A fair amount of MacBook Pro 2010 (and some 2011) users are reporting stability issues with their NVIDIA 330M equipped Macs and Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, with problems including kernel panics, random system crashes, blank or black screens, inability to wake from sleep, external displays not working, and assorted other headaches. The Macs most … Read More
Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a small utility that provides the ability to create an external bootable recovery drive for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This should quell some of the complaints from users who didn’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, or who were otherwise unsatisfied with … Read More
Many users who upgraded to Mac OS X Lion discovered that their Wi-Fi connections were dropping periodically for no apparent reason. We published a reasonably thorough walkthrough with tips on fixing OS X Lion’s wireless dropping issues and that’s a recommended starting point because most tips are easy and less complicated, but among those was … Read More
It’s unclear why, but the Mac App Store is running a lot slower in OS X Lion for some users, including myself. By slow I mean you’ll encounter nearly constant beachballs as you click from app to app, with the absolute worst offender being the main category sections. I’m assuming there is an underlying bug … Read More
If you’ve found yourself stuck in Chromes full screen mode, you’re not alone. Chrome has it’s benefits, like syncing and the native omnibar, but unfortunately Chrome does not play well with Full Screen Mode under Mac OS X Lion – at all. You are free to click the full screen button to get in, but … Read More
In Apple’s quest to simplify the Mac user experience, they hid the windows status bar in Mac OS X starting with Lion and continuing through with Mountain Lion, Mavericks, OS X Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. Obviously that change is here for good, and while this definitely makes for a cleaner appearance when looking at … Read More
If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s … Read More
Don’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or DVD yourself? It’s easier than ever, but if you aren’t up for it, you can now get an official Mac OS X Lion USB recovery drive from AppleCare. The word is that these Lion USB installer drives will officially cost $69, but some users are … 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
Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only. First off, you have to use a PNG … Read More
The scrollbars in new versions of Mac OS X are hidden until activated by use, that is, by scrolling, making them invisible by default. This is the new default behavior that works very well if you primarily use a trackpad with your Mac. I use an external mouse with my Mac quite often though, and … Read More
Need to redownload Mac OS X Lion from the Mac App Store? If you plan on making an install drive but you already upgraded to Lion, you’ll need to redownload the Installer so that you can extract the DMG file. This is the sure fire way to do it, in short, hold the Option key … Read More
If you don’t want to deal with the already simple task of making a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, you will probably like the little third party utility called Lion DiskMaker, it’s an AppleScript that handles everything for you as long as you have the requirements met. In order to use LionDiskMaker, you … Read More
Xcode 4.1 was made available as a free download through the Mac App Store for OS X Lion owners, but many users are encountering a strange error when they go to install the development suite; an error message pops up saying that XCode can’t be installed while iTunes is running telling you that “In order … Read More
In our post on how to disable Resume for Safari or other applications in OS X 10.7, several of our commenters pointed out that it isn’t necessary to change the individual app directories permissions. Alternatively, you can turn off Resume on a per-app basis using a defaults write command entered into the Terminal. Turn Off … Read More
Launchpad is the app launcher in Mac OS X that is quite like the iOS Home Screen, showing a series of app icons and names on a simple screen making it very easy to launch whatever apps you want to open. It’s a nice utility and feature built into the Mac, but it does have … Read More
Resume is that feature of Mac OS X Lion that causes apps windows to reappear after you have quit and then relaunched the app. It’s a great feature but not one that we want all applications to use, so here is how to disable Resume on a per app basis.
One of the many understated features in Mac OS X is the ability to natively convert audio to m4a directly in the OS X Finder – without any additional downloads or add-ons. Yes, an MPEG audio encoder is built directly into Mac OS X since versions 10.7 and 10.8, 10.9, 10.10 (and beyond of course), … Read More
