Spotlight is the wildly useful search feature built into Mac OS X (and iOS) that is accessible by hitting Command+Spacebar. It can seemingly find and do everything, but did you know it also includes basic file system functionality? Using some little known tricks, you can copy and cut files directly from Spotlight, letting you easily … Read More
Personal Hotspot lets you share a devices cellular data connection with other devices or computers by turning a device into a wi-fi router, and it’s easily one of the better features of the iPhone and cellular iPad models (and Android phones for that matter). The iOS Personal Hotspot usually functions without a hitch, but sometimes … Read More
One of the most commonly used command line tools is ‘cd’, which stands for change directory, and as you probably know is used to navigate directories and switch between one folder or another within the file system. For those just learning and starting to familiarize themselves with the Terminal and command line, here are five … Read More
The Dock sits at the bottom of the screen on every Mac by default, and it will stay there unless it has been relocated either with a settings adjustment or a key modifier. If you’d like to switch the location of where the Mac OS X Dock resides, you can easily do so with either … Read More
Column View is one of the more useful file browsing view settings in the Mac OS X Finder, but it has a usability flaw that’s initially visible to most users; file names and folders often don’t fit, thus they wind up truncated and become unreadable. Rather than dragging around every single column to accommodate the … Read More
Have you ever wondered if you can keep your entire iTunes Library on an external drive, freeing up disk space and providing for a portable music and media library? The answer is yes, you can, and it’s actually pretty easy to offload an entire iTunes collection to another drive, whether you’re using a Mac or … Read More
Having a Macs serial number is important for when you’re ordering AppleCare extended warranties, checking on the status of your current warranty or repairs, or even when just contacting tech support whether it’s Apple or another third party support solution through the phone. Because you’ll likely need a Macs serial number at some point in … Read More
Apple has released OS X Mavericks GM to those registered with the Mac Developer program. The GM (Golden Master) build is the final release version of OS X 10.9, ending the Developer Preview beta process and indicating that a wider public release of Mavericks will arrive shortly in the coming weeks. Registered developers can download … Read More
A couple of easy to remember keyboard shortcuts will dramatically boost your productivity when navigating around documents and webpages throughout OS X, giving you the ability to instantly jump to the beginning or end of a scrollable document. These are universal on all Macs and should work regardless of what keyboard you’re using, so whether … Read More
Apple has released two minor software updates for Mac users, OS X 10.8.5 Supplemental Update and iTunes 11.1.1. Users who are currently running OS X Mountain Lion will find the Supplemental Update available in Software Update, and all users with iTunes 11.1 installed will find the 11.1.1 update available there as well. The two updates … Read More
Mac OS X has always been able to read NTFS drives, but tucked away in Mac OS X is a hidden option to enable write support to drives formatted as NTFS (NTFS stands for New Technology File System and is a proprietary file system format for Microsoft Windows). Enabling NTFS write support on the Mac … Read More
configd is a system configuration daemon that runs behind Mac OS X, most users will never notice or see the core OS X process running in the background of their Macs. With that said, configd can sometimes act up and cause unusual CPU spikes and fan activity making your Mac sound like a wind tunnel. … Read More
Want to convert a color picture to a beautiful black and white version? Believe it or not, you don’t need any fancy apps like Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator, or even iPhoto to convert images into black and white, all you need is Preview, which is the preinstalled basic image viewing Mac app that comes with Mac … Read More
A handy terminal command will show a list of all apps installed on a Mac that have come exclusively from the Mac App Store. This can be helpful for a variety of reasons, like when building a list of apps you may want to replace from outside the official App Store channels if you’re migrating … Read More
Hard drive failures are never fun but they are a fact of computing life whether you use a Mac or PC. Sometimes drives can truck along for many years before going bad, and other times you wind up with a drive that goes kaput after just a few months of normal use. Regardless of when … Read More
The iTunes Radio music service offers a great way to listen to your favorite songs and also find new music, and with some minor adjustments you can tune any station to prefer either the hits, wander more into discovery, or a mixture of the both. These three tuning settings are named appropriately, and can be … Read More
The Mac command key, sitting alongside the spacebar and containing that funky looking icon logo, is commonly used for initiating keyboard shortcuts throughout OS X. But that command key also has some nice usability tricks up its sleeve that are lesser known and underutilized, many of which can help with your general workflow throughout OS … Read More
If you’ve been listening to iTunes Radio and noticed there’s a strong preference to clean songs versus the original versions that may contain some stronger language, you’re not going crazy, it’s actually the default settings choice for iTunes Radio. Listeners of certain genres will probably never notice the difference, but a surprisingly large amount of … Read More
