iPhoto in OS X works pretty well as a photo manager, photo stream recipient, and for making minor adjustments to images, but it’s not a mail client. That’s pretty obvious right? But iPhoto 11 thinks otherwise, at least in regards to sharing pictures from iPhoto using the “Email” option, which (slowly) launches a very stylish … Read More
Did you know you can get detailed information about what is stored on your iOS devices right from iTunes? The little colorful bar shown at the bottom of iTunes can reveal more specific info about storage capacity, including count totals for each respective category. This can be useful info to know if you’re looking to … Read More
Capturing system audio on a Mac is not something that OS X has the native ability to be able to perform, but with the help of a great third party utility you can easily add that functionality to Mac OS X and any accompanying applications. This means you can capture and record audio output directly … Read More
Longtime command line users are probably familiar with the text based web browser lynx, which strips down the web to text-only format and allows for super-fast web browsing. But lynx (links, technically) can be compiled to support graphics and run within x11, which creates a highly effective web browser for low-bandwidth situations because it strips … Read More
Adjusting the mouse pointer sizes on a Mac is a simple way to greatly improve accessibility for individuals with visual impairments. But it’s not the only reason to increase the size of the mouse pointer on the Mac screen, and there are other uses though, for example having a less dramatic difference with just a … Read More
The latest versions of iPhoto (11+) and OS X (Mountain Lion+) support Photo Stream screen savers, this means you can have your Mac display a screen saver show that automatically updates the stream of photos based on pictures that are taken on the go with an iPhone, without ever having to manually copy pictures over … Read More
Reading List is a great feature of Safari that syncs saved web pages between Safari on all of your Macs and iOS devices. This lets you save web pages to read later and works a lot like Pocket and Instapaper, except that it doesn’t require any additional downloads, toolbars, plugins, or third party apps in … Read More
Fresh off the news that Macs at Apple’s corporate headquarters were hacked through (yet another) Java exploit, Apple has released an update for Java that closes that hole, and also disables Java on Macs that have not used the applet in over 30 days. The update is available to all OS X users running 10.7 … Read More
Activity Monitor and the traditional ‘kill’ command line tool are able to handle most process termination needs, but if you’ve ever needed to target and kill all processes belonging to a single user account, you know it can be a frustrating task. Though Activity Monitor allows you to sort “Other User Processes” and select multiple … Read More
Assuming you keep iTunes on the default setting and let the app manage your music files and songs, iTunes will store all of your media nicely in the Music directory of your home folder, with each song kept in a folder according to the album and album artist. Though you’ll usually never need to directly … Read More
Ever had a zip file turn into a cpgz file? This is an infrequent problem, but here’s what happens; When the .zip file is attempted to be unzipped, it extracts into a .cpgz file, which then can also be launched in Archive Utility, only to then turn back into a .zip file, which then turns … Read More
DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and is commonly used to configure network devices so they can communicate with one another. Typically you’ll have a DHCP server (like a wireless router), and client machines on the local network (like a Mac, iPhone, PC, etc) that pull a dynamically assigned local IP address from that … Read More
The mobile world of iOS and desktop world of OS X continue to converge, but some features remain absent or different in either OS. One such example is how multitasking and running multiple applications is handled, which is managed quite simply in the multitasking bar of iOS. On the OS X side of things, the … Read More
The easiest way to copy pictures from an Android device and to a Mac is using one of the image transfer apps that is bundled with Mac OS X. That’s because all Android devices, including the popular Google Pixel, Nexus, Huawei, Xiaomi, OnePlus, and Samsung Galaxy series, should be treated by the standard camera apps … Read More
Between Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Canary builds, Opera, and the myriad of other apps, juggling between web browsers can be a pain. This is even more exaggerated since every browser wants to set itself as the default, and then, to go about changing the default web browser after the fact, you have to open Safari and … Read More
Archive Utility is the little system app that launches anytime an archive needs to be dealt with by OS X, usually it launches itself, extracts a zip, sit, tar, gz, or whatever other archive file, then quits on it’s own. Lately there’s been widespread reports of weird problems with Archive Utility though, where a zip … Read More
Those familiar with the command line know that running things with super user privileges is typically just a matter of using the sudo command. That still holds true with launching GUI apps into the OS X with root privileges, but it’s not just a matter of prepending sudo to the otherwise useful open command, because … Read More
The standard terminal appearance is just boring old black text on a white background. Apple included a few nice preset themes too, but to really make your terminals appearance stand out you’ll want to take the time to customize it yourself. While some of these tweaks are admittedly pure eye candy, others genuinely improve the … Read More
