Want to check the download speed of something you’re getting from iTunes or the iOS App Store? No sweat, you can check not only the progress of the download, but also see the transfer speed of what is being downloaded from iTunes. From the sidebar of iTunes, click on Store, then go to “Downloads” This … Read More
OS X Lion’s Restore function is what causes app windows to re-open after you’ve relaunched an app, and people seem to either love it or hate it. Sure you can turn it off completely, but that’s a bit overkill if you only don’t want certain apps to restore their windows, and still want resume to … Read More
Have you ever wanted to get a look at the contents of a package file on the Mac, but without installing it? You can do that with the help of an excellent command line. This continues on with our series of inspecting the contents of app installers, and in this case we’ll demonstrate how to … Read More
Mac OS X 10.7.2 build 11C62 has been released to developers today with no known issues. The second update to OS X Lion primarily focuses on iCloud support, suggesting the software update will likely be released alongside iCloud, iOS 5, and whatever iPhone is announced at the October 4th event that Apple has planned. Other … Read More
If you spend time customizing the desktop icon placement, it can be pretty annoying to discover that after each restart of Mac OS X, the icons seem to take on a mind of their own and rearrange themselves, usually changing their position so that they are all aligned to the far right of the Mac … Read More
AirDrop is the extremely easy local peer-to-peer file transfer tool that is built into OS X 10.7 and 10.8 and beyond, it allows you to easily send and receive files wirelessly over a network just by dragging and dropping. It’s a great addition to Lion, but it’s not supported on all Macs (some 2008 model … Read More
Just in time for some weekend fun, you can download the wildly popular physics-puzzle-shooter game Portal for free from Steam until September 20. Download Portal from Steam by going here and clicking the big green “Install Game” button Portal runs in both Mac OS X and Windows, and once it’s in your Steam account you … Read More
If you want to quickly style your folders or Launchpad with Emoji, you can access the Special Characters panel directly from the Finder in Mac OS X and then drag or enter those special characters or emojis into the folder or file names.
Thanks to the inclusion of Emoji in Mac OS X, you can now customize the appearance of Finder items by inserting Emoji characters into file and folder names. This offers yet another way to customize the appearance of a Mac OS desktop, and it can provide an easy visual identifier for file and folder names … Read More
If you find yourself needing to know what the default gateway address is for a Mac, you can uncover this information in a few ways from OS X. For those who aren’t familiar, the gateway address is the IP of whatever modem, router, or switch the computer is using the access the internet, hence, it