The Dock received a visual overhaul in OS X Mavericks which defaults to removing a minor transparency effect. It’s a subtle change that many users won’t even notice, but the difference is that now the content of windows, images, and items moved below/behind the Dock are no longer visible through what looks like a frosty … Read More
Many Mac users running OS X Yosemite and OS X Mavericks have noticed the purge command, which forces memory cache to be emptied as if it a computer was rebooted, throws an error when attempting to run through Terminal in OS X 10.9 or newer. In most cases that error message is “Unable to purge … Read More
Finder is the file manager in OS X, and it’s actually one of the oldest components of the Mac operating system, having been around since the earliest days of Mac OS. Despite it’s long history, many users who have upgraded to OS X Mavericks have discovered some peculiar behavior with Finder, where it can become … Read More
Notification Center in Mac OS X sends a little pop-up alert in the corner of the screen when an event occurs. These are often in the form of a reminder originally made on an iPhone, a new inbound iMessage, a persistent software update or twenty, new emails, almost anything really. While obviously useful for many … Read More
A full featured Apple Maps app is now bundled on all Macs running modern versions of Mac OS. Most people will probably use Maps to get directions and cruise around the globe for virtual tours, but there’s an excellent little feature that allows you to export any regions map as a PDF file. This is … Read More
Just about every web developer or designer is familiar with Google Chrome’s Developer Tools, which allows for easy browser based debugging, tweaking, and adjusting of web pages and web applications. Those who live in web browsers and text editors know just how useful DevTools is, and with the help of a third party Chrome extension … Read More
Gatekeeper is an application level security feature on the Mac that aims to prevent unauthorized and unidentified apps from being launched in Mac OS X, thereby preventing potential security problems like exploits or trojans from running on a Mac. The feature is most often encountered when an app has been downloaded from the web, and … Read More
Many users of the Mail app in OS X Mavericks have experienced significant problems, ranging from severe issues like randomly deleting emails to entire inboxes, to not signifying if emails have been read, amongst a wide variety of other more minor but annoying problems with the Mail app. Some of the issues have been so … Read More
Finder Tabs are one of the better Mavericks improvements brought to the Mac OS X Finder in years, letting you use the file system in a single window view, with each open folder or directory path as it’s own unique tab. Used properly, Finder Tabs will prevent the enormous amounts of window clutter that can … Read More
Though we generally recommend staying on the latest versions of OS X, some users may find incompatibilities or problems associated with updating their Macs to OS X Mavericks, and for these unique circumstances it can make sense to downgrade the Mac back to a prior release version of OS X. For such specific cases, we’ll … Read More
Changing the login screens background wallpaper is a great way to customize the appearance of a Mac. The process of doing so seems to change with every release of OS X though, and that’s no different with swapping out the login wallpaper in OS X Mavericks. Changed yet again with OS X 10.9, you will … Read More
Dictation is the new speech-to-text engine that lets your Mac type out what you are saying as you talk, and it’s one of the many excellent features included with modern versions of Mac OS X. Now from Mavericks onward, you can improve Dictation considerably by enabling an option called “Enhanced Dictation”, this will provide two … Read More
Already installed OS X Mavericks, but now you want to create an install drive for other computers? Or maybe the Mavericks installer became corrupt during the process? Whatever the situation, you can easily re-download OS X Mavericks from the Mac App Store.
Java has plenty of real-world applications and uses, but because it has been used as an attack vector in the past, Apple has made OS X reasonably aggressive in limiting Java on Macs. As a result, Mavericks does not come with Java preinstalled, and upgraded Macs will remove Java in Mavericks installation process. For most … Read More
Network Utility is a great tool that has been around on the Mac since the very first version of Mac OS X. It provides a variety of helpful networking tools and details, the “Info” tab includes general network info on a per interface level showingIP address, MAC address, link speeds, and sent/received data transfer statistics, … Read More
Sharing files between Macs and NAS drives and Windows PC’s has always been very easy, but Mavericks brought a slight change that has caused some problems for certain users in mixed PC and Mac environments. Without getting too geeky, Apple adjusted the default protocol for SMB (Samba, the Windows file sharing ability) from SMB1 to … Read More
App Nap is a great feature that arrived with OS X Mavericks which automatically pauses applications once they have gone unused for a period of time, helping to reduce energy consumption and saving battery life for portable Macs. Though App Nap can make a big difference in extending the battery life of MacBooks, there are … Read More
All of the latest versions of OS X have opted for a conservative approach to showing the users ~/Library/ directory, a folder which contains a variety of important files, settings, preferences, caches, and many specific files that are required for apps to run as intended. Because of the possibility of unintentional harm to a users … Read More
