You can quickly clear all of the text from the Spotlight menu without closing the window by hitting Command-Delete, I discovered the use in this after my cat walked across my keyboard entering in a lengthy mishmash string of characters. Try it out!
You can schedule your Mac to sleep, wake, shutdown, or boot up at any time or any regular interval using the Mac System Preference ‘Energy Saver’ schedule settings. This provides for an excellent option for work Macs that you want to be awake or boot when you arrive in the morning, and to sleep or shut down at a provided time when you leave in evening. Of course there are tons of other uses for the overlooked scheduling feature, so let’s learn how to set up this up.
The Mac OS X Preview application has a a few little known image adjustment features for rapid image orientation flipping or rotation that are quite powerful, and if you’re looking to make quick adjustments to rotate a picture or mirror vertically or horizontally the general orientation of any image file, a great Mac app to do so is bundled on every MacOS and Mac OS X machine from the get go with Preview.
Using the app to complete these tasks is quick and easy, here’s how to adjust orientation of either a single picture or multiple pictures at the same time.
You can convert m4a music files to mp3 format very easily by using the same program that creates m4a files… iTunes! Yes that’s right, iTunes can double as a music file conversion program, and in this case it’s one of the easiest ways known to convert m4a to mp3 that doesn’t require any additional software downloads.
This audio format conversion trick works in all versions of iTunes on any computer whether it’s an OS X Mac or Windows PC.
We’ll walk through each necessary step to convert m4a files to mp3 format with the iTunes application, let’s begin the tutorial.
Want to navigate within a websites directory structure? If you use Safari then you can Command+Click the Title of any website window in Safari and you can pull up a nice navigable drop-down list of the websites directory paths.
This is really handy if you’re deep in some archive or if you’re looking at an image and want to cut down to the parent directory.
Note this particular trick only applies to versions of Safari on Mac where the title bar is visible on of a website, which is generally on older versions of Safari for older versions of Mac OS X. Modern Mac OS versions have simplified the Safari interface to show the URL and search bar within the title, and instead page titles are part of tabs or in a tab bar, where command+clicking does not do anything on those versions. There may be a way around that, if you know if it share with us in the comments of course.
Regardless of whether or not a particular Safari version supports this trick, this tip also works in a similar way in the Finder of Mac OS X too and that applies to basically every version of Mac OS released, so try it there too!
I’m a procrastinator with holiday shopping, and anything I can do online makes my life easier. Unfortunately when waiting until the last minute, you often lose out on having things shipped in time, but thankfully Apple has a new service that will help this situation. Between December 15 and December 24, you can order products online with Apple and pick them up at an Apple store, even having them gift wrapped for you. Cool!
To list all mounted drives and their accompanying partitions from the Terminal on Mac OS X, you can use the diskutil command with the list flag. This approach will display all disks, drives, volumes, and containers on any drive connected to the Mac, including boot volumes, hidden volumes (like the Recovery partition), empty volumes, unformatted drives, and all other disks.
Moving your iTunes music library to another location or machine is really easy to do because Apple has made iTunes store and maintain all of your music in one central location. Thus, that directory is fairly transportable, and if need be it can be relocated to a different location with relative ease.
Unless you have changed it has been changed to something else, iTunes music is by default stored in a Mac users home directory located at ~/Music/iTunes/ and that is the basis of what we’ll use to relocate, moving the library elsewhere.
Want to open a Finder window from the current directory location in Terminal? Mac OS makes this easy!
From the Mac Terminal, you can immediately open whatever folder or directory you are working within into the Finder of MacOS and Mac OS X by simply typing the a short command string and executing it. To try this out yourself, you’ll want to use the following command:
We have discussed SnowFall just about every holiday season for the past few years because it’s really that great of a screensaver for the winter and holiday season. It is so great that Apple has featured it in their Apple Stores around the holidays on numerous occasions, so if it has Apple’s seal of approval, it has ours.
SnowFall is delightfully simple but absolutely beautiful with it’s 3d rotating snow flakes, you can customize the screen saver in regards to how many snowflakes are falling, how fast they are going, the background color, the background image, and whether you want stripes or no stripes on the background. Here are some screenshots showing the customization and diversity of the screensaver, but I assure you screenshots do this screen saver absolutely no justice, you just need to install it yourself to see how beautiful it really is.
Installing SnowFall ScreenSaver in Mac OS X:
* Drag the SnowFall.qtz file into ~/Library/Screen Savers/
* Launch System Preferences and under “Desktop & ScreenSavers” you’ll be able select SnowFall
* Adjust settings as you see fit
* Enjoy falling snow on your Mac screen saver!
