Ever wanted to check the remaining balance of an Apple ID, so you know how much credit is remaining for iTunes, iBooks, or App Store purchases? Us too, and it’s actually quite simple to see quickly from either iOS with an iPhone or iPad, or through OS X from any Mac. The only thing you’ll … Read More
There are a variety of ways to see all applications or programs which are running on a Mac, ranging from only seeing “windowed” apps running in the graphical front end, to revealing even the most obscure system-level processes and tasks running at the core of Mac OS. We’ll cover five different ways to view these … Read More
Adding text to images is a fairly simple process to begin with that is made even easier with Preview, the basic image viewing app that is bundled on all Macs. Most people don’t think of Preview when they think of making adjustments and edits to pictures like this, but it works just fine, and because … Read More
Apple introduced some new features to an update to iTunes versioned as 11.0.3 which adds a few user interface refinements and some minor features. The update can be downloaded from the  Apple menu by selecting “Software Update”, or by going directly to the App Store or iTunes to update. The two most notable changes … Read More
We already know that Pixelmator is the best Photoshop alternative out there at a tiny fraction of the price, but newer versions of Pixelmator at 2.2+ and beyond include an incredible easter egg that turns Pixelmator into a full-fledged vector art app, a la Illustrator. Seriously, an entire vector graphics application is hidden within Pixelmator … Read More
Services and the service menu appears at the bottom of the contextual menu actions when you right-click (or control+click) any item in the Mac OS X Finder. These typically perform various actions, ranging from launching the selected file or folder in a specific app, to conversions that you’ve created yourself through Automator actions. Here is … Read More
You can mount and unmount drives, volumes, and disks from the command line of MacOS and Mac OS X. For many users, the easiest way to unmount a drive in Mac is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive, or use one of the force eject … Read More
Nearly every Android smartphone can share it’s cellular data connections and turn itself into an internet hotspot, an infinitely valuable feature that lets you connect Macs, PC’s, iPad, or Nexus tablets get online through the cell connection. Of course the iPhone has the Hotspot ability too, but we’re going to focus on getting this feature … Read More
Running out of disk space is never fun, and drive space comes at a premium for those of us with smaller SSD drives like the MacBook Air with a 64GB or 128GB drive. These tricks are fairly advanced and thus aimed at the pro segment of SSD users who are comfortable modifying system functions and … Read More
If you’ve ever had a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro’s battery disappear at random it can be a disconcerting feeling. This is often accompanied with the battery menu having an “X” through it and saying “No Batteries Available”, a very sluggish Mac, and even after a reboot or not the Mac will often have fans … Read More
Mac OS X defaults to automatically re-opening windows when an application is quit and relaunched later. This feature is borrowed from iOS and it’s incredibly useful, and once you become dependent on it you’ll find that it can really increase your productivity by allowing you to get back to work quickly. This is especially true … Read More
Bluetooth devices are usually extremely reliable, but every once in a while something can start acting up and either lose it’s connection with the Mac completely, or suddenly develop a flaky connection. With something like the Apple Wireless Keyboard, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse, it’s fairly obvious when something is going wrong; clicks … Read More
Desktop clutter happens to the best of us, even if we try our hardest to maintain a remarkably simplified virtual workspace. Whether it’s way too many icons thrown all over the desktop from working with files, or just a million and one windows open for various apps, documents, and browser tabs, there are some simple … Read More
If you’ve ever connected a Mac to something else like a TV through HDMI, you’ve probably noticed that, unlike the video source, sound output does not automatically change to the newly connected hardware. This is intentional, but many users misinterpret that as a problem with their HDMI adapter or cable, or even their Macs output … Read More
Though most web pages pick a reasonable text size, some are just too hard to read because the font size is either too big, or more typically, just too small. Sometimes it’s not the web sites fault though, and a web page that is perfectly viewable on one computer may become teeny-tiny on another display … Read More
Tired of seeing that linen wallpaper in the background of Notification Center of OS X? You can change that linen pattern to something else, giving a nice customized appearance to the Notifications panel when you’re checking alerts on the Mac. There are actually two ways to swap out the Notifications background, the harder manual way … Read More
Having regular backups of your Mac is a necessity, and there is really no easier way to consistently back up your Mac than by using the excellent Time Machine feature of OS X. But with the enormous size of external hard drives and their prices becoming cheaper and cheaper, it’s not always necessary to dedicate … Read More
The easiest way to exclude many specific files or a group of matched files from a zip archive is by skipping the easy zipping utility built into Mac OS X’s friendly UI and turn over to the command line, where the powerful zip command resides.
