Macs have pretty amazing battery life to begin with, but following a few simple tips will help you to get the absolute best battery performance out of a MacBook, MacBook Air, or MacBook Pro. The primary goal here is to reduce overall power consumption on the Mac laptop and we’ll cover a few different techniques … Read More
Looking for some nice mellow wallpapers to add to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? The DizzyUp collection features three beautifully subtle wallpapers in a wide variety of common screen resolutions and has also been updated to support the 3rd gen iPad retina 2048×2048 display. The wood paneling is my personal favorite of the group, but … Read More
Tired of all the OS X default screen savers? Breathe a ton of new retro life into your screen saver collection with the XScreenSaver pack for Mac. The free bundle includes over 200 old school screen saver classics, including an Apple II emulator, Flying Toasters, The Matrix, Blue Screen of Death, Missile Command, Phosphor BBS … Read More
Want to share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple Macs? How about using a keyboard and mouse attached to your Mac to control an additional PC running Windows or Linux, and even being able to share copy and paste data between the different operating systems? You can do that with the help of a … Read More
Modern versions of Mac OS X allow videos and movie files to be previewed and played directly in the Spotlight search results menu. This works with any supported movie or video file type that can be played in QuickTime. To try this out for yourself:
Assuming you have file extensions shown in the OS X Finder, attempting to change a file extension causes a warning dialog with a confirmation box to appear. The warning text says “Are you sure you want to change the extension from (this) to (that)?” then giving you two choices; keep the current file extension, or … Read More
If you saw our Air Display review you’ll know it’s a pretty awesome app that lets you turn an iPad into an external display for a Mac or PC ($10 on the App Store). If you bought it and haven’t figured out what to do with it yet, here are eight of our favorite ways … Read More
When it’s not in use, do you shut down your Mac, put it to sleep, or just keep it turned on? Is one choice better than the others? Why and why not? These are great questions, so let us review the choices and why you may want to choose one over the other. Sleeping a … Read More
TextWrangler is a very powerful general purpose text editor with a heavy emphasis on development and programming. We’ve long been big fans of TextWrangler around here as it is unequivocally the best free text editor out there for Mac OS X, and now that title is cemented even further with the release of TextWrangler 4.0. … Read More
Update: Apple has released an official update that removes Flashback with a Software Update. Download the latest Java updates from the OS X Software Update panel to automatically remove Flashback trojan malware. A new application has been released which makes checking a Mac for the Flashback malware infection as simple as clicking a button. This … Read More
iTunes allows users to rate songs on a 1 star to 5 star basis, song rating data can then be used for a variety of purposes, either for your own reference or for creating custom play lists that only include songs rated over a certain star value. But what if a song is somewhere in … Read More
The recent outbreak of the Flashback trojan (Apple released an update and fix, get it!) has brought a lot of attention to potential viruses and trojans hitting the Mac platform. Most of what you’ll read is overblown fear mongering hype, and practically all Mac malware has come through third party utilities and applications. What that … Read More
Google Chrome automatically updates itself in the background when a new version is out, this takes responsibility out of user hands and makes it simple to keep up to date with the latest version of the Chrome app for Mac. Generally you should leave automatic update enabled for Chrome, if not for its ease than … Read More
You can drag and drop files directly from Spotlight to elsewhere in the Mac OS X Finder. This allows Spotlight search to function as a sort of basic file manager, not quite like the Finder, but at least for quickly locating and moving a document of any type on the Mac to another location, or … Read More
You’re probably familiar with making your own zip files if you’ve ever needed to transfer a group of files or if you’re managing your own backups outside of Time Machine. Using the GUI zip tools are easy and user friendly, but if you want some more advanced options with better compression you can turn to … Read More
Update: Apple has released a Java software update that includes automatic detection and Flashback removal ability. Go to “Software Update” from the Apple menu to download that update and automatically remove the trojan if you happen to have it on your Mac. Trojans and viruses are generally something Mac users don’t have to worry … Read More
Archives can be deleted automatically after expansion with the help of a hidden preference panel in Mac OS X. This little known ability is an option in Archive Utility, which is the engine and settings controls to the Mac decompression agent that launches anytime you open a zip, sit, tgz, or other archive file formats … Read More
If you spend a lot of time switching between web browsers for development or for whatever other reason, you’ll find Switch useful. Switch is a handy free menu bar utility that transfers all browser tabs and windows between web browsers in Mac OS X. Whether you use Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, you can easily send … Read More
