Mac

Mac OS X has a secondary Cut and Paste function that provides the ability to cut and paste additional information without overwriting existing clipboard contents. This alternative clipboard is completely separate from the normal clipboard accessible with Command+C and Command+V, and instead you’ll use different keystrokes to access the secondary cut and paste feature and … Read More

Apple has released an all new version of AirPort Utility for OS X Lion with a redesigned user interface. The revised appearance makes it simpler to use, with the first screen showing a graphical overview of the network and all connected devices. Interestingly, the new Mac version looks practically identical to the current iOS version, … Read More

Need to quickly encrypt a file from the command line? With OpenSSL, you can encrypt and decrypt files very easily. For the purpose of this walkthrough, we’ll use des3 encryption, which in simple terms means a complex encryption algorithm is applied three times to each data block, making it difficult to crack through brute force … Read More

If you haven’t set up iCloud and Find My iPhone yet, now is a good time to do so. Follow our guide below on how to get this configured on an iPad, iPhone, iPod, and a Mac, then read on for a story about how a police officer used the application to locate an iPhone … Read More

Pacifist is a powerful Mac OS X utility that gives you full access to package and installer files and their contents, without running the installer itself. Using Pacifist, you can open installers and disk images, find out what is in them, discover what is going to be installed and where, and best of all, extract … Read More

If you have a new computer, you’re going to want to authorize it with iTunes and an Apple ID. Authorizing iTunes does quite a bit, it lets you sync apps, books, music, movies, and other content from the iTunes Store, re-download past apps from the App Store, it enables Home Sharing with iTunes, and also … Read More

The Mac uses a ‘secondary click’ in lieu of a right-click, this is largely because Macs have long kept things simple by keeping a single mouse button – or even no buttons at all on the mouse or trackpad. While the two finger tap mimics the right-click action on Mac and is very intuitive for … Read More

Do you have a huge folder or ten you don’t want to include in Time Machine backups? Maybe just a few files that aren’t necessary to keep, or that you have a different backup solution for? Maybe you just want to slim down the size of a backup, or speed things up by excluding a … Read More

If you use a traditional mouse with a scroll wheel in Mac OS X and you need to scroll horizontally, all you need to do is hold down the Shift key and then use the scroll wheel. This shifts the normal scrolling motion to go side-to-side rather than the default up-and-down motion, allowing you to … Read More

We recently showed you how to password protect files and folders using encrypted Disk Images in Mac OS X, but if you have an external drive you can go a step further. By using encrypted disk partitions, any drive, be it a USB key, flash drive, hard disk, or whatever else, can be set to … Read More

The default behavior for Spotlight is to start indexing any drive as soon as it’s connected to a Mac, a task that can take a very long time with larger volumes. The problem is that for larger external backup drives and Time Machine volumes, you don’t necessarily want it indexed by Spotlight. This is particularly … Read More

Another option when enabling zoom in OS X Lion and other newer Mac OS X versions is to use a smaller floating zoom window, rather than zooming into the entire screen. This allows you to zoom into screen elements using a small zoom window that hovers over screen elements, kind of like a virtual magnifying … Read More

Modern versions of Mac OS X include a great tool called tmutil that lets you interact with with Time Machine from the command line. It’s a powerful utility that has a ton of options, and we’ve used it before to disable local snapshots, but for the purposes here we are going to use tmutil to … Read More

You can monitor disk activity in Mac OS X by using the Activity Monitor app or several command line tools. Activity Monitor is the easiest and most user friendly, but the Terminal options allow further information to be retrieved.

Apple has released iBooks Author, an easy to use app for Mac OS X that lets anyone create interactive multi-touch books for the iPad, these can be published on the iBookstore or iTunes U and offered as free or paid titles. iBooks Author should be a big hit with both small and large publishers, teachers, … Read More

Stacks are a Dock feature in Mac OS X which allows for an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock. There are a few different ways to view the Stacks, which appear on the right side of the Mac Dock, like grid, automatic, list, … Read More

All versions of Mac OS X from Lion onward (meaning Mountain Lion, Mavericks, etc) can display messages that require acknowledgement prior to the standard login screen appearing on a Mac. For administrators, this allows a user agreement or acceptable use policy to be displayed before users can login, and for personal use it lets users … Read More

Do you need to rebuild the entire Spotlight index on a Mac? It’s easy to do, but can take a while. This tutorial will show you how to start the reindexing process of an entire drive in Mac OS X, we’ll do this using the Spotlight control panel, and we’ll cover an alternative method as … Read More