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
If you’ve tried to take a screenshot of a screen saver before, you’ve noticed that the keyboard shortcuts disturb the screensaver and wake the Mac up. The secret to taking screen shots of a running screen saver is to use the “Test” button while holding down half of the key sequence, here’s how: Open System … Read More
An excellent feature in Mac OS X are the several built-in media encoding abilities, allowing anyone to encode and convert video and audio files to other formats right on the desktop or from any Finder window. Having covered a tip on how to convert video to audio using these media encoders, we discovered the feature … Read More
Converting a video file to an audio track is made extremely easy with the help of the media encoding abilities of Mac OS X that are built directly into the Finder. With this, you can convert many popular movie formats into audio tracks, including video files of .mov, .m4v, .mpg, and mp4 format. The resulting … Read More
Need to quickly restart the Finder in Mac OS X? Perhaps for a change to take effect with a defaults string, or to resolve a simple error or problem? Restarting the Finder does just what it sounds like, it quits the Finder application and then re-opens it again.
File extensions (like .jpg, .txt, .pdf, etc) make it easy to see what a specific file type format is, but as many Mac users notice, those file extensions are hidden by default in Mac OS X. While hiding the format suffix makes for a cleaner user experience and is fine for many users, it can … Read More
Advanced Mac OS X users may find it useful to know that KEXT (kernel extensions) can be manually installed. The process of installing kexts manually into OS X is not too difficult if you’re comfortable with the command line, but it is a multi-step process of copying the appropriate .kext file to the appropriate kernel … Read More
Remembering a keyboard shortcut makes using AirDrop even easier in Mac OS X, by quickly accessing the AirDrop window and enabling the Mac to be ready to accept or send files to other nearby computers.
You can password protect files and folders in Mac OS X by using a trick with disk images. Here’s how it works; by placing files inside of an encrypted disk image, that disk image will work like a password protected folder and require a password before it’s mounted, preventing unauthorized access to all of the … Read More
On some fresh OS X installations, you’ll find the user name or login appears in the upper right corner of the menu bar, even if there is only one user account on the Mac. This is actually a feature called Fast User Switching, and the name likely appears in the menu bar due to the … Read More
Ever wondered how to make a zip file in Mac OS X? We recently demonstrated how to password protect zip archives, but in the comments a reader asked a more simple yet completely valid question: “what about just making a standard zip file?” Well, making a zip archive on a Mac is easy, and with … Read More
