Store Genius who is called upon in three unusual circumstances. The TV spots started during the Olympic games and are quite unlike other ads Apple has put out recently.

Read more »