Want to email a picture to someone from a Mac, but the photo is too large? Did you know you can quickly resize photos and pictures directly in the Mail app for Mac OS X? That’s right, you can resize attached pictures right in the Mail application without having to leave to resize through another app like Preview or Photoshop, instead you can handle the entire photo resizing process directly in the Mail app instead.

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Here’s a very useful feature that is widely overlooked by Mac Safari users, the ability to enable Private Browsing. What does that mean exactly? Basically it allows you to browse the web without a trace; nothing is added to the history, autofill, downloads window, and no information about what you are viewing or reading on the web is saved or cached.

This handy privacy trick is extraordinarily useful for many situations, particularly if you are on a public computer and you’re doing anything private, say checking your email, bank balance, or one of those special websites that you may or may not partake in viewing. These perks make this little known trick something that should be better known and certainly receive more widespread usage, whether to satisfy personal preferences to maintaining some secrecy or just because you like the added benefits to your own privacy, it’s valuable for all Mac users.

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We all know that navigating around the Mac Finder is quick and easy, but you can speed things up by memorizing a few keystrokes that’ll be sure to come in handy. With that in mind, here are six quick keyboard shortcuts to make navigating around the Finder a tad bit speedier.

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iChat is a great instant messaging client, but Chax makes iChat even better with a slew of feature improvements that add to the functionality. My personal favorite is the ability to use tabbed chat, I frequently have several instant message windows going at once, and on a relatively small MacBook screen it sure is nice to be able to have them all in one window, this feature alone makes Chax worth installing. Another interesting option with Chax is the ability to auto-accept video conferences, allowing you to setup a remote spycam of sorts where ever your iSight equipped Mac is placed.

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Many Mac users avoid the command line altogether, a reasonable amount probably don’t even know it exists. For the curious out there, here are some basic and essential commands and functionalities to know if you want to get started using the Mac OS X Terminal. We’ll cover simple file manipulation, maneuvering in the file system, displaying and killing processes, and more. Remember to remove the brackets or the commands won’t work.

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How many times have you left your Mac on, and later while you’re out and about you wish you would have turned the thing off or put it to sleep? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to put it to sleep remotely with a quick email or text message? You can, and it’s easier than you’d think. You’re just a simple AppleScript and a few Mail rules away from putting your Mac to sleep from virtually anywhere. We’ll show you how to do it, but if you’re still confused then a screencast demonstrating the technique is also available:

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There are many occasions where you may need to refresh a webpage and that web sites cache, ignoring any locally stored cache files on the Mac so that you can pull a fresh version of a website from the web browser. Being able to ignore existing cached pages when loading a website is very useful and it’s quite simple. This is sometimes called a force refresh, and you can do it with every single browser app out there.

With that in mind, here is how to refresh a webpage and ignore the existing cached files in the most popular Mac OS X web browsers: Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and Camino. We’re going to cover all common web browser apps in Mac OS X so that regardless of what your default browser is set to on the Mac, you’ll be able to force reset the cache on a webpage if you need to.

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Think back, and pretend for a minute that it’s 1989 and you’re on a Macintosh SE/30.

What was the hottest game? Shufflepuck Cafe.

What was the coolest screensaver at the time? AfterDark’s Flying Toasters.

It’s time to get retro with your Mac, and thanks to Mac developers these two blasts from the past have modern versions for Mac OS X.

Check out the screenshots below and be sure to download each, enjoy reliving the Mac 80’s.

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MozoDojo is a simple and fun Mac OS X app that creates those nice photo mosaics you see every now and again in advertising.

Using your iTunes library, iPhoto library, or even your Pictures folder, MozoDojo will render an attractive and accurate representation of the original file into a fancy and colorful mosaic made up of hundreds if not thousands of other images. You’re sure to have a load of fun with this great app. And best of all, it’s free for personal use.

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Highlighting, cutting, and pasting is a part of virtually every computer users daily routine. We select the desired text by dragging horizontally across the screen, highlighting what we want to copy or edit. But say you want to highlight vertically, in a column of text, rather than choosing an entire line. Easily done thanks to a simple keystroke, and just another well thought out and little known feature in Mac OS X.

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We all know how to launch applications from the GUI with a double-click on the icon or clicking on the app in the Dock, and there are numerous ways to do so, and they’re all relatively speedy. If you spend a decent amount of time with the command line though, it’s nice to be able to launch Mac apps directly from there as well. Also, the Terminal has a fair share of applications that run in text based mode, but maybe you wanted to edit a text file in the Mac OS X GUI app TextWrangler rather than the text based nano or vim.

We’re going to demonstrate how to launch any graphical Mac app from the command line of MacOS X, including how to open specific files from the command line with a GUI app, and how to edit and open those files with root access if it’s necessary.

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All of us have likely admired the results of a nice time-lapsed sequence, perhaps of a flower opening or the sun setting, the effect of time lapse video can be simply gorgeous. So, wouldn’t it be cool to do these on your own with little effort? With a Mac and the front-facing FaceTime / iSight Camera, you can with the help of this neat little app.

Gawker is a really fun open source app that allows you to easily create time-lapsed photographic images, and conveniently exports them into movie format for easy viewing and sharing. This is free Mac software at it’s best, but of course donations are always accepted. So use your built-in or external iSight and start having some fun, the results are always amusing.

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Whenever you log in to your Mac, you’re greeted by the familiar login screen with the Mac OS X logo, the computer name, and a list of users. You can actually get useful system information from this login screen by clicking on the computer name, which cycles through a series of statistics and info on your Mac, ranging from build version to IP address.

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Whenever you launch the Terminal in Mac OS X, you may get a little message: “Welcome to Darwin!” or a “Last Login” time – well, after you’ve seen it a few hundred times you might be sick of it, or perhaps you’d prefer something more amusing, meaningful, or even useful to yourself and other computer users. That little message you’re seeing is the MOTD, otherwise called a Message of the Day, and it’s a simple text file located at /etc/motd.

We will show you how to change the MOTD in the Mac OS X Terminal to whatever you want, easily.

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If there’s one annoying thing about the QuickTime Player on earlier versions of Mac OS X it is the lack of fullscreen movie support by default. Fortunately modern versions solve that problem, but if a Mac is running a prior version of OS X and has an older version of QuickTime Player, what should you do?

Typically, if you want to play QuickTime movies at full screen you have to shell out $30 for QuickTime Pro for those older versions of Mac OS X pre Leopard, or use a third party application like VLC. Don’t pay the $30 and don’t download the extra software if you don’t need to though, and thanks to a very simple three-lined AppleScript that scales the movie to your screen size, you don’t have to. Very crafty!

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Backups. A dreaded word because it is tedious and boring. You say it and people go fleeing in all directions plugging their ears. So what do you do? Have no fear Mac users, Carbon Copy Cloner is here for you to make Mac backups easy.

Say hello to your newest friend, Carbon Copy Cloner. Carbon Copy Cloner creates a bootable clone of your hard drive, perfect for full system backups of a Mac. With an easy interface and simple backups, and it’s donation ware (or a free trial, depending on the version), that means you don’t pay unless you like it. Just another reason to love your Mac and the development community.

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Navigating around Mac OS X is significantly easier than competitive operating systems, and that’s largely thanks to the Dock, Expose (Mission Control), Spotlight, and the improved Finder, which is the OS X file system. Of course there are also third party apps that people swear by, such as Quicksilver, but with so many great features built into OS X, it’s usually not necessary to install any third party software if you’re just looking to optimize your workflow and move around more. Instead, simply dig deeper and learn a few new tricks.

With that mind, here are a handful of some great keystrokes for Mac OS X that once you learn, will make navigating around even easier. These will be presented in the format of “action” followed by the accompanying keystroke to achieve the desired result.

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This is a fun little program that quickly gives you information on when and where your Mac and iPod were built (it claims to check any Apple products based on serial number, but we couldn’t test this feature). There’s also an ability that allows you to check your serial number against a database to see if your Mac was reported stolen, which could be useful for those who have purchased a used Mac or iPod via Craigslist and eBay. If the Coconut name sounds familiar, its because the developer also makes CoconutBattery, a great app for Mac laptop owners.
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