If you’re troubleshooting some of the more difficult problems that you can have on a Mac, a good place to look are the System & Kernel Logs contained within Console app. But you can access the same OS X logs from the Terminal too.
Increasing the size of the Mac mouse and trackpad pointer is an important ability for those with visual impairments, but it’s also a great way to make a Mac more friendly for newcomers to computers in general, like kids and grandparents. This tutorial will detail how to increase the size of the cursor on a … Read More
Portal 2 for Mac is out, the game is a unique puzzle-shooter blend that is unlike nearly any other game on the market. The game includes single player and a new multiplayer cooperative mode that requires two players to work together in unique ways. Valve describes Portal 2 as follows: Portal 2 draws from the … Read More
Customizing the Mac Finder window toolbars can be a good way to gain quicker access to features you use often, and to help navigate around the file system of OS X , but what if you overdo it and the toolbar becomes cluttered with way too many buttons and doo-dads, resulting in a toolbar that … Read More
If you’re coming to Mac OS X from elsewhere in the unix & x11 world, you might be used to the focus of Terminal windows following your mouse cursor. With a little command line magic, we can enable this hidden feature in the Mac OS X Terminal.app too.
Note: This feature is currently only in Lion Dev Previews, but it will likely come to a Safari update for existing versions of Mac OS X in the near future. Safari 5.1 in Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 has added a new feature that blocks cookie tracking used by online marketers. Cookie tracking … Read More
Update: Updated with direct download links for the DP2 Update 1 packages – these files are only relevant for developers with DP2 installed. An update to Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 has been pushed out via Software Update. The download comes in at around 1GB and changes aren’t specific other than being “recommended … Read More
Are you bored with your iPhone ringtones? You probably know by now that you can make iPhone ringtones yourself with iTunes, but instead of chopping up a song, why not get some ringtones that actually sound like they belong to a phone? You’re in luck because there are 932 free iPhone ringtones on your Mac … Read More
You can add a Recent Items menu Stack to the Mac OS X Dock by using a defaults write command. The default is set to “Recent Applications” but once the Dock item exists you can adjust it to feature other recent items too, like Recent Files, Recent Items, Recent Servers. This is a neat feature … Read More
Late last night, a reference to a “ix.Mac.MarketingName” mystery string appeared on the iOS App Stores under the required compatibility section of nearly all apps. Initially people thought it was just a bug, but the placement and wording of the text started a fury of speculation. Most unusual of course is that it’s seemingly a … Read More
Reverse scrolling is one of those features that came along in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion that surprised a lot of people, on a computer it doesn’t feel quite as normal as it does on a touchscreen iPad or iPhone, but once you get used to it, it’s good. If you dual boot between 10.7 … Read More
The Finder window sidebar makes navigation in Mac OS X easier, with quick access points to various aspects of a users home directory, as well as throughout the file system. Users can choose to show the Finder sidebar, or to hide the Finder sidebar, depending on their individual preferences.
Mac OS X Lion Dev Preview 2 has readded the Graphite appearance option, which was initially greyed out and set on “Blue” by default. The first Developer Preview disabled the ability to adjust the window appearance colors, which led some to believe an entirely new UI would appear at the Lion public debut. Along the … Read More
Using the powerful ‘networksetup’ utility, we can connect to wireless networks directly from the command line of Mac OS X. The syntax you’ll want to use to accomplish joining a network is as follows: networksetup -setairportnetwork [interface] [router SSID] [password]
You can quickly launch a new styled Terminal window through the apps Mac OS X Dock icon. Just right-click (two-finger click for trackpad users) on the Terminal app, navigate to “New Window” select a preconfigured style.
Using curl and pbcopy, we can quickly grab and copy HTML and CSS code from any URL via the command line. This should be a helpful tip for the web developers out there, but for anyone looking to check the source of a web page through this can be an invaluable little trick.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Developer Previews 1 and 2 currently do not install on older Macs with unsupported Core Duo and Core Solo hardware, but by performing a simple hack you can get these machines to boot Lion. Apparently the only thing preventing Lion from working on these 32-bit Macs is a single file … Read More
Last week we posted the newest version of the Fuji Mountain default wallpaper from Lion Developer Preview 2. If you haven’t seen it yet, I described it as a “rather large 3200×2000 pixels” and I didn’t think much of it beyond that. However, one of our readers noticed 3200×2000 pixels is significantly larger than any … Read More
