If you use the multi-desktop Spaces feature of Mission Control often, you’ll probably like a hidden gesture in Mac OS X that lets you immediately jump back to the most recently used Space with just a four-fingered tap on the trackpad (or Magic Mouse). Here’s how to enable the gesture with a defaults write command.
Finder on the Mac can show the path to the currently browsed folder (that is, something like Lion->Users->John->Music->MP3 collection). Just click View->Show Path Bar. However, there’s a slight problem—the path is listed from the root of the hard disk up to the current directory. I f all you ever do is browse your home directory, … Read More
Mission Control in Mac OS X groups together thumbnail previews of windows from the same app. By hovering the mouse cursor over a cluster of these thumbnails and scrolling up on a multitouch trackpad or Magic Mouse (or scrolling up the mouse wheel with other mice), you can cause the cluster to expand, showing more … Read More
Recently we covered how to show full file names on the Mac OS X desktop, avoiding the abbreviated labels that occur when a file or folders name is too large to fit in the allowed character count limit. That trick was done by increasing the desktops grid size, but as one of our readers pointed … Read More
Quick Look is one of the better little features of Mac OS X, but a new hidden option in OS X makes QuickLook even better by allowing you to select, highlight, and copy text directly from the windows.
Ever set a desktop background picture on the Mac and have no idea where the original wallpaper image is stored in OS X? Maybe you set an image from the web and lost it, or maybe you’ve wondered where that default background image is stored so you can share it with your iOS device or … Read More
Using a defaults write command, the iTunes Dock icon can be set to display a “Now Playing” song and artist pop-up that transitions in and out and music starts. It’s a nice addition, particularly if you’re playing songs from a shared network playlist and have iTunes hidden in the background.
Safari has a hidden “Debug” menu that offers some additional features for debugging the browser, including stress and load tests, sampling, javascript error logging, the ability to intentionally crash a page, and more. Intended for Safari developers, the Debug menu is different from the Developer menu, which is geared more at web developers, although there … Read More
By enabling a hidden debug feature in Disk Utility, you are able to both view and mount hidden partitions on hard drives in Mac OS X. Hidden partitions include things like Linux swap, GUID partitions, a Windows Recovery drive, and the Mac OS X Recovery HD partition, and once they’re mounted they can be edited … Read More
A new addition to Safari 5.1 in Mac OS X 10.7 is that web pages auto-refresh if they are left inactive for a period of time. The feature can seem unnecessary and even annoying, but there’s no clear preference option to disable reloading of pages. Thankfully, Stormcloud (via DaringFireball) shows us how to stop this … Read More
AirDrop is the extremely easy local peer-to-peer file transfer tool that is built into OS X 10.7 and 10.8 and beyond, it allows you to easily send and receive files wirelessly over a network just by dragging and dropping. It’s a great addition to Lion, but it’s not supported on all Macs (some 2008 model … Read More
If you’re an advanced user and setting up a new Mac, you probably customize the OS with a ton of defaults write commands and .alias adjustments. These are things you can either enter manually, use an easy tool like LionTweaks, or check out this new great script from GitHub called .osx. Note: this is obviously … Read More
The Mac App Store has a hidden element inspector that lets you view the source of any page or element drawn within the App Store, letting you extract text or images, and even enter your own code into the console (which can lead to all sorts of fun things). This is probably most useful for … Read More
You may have noticed that when you log out or reboot Mac OS X, you get a dialog window with a checkbox next to “Reopen windows when logging back in” that restores all of your currently open applications and windows. If you don’t like it and you’re tired of unchecking the box to no longer … Read More
Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue! This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of … Read More
Prior to Mac OS X 10.7, you used to be able to click on the “Mac OS X” text to display additional system information about the Mac, showing things like IP Address, OS X version and build number, and the machines Hostname. Apple pulled that ability out of Mac OS X Lion, but you can … Read More
Mac OS X has rearranged the “Don’t Save” keyboard shortcut that shows up in the save dialog windows, moving from the longstanding Command+D to Command+Delete instead. Presumably this was done because Command+Delete (backspace) makes more sense and it’s harder to make a mistake, but some habits die hard. This change was first introduced in Lion, … Read More
If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold … Read More
