This post references software that no longer exists, notably the AIM (AOL Instant Messager) service, and cellular plans that are no longer relevant. Nonetheless we are keeping this post up for posterity sake. Long live AIM!

The iPhone 3G is awesome, we all know that, but the rate plans are not necessarily awesome for everyone, and some of the cellular plans may be cost prohibitive for the amount of text messages that you get. Wouldn’t it be great if you could send text messages (SMS) for free with iPhone?

Well guess what, you can get free SMS text messaging on your iPhone by using the AIM protocol. Yes, AOL Instant Messenger!

First you’ll need some kind of AIM client for your iPhone, so you can either download the AIM client for iPhone from the App Store, or even use Meebo.

Here’s the most important part, add a new buddy to your list, but use the full phone number with a + sign in front of it, like so: +18085551212.

The plus sign is crucial because thats what tells the AIM protocol that it is an SMS message.

Now you can SMS any phone on any carrier from your iPhone, without using any SMS messages or without having an SMS message plan!

If you’re confused, check out the screenshot which shows adding a cell phone number in iChat.

It’s a good idea to secure your Mac from prying eyes, and it doesn’t take a lot of work to set some basic security to Mac OS X. This will help protect a Mac and the important files you have on it, and I consider the following three tips to be 100% necessary for almost all Mac users, particularly if you’re either in a shared computing environment, an office, school, public place, and especially if you have a laptop.

Each of these three security tricks can be enabled via the System Preferences with the Account pane and the Security pane, respectively. What you’re going to be doing is requiring a password if the computer is woken from a ‘sleep’ state, including a screen saver, and also preventing the automatic login process, thus requiring a password to be entered if a Mac has been booted up or restarted. Finally, you’ll learn a simple keystroke to lockdown everything anytime you step away from the computer, thereby increasing the protection by restricting access.

Don’t worry if you’re not sure where to begin, we will walk you through the simple steps and you’ll have some added protection and security added to your Mac in just a few minutes.

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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 you’re working in the command line interface of OS X, so launch the Terminal and try them out on your Mac! If you have any others that you think should be added to this list, feel free to post them in the comments, and be sure to check out 10 Mac OS X Command line utilities you might not know about for more.

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Life is officially easier for front-end web developers, you can now easily test browser compatibility by running Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 concurrently with a great utility called MultiFirefox. Simply install MultiFirefox, then rename one of the Firefox applications (to say, Firefox 3), and upon launch you can select either application version to run. MultiFirefox is fast, free, and simple to use, so check it out. Mac web developers rejoice!

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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 work there are other methods to mount ISO’s within Mac OS X, and we’ll cover ways to do this with the built-in Disk Utility and a more advanced option of using the command line.
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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 fresh Mac OS X install, I figured it wasn’t a big deal and that I could change it easily in the User accounts system preference pane, but boy was I wrong. Unfortunately, changing your short username is not a matter of typing a new name in a field, but thankfully there are two fantastic write ups on three ways to change the short username in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The first tip, involving the creation of an alias by accessing an ‘Advanced Options’ area within the Accounts preference pane, is pretty nifty. You can access this area by doing the following:

Step 1): Unlock the Accounts preference pane by clicking on the lock icon
Step 2): Right click (or Control click) on the name of an account in the list and choose “Advanced Options” from the resulting menu.

So that’s where you create an alias and do some other fancy things, but this isn’t really a solution to the short username problem I had. So what else can we do? You can read the Macworld article or our own OSXDaily: Change a short user name in Mac OS X

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 actually several different commands to use, and you will find the commands are unique to different versions of Mac OS X. We’ve got you covered regardless of what version of Mac OS X you’re running, from MacOS Sierra 10.12, 10.11, 10.13, OS X 10.10, OS X 10.9, all the way back to 10.4. So find your version of OS X, open your Terminal, and follow the appropriate directions below to get started.

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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 Mojave 10.14, macOS High Sierra, Sierra 10.12, El Capitan, Yosemite 10.10, Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, 10.7, OS X 10.8, and OS X 10.9. For the purpose of this article, we are going to assume you want to spoof your Mac’s wireless MAC address, meaning your wi-fi card.

Without further ado, here’s a three step process on how you can spoof and change the MAC address in macOS and Mac OS X.

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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 on. To enable the secret option yourself with a defaults command, so here’s how to activate it.

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Quick Look is likely the only feature in Leopard 10.5 that I actually notice and something I would certainly miss if I went back to 10.4, it’s just too useful. The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a decent post listing 10 useful Quick Look usage tips, some are built right in and won’t require modification, while others will require 3rd party plugins to use. Here’s the full list, minus the detail:

1. Identify files on remote machines.
2. Preview the contents of Zip files (plug-in required).
3. Preview the contents of a folder (plug-in required).
4. Examine snippets of code with syntax highlighting intact.
6. Prep your iWork documents for use with Quick Look.
7. Enhance TextMate.
8. Preview fonts.
9. Quick Look and Cover Flow.
10. Send images to iPhoto.

If these sound appealing, read more at TUAW: 10 ways to get the most out of Quick Look

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 they’re easier to see. This is where the command line comes in, where you can use a defaults write command to force the Mac OS X desktop to display icons as large as 1024 x 1024 pixels!

To do this yourself, launch the Terminal and type the following commands:
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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 new 3D dock, or if you just prefer the old Dock appearance, it’s very easy to change and you don’t need to be a super Mac genius to figure it out.

Simply launch your terminal and type the following commands:

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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 at something, whether it’s to confirm contents or verify you’re working with the proper file. If you’re an avid command line user though, you may be browsing through a directories contents and wondering just what is that JPG or DOC file.

Wonder no more, because you can easily use Quick Look from the command line of Mac OS to open Quick Look previews right from the Terminal application.

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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 this page, you would type /firefox – that’s it!
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Many of us who converted from a Windows PC to a Mac may long for the amazing artistic capabilities allowed within Microsoft Paint. Ok so maybe that’s a bit dramatic, and we all know that Microsoft Paint is pretty crappy in a weirdly lovable way, but that’s also why it was fun. So, if you came to the Mac you may miss mspaint, right?

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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 in Mac OS, which can be used to access a lot of common things you would otherwise do with the mouse. No list is perfect, but here are fifteen useful keyboard commands and tips that I use on a regular basis that let you navigate through Mac OS X using only the keyboard.

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It’s that time of the year again Mac users! The holiday season is now here in full force, and part of the fun is customizing your Mac to be with the season. Here’s our three favorite apps so you can deck out your Mac desktop in the holiday spirit.

Snowfall – a beautiful falling snow screensaver for Mac OS X

SnowFall is as good as it gets in terms of holiday screensavers – it’s what Apple uses in the Apple Stores during the holidays! Screenshots do not do this justice, download yourself and see.
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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 you’ve been using Boot Camp for a while though, you probably don’t want to lose what you’ve been working on within that partition. That’s where this comes in, you can convert a boot camp partition (well, technically any Linux or Windows partition!) to a VMWare virtual machine, so that it can run inside the virtualization software.

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