I was recently asked to do some maintenance work on a relatives iMac, and one of their chief complaints was the speed of Photo Booth, the fun application that takes pictures and distorts them with your iSight. Upon inspection of the machine, I found that Photo Booth was running extremely slow, launching the application would … Read More
The Mac OS X Finder column view is really handy, letting you see multiple folder contents side by side in a hierarchical view. But unless you set the default column width yourself, anytime you launch a new Finder window, the columns size will be reset on a per window basis.
You can set Mac OS X to automatically display file and folder information directly within the Finder windows of the file system, much like the desktop of OS X.
Renaming a folder in Mac OS X is very easy, and there’s a few different ways you can do it. We’ll focus on the three most common tricks to quickly rename any file or directory folder on the Mac, two of which are done through the familiar graphical interface of the Finder file system, and … Read More
I love tabbed windows and I use them everywhere I can, whether instant messaging in iChat to hoarding sites in Safari. Now you can get tabbed windows in Mac OS X’s Finder! TotalFinder is a really cool app that brings full tab functionality to the Mac desktop, allowing you to not only create tabs of … Read More
Do you have a large directory of movies? Not sure what each video file actually is? If you’re in thumbnail view at a large enough resolution (looks like 68×68 is the threshold for me) or you’re viewing the folder in Cover Flow view, you can play movie files directly within the Finder of Mac OS … Read More
Want to get a quick glance at a font style or a preview of the appearance of a font face before you install the font on a Mac? There are multiple ways to do this, and we’re going to show you two methods to see previews of fonts using the Finder of OS X. The … Read More
If you’re tired of having your Mac Dock full of thumbnailed versions of minimized windows, you can change the Dock’s minimize behavior with a simple Terminal command that will minimize windows into the parent applications Dock icon. You can then tell which windows are minimized by looking for the diamond next to the window name … Read More
Would you prefer to use the keyboard to speed up navigation around your Mac? That’s what the Full Keyboard Access setting allows for. Using a Keyboard option, you can have the Tab Key able to switch between dialog buttons, fields, screen items, controls, and anything else in a dialog box within Mac OS X. This … Read More
The bouncing Dock icons are a nice GUI feature that let you know an app is launching on the Mac, but for some people those little bouncing icons are just really annoying. Additionally, Dock icons will bounce to notify you that an alert is active in the app, or the app needs your attention. If … Read More
If you’re a developer (or anyone else) you may quickly get fed up with the Crash Reporter Dialogue box that pops up when an app melts down and crashes in Mac OS X. If you’re pestered by the crash reporter dialog window, then you can quickly turn the window on and off with a defaults … Read More
At its core, the file and folder explorer of OS X known as Finder is essentially an application like any other on the Mac. Accordingly, users can quit the Mac OS X Finder in a few different ways which we’ll cover here, but perhaps the fastest way is to just launch the Terminal app and … Read More
I frequently get asked about the purpose of .DS_Store files by Mac users and Windows System Administrators who have a few Mac’s on their networks, where seeing the files turn up when hidden files are made visible. Here is an explanation as to what a DS_Store document is in macOS and Mac OS X, what … Read More
Finder, the Mac OS X file system browser, is ultimately just a nice looking GUI application, and it can be interacted with fluidly from the command line. This means you can jump to directories and open literally any Mac Finder window directly from the terminal by using a simple command string based upon the ‘open’ … Read More
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 … Read More
Aliases are wildly useful on the Mac, offering quick access to anything in the file system. Most Mac users make aliases through the File menu, but did you know there’s a fast trick for dragging and dropping to create an alias of anything?
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 … Read More
Need to quickly see where you are in the Finder by showing the current windows path on a Mac? There are a few ways to do this in Mac OS X, for example you can use a defaults command to show the full path in Finder window title, and we’ll show you another couple of … Read More
