Did you know you can turn your Mac into a wireless access point by using Internet Sharing? Internet Sharing works for nearly all versions of Mac OS X, from 10.6, to OS X 10.7 Lion, 10.8 Mountain Lion, OS X Mavericks, and beyond, and with internet sharing enabled, your internet connected Mac will broadcast a … Read More
If your Mac menu bar is starting to resemble an icon farm, remember that you can remove items from the menu bar by holding down the Command key and dragging items out of the menu. The icon will disappear into a puff of dust, the same way an icon from the Dock or sidebar disappear.
Kext files are kernel extensions for Mac OS X, typically these are device drivers for hardware like the graphics card, wireless card, printers, etc. Most Mac users have no need to directly interact with .kext files, but for those who do, installing them can be annoying. Sure you can install .kext files manually by digging … Read More
Want to shuffle around some windows in the background without bringing them into the foreground? Hold down the Command key, and then click on a windows titlebar, the window can now be moved and dragged around in the background without bringing it to the foreground. This should work in all versions of Mac OS X. … Read More
If you want to insure full Mac compatibility of a new external hard drive or flash disk, you’ll want to format the drive to the Mac OS Extended filesystem. This is particularly necessary for purchases of generic PC drives, which almost always come preformatted to be Windows compatible rather than for Mac OS X. Yes, … Read More
If you have a third party SSD you probably noticed that Mac OS X Lion probably doesn’t support TRIM on the drive. While OS X Lion supports TRIM for all Apple SSD’s, many third party SSD’s are left without trim in OS X 10.7, OS X 10.8, OS X 10.9, and OS X 10.10.
The Dock disappears whenever an app is put into Mac OS X full screen mode, but that doesn’t mean you can’t access the Dock if you need it. To show the Dock in a full screen app, swipe twice at the bottom of the screen, the first swipe won’t show anything but the second swipe … Read More
The Mac OS X Terminal includes a great feature that lets you quickly access new manual pages from any existing Terminal window.
Screen zoom is a useful feature of Mac OS X that zooms into the screen where ever the cursor is located, making it easier to see parts of the screen, examine pixels, read small fonts, and perform other functions with greater visual clarity. The zoom feature was enabled by default in some earlier versions of … Read More
FreeSpaceTab is a free utility that lets you manage hard disks and mounted volumes directly from the Mac OS X menu bar. With an attractive and simple GUI, you can pull the menu down to see all mounted drives and partitions, arranged by volume type (local drives, disk images, network volumes, etc) as well as … Read More
Spotlight is a wonderful feature of Mac OS X that lets you quickly find literally anything on a Mac by search, that includes files, apps, folders, emails, you name it, and Spotlight will find it, but sometimes you don’t want everything to be indexed. Whether that’s an external backup drive, a scratch disk, a directory … Read More
ClipMenu is an awesome free clipboard history manager for Mac OS X that keeps track of nearly anything copied into the clipboard, ranging from plain and rich text, URLs, images, even files.
Have you noticed when you try and move an application out of the /Applications folder in modern versions of Mac OS X, you will end up creating an alias of the app instead? What if you want to move an application out of the Applications folder of MacOS, and put the app somewhere else?
Wi-Fi Diagnostics is an incredibly useful utility to troubleshoot and optimize any wireless network and the signal strength of computers that are connecting to it. This utility first came bundled in Mac OS X Lion and works with all wireless routers and not only the Apple branded ones, meaning you can improve the performance of … Read More
If you use a lot of DVD’s or CD’s on a regular basis, you may find some use enabling a hidden disk eject menu item. Once enabled, you’ll have a Finder pull down menu that lists discs, and selecting a disk from the menu ejects it: Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the Go To Folder … Read More
We recently showed you where iOS apps are stored locally on the computer, but if you just want to quickly access that folder or get to a single app in the Mac OS X Finder, you can do so with a right-click within iTunes: Open iTunes and click on “Apps” under the library listing Right-click … Read More
Ever wanted to remove shadows from windows, menus, and box items in Mac OS X? You can with a free tool called ShadowKiller, and it works in newish versions of OS X too. All you need to do is launch the app, the screen will flicker briefly, and all on screen windows will appear shadowless. … Read More
The Back and Forward buttons in Mac OS X Finder work much like their respective buttons in Safari or another browser, meaning not only do they go page or forward within the file system, but now Finder windows also track folder browsing history. After you’ve visited several folders, click and hold on the Back button … Read More
