OS X Mountain Lion has been updated to 10.8.1, the update is a general maintenance and bug fix release which includes assorted improvements. The OS X 10.8.1 update can be downloaded through the Mac App Store, either launch the App Store directly or access it through the Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”. The … Read More
OS X Mountain Lion changed the battery indicator for mobile Mac users, removing the option to show the remaining battery life time and instead displaying only a percentage, like iOS. For those of us who live on the go and rely heavily on battery life, knowing the actual remaining battery capacity in hours is much … Read More
If you don’t like the Auto-Save feature of OS X, you’ll be pleased to discover that turning it off system-wide on a Mac is just a matter of checking a settings box within OS X Mountain Lion and OS X Mavericks. This will disable the automatic saving behavior for all files across all documents on … Read More
Twitter is deeply integrated into the Mac now with the latest versions of OS X, and that means you can send tweets from just about anywhere once it’s set up and configured. If you went to System Preferences hoping to find a panel to set it up and walked away confused, don’t worry because enabling … Read More
You’ll often hear Mac users reference their machines by a model and the build year (for example, Mac Mini 2010, or MacBook Pro 2016), or by a timeline within the year it was released (iMac mid-2011 model). Sure some Mac users just have an amazing memory for this stuff, but everyone else can retrieve the … Read More
Hot Corners are a great feature of Mac OS X that let you instantly enable things like the screen saver, sleep, the lock screen, LaunchPad, Dashboard, Mission Control, and new with Mountain Lion, Notification Center. The advantage to using Hot Corners are their speediness, since you only have to swipe the mouse cursor into a … Read More
Previous versions of Mac OS X allowed you to see a “Now Playing” notification pop up over the iTunes Dock icon, the alert showed the song and artist name anytime a track switched and is a really popular tweak. It turns out that hidden feature is missing from OS X Mountain Lion, but with the … Read More
Apple has released the first point release of OS X Mountain Lion as a beta to developers. The beta build of OS X 10.8.1 12B13 focuses on a variety of bug fixes, but perhaps most interesting for some users is the mention of a Wi-Fi issue as a focus area, which could be related to … Read More
Since OS X 10.7.2 onward, you can access files stored in iCloud directly from the OS X Finder. Furthermore, if you have multiple Macs configured with iCloud and running Lion or Mountain Lion, you can actually use this hidden folder to sync files between Macs with iCloud, much like DropBox. With OS X and iOS … Read More
We have discussed the powerful new Wi-Fi Scanner tool in OS X but it turns out there’s a much easier way to access the Wi-Fi Diagnostics app than to dig around in /System/Library/CoreServices/ and make a Dock or LaunchPad alias. Instead, you can quickly launch the excellent wi-fi diagnostics app on a Mac at any … Read More
The new Notes app in OS X features a default font that is kind of hard to read and looks a bit goofy, nearly like Comic Sans. If you want a more professional looking font that’s easier on the eyes, you can easily switch the default font from “Noteworthy” to the always classic Helvetica, or … Read More
Need to edit or modify the hosts file on a Mac? This guide will show you exactly how to edit the hosts file in Mac OS. You’ll find hosts in Mac OS X is stored at /private/etc/hosts but it can also be accessed at the more traditional location of /etc/hosts. That said, if you’re looking … Read More
Notification Center is a great addition to Mac OS X but not everyone likes it, sometimes just muting the alert sounds and turning banners and alert pop-ups off per-app is just not enough, and you may want to disable the entire notification system completely. Furthermore, if you don’t use Notifications on the Mac then you … Read More
Safari 6 changed the longstanding behavior of the Delete key, which used to navigate back a page when pressed but now does nothing. Instead, navigating web pages forward and backward is done through Command [ and Command ]. If you’d like to return the back-a-page navigation behavior to the Delete key within Safari, you can … Read More
AirDrop is probably the quickest and easiest way to transfer files between Macs these days, thanks to it’s instant ad-hoc network it lets Macs send files back and forth – without even being connected to the same network. As is, using AirDrop is easy through the Finder, but now with Mac OS X you can … Read More
Using an excellent third party tool called terminal-notifier, you can post alerts and messages to Notification Center directly from the command line. This has a myriad of potentially valid uses, but one fantastic use-case is along the same veins of verbally announcing when a command has completed or sending a badge alert, but instead posting … Read More
You’ve always been able to temporarily prevent a Mac from sleeping by using the pmset noidle command or a hot corner, but with modern versions of Mac OS X, Apple has bundled a command line tool dedicated to sleep prevention much like the popular Caffeine app, and appropriately, named it caffeinate. At it’s most simple … Read More
OS X Mountain Lion has been a painless upgrade for most users, but there are a fair amount of people experiencing some unusual wireless connectivity problems and issues. Mainly, the wi-fi connection seems to drop at random, or the Mac simply won’t stay connected to a wireless network for long. Sometimes it automatically reconnects and … Read More