A few notes: Snowfall works in OS X 10.4 through 10.6, but not 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, or later.
Most Mac users who want to schedule a Mac to startup at a specific time will use the Energy Saver schedule tool in System Preferences, but for the more technically savvy, another option is to schedule the boot time of a Mac through the command line.
We’ll show you how to use the pmset command to schedule a Mac to boot up (or wake from sleep), this is a great tip and I use it to get my Mac to boot before I get to the office, reducing the time necessary to wait to use the computer.
With modern versions of Mac OS X you can input Chinese Characters directly into the trackpad! This is an extremely cool feature but requires a newer Mac with a multitouch trackpad as well, so it’s best for Mac laptops and the Magic Trackpad surface.
You can rate iTunes songs directly from your Dock in Mac OS X! Just right-click (or control-click) the iTunes icon within the Dock, and scroll up to ‘Rating’, this will open up a submenu and from there users can select the Star Rating they want to assign for the song that is playing.
This is great if you use playlists based upon ratings, or if you’re listening to a large playlist or iTunes library of tons of songs that you’re unfamiliar with, or maybe you just like being a critic, that’s ok too.
This should work in all versions of iTunes and all versions of Mac OS X. Keep in mind that you must have the song playing from a local library to get the ratings, and you can’t rate songs streamed over the internet or from iTunes Radio sources.
If you’re looking for a free Mac ToDo list manager, look no further than these apps. We highlight our favorite three to-do list apps, and one of them already comes with your Mac!
Our first ToDo list manager app for the Mac is called Anxiety, and on top of having a very attractive interface, it has some pretty great features. Anxiety sits seamlessly in your menubar and syncs with both iCal and Mail, so you can be sure your to-do tasks are managed regardless of where you check them off. Done with your doctor appointment? Check it off in Anxiety and it will be removed from iCal, and vice versa. You can have multiple todo lists, easily add new task items to the lists, and get more information on each todo list item by simply double-clicking it which will bring up the relevant iCal event. This is definitely our top desktop software choice for a Mac todo list manager, check it out!
TaskMate is another great choice for a to-do list manager app, it is extremely lightweight and allows you to easily add new todo tasks or delete completed ones. TaskMate is very no frills, there’s no fancy syncing or iCal integration, just pure todo list task management. If you don’t want or need the syncing features of Anxiety, but still want a great and simple to use to-do list manager app, TaskMate is a perfect choice.
TaskMate home
Download Taskmate
Mac OS X doesn’t ship with a to-do list manager per se, but you can add and set iCal events to notify you of tasks that need to be done. An even simpler approach to Mac task list management though is to just use the Stickies app that is located in your Applications folder. There’s no fancy features, checkboxes, or syncing, but you can easily type in or delete any to-do list task and since it comes with your Mac already, you won’t need to download or install anything else.
Got a Mac and a PC running Ubuntu and want to control both from one computer? Make your life easier and share a mouse and keyboard between the two machines using Synergy! There’s a nice walkthrough on how to do this at Donncha O Caoimh’s blog, don’t pass it up if you’re an Ubuntu user.
If you Option-Click the Airport Menu you can get extended information about the wireless network you are connected to (and the ones you’re not as well), including Channel information, MAC address of the access point, signal strength, and the transmission rate. This is Snow Leopard only, if you haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet and your Mac is compatible, it’s highly recommended.
Thanks to reader Jim Thorpe for the tip and screenshot!
You can easily convert WMV movie files to MOV format for free by using the FlipForMac Quicktime component plugin and QuickTime itself. Here’s what you will need to do:
First download FlipForMac, it is a WMV component plugin for Quicktime, the free version is all you will need to download and install. After you have installed the free FlipForMac plugin, launch QuickTime Player.
Now within QuickTime:
* Open the WMV movie file you want converted to .MOV format
* From the File menu select “Save As”
* Select the file type as ‘Movie’ and you will notice the filetype changes .mov
* Click “Save” and wait, the processing time depends on the length and size of the movie file.
All done! You just converted a WMV file to MOV format for free!
Did you know you can quickly copy a files path to the Terminal just by dragging and dropping the folder or file into the Terminal window? Try it out, open any terminal window then take something from the Finder and drop it into that Terminal, it’ll instantly print out the full path to the file, effectively copying the file path from the Macs Finder GUI to the command line.
By itself it will only print the directory structures path, it won’t execute without hitting the RETURN key (which, unless the file/folder path is prefixed with some compatible command string anyway, it wouldn’t do anything).
This is particularly helpful when a file is located in an obscure location that you happen to already in within the Finder of Mac OS X, but want to quickly jump to the command line, or just make an edit.
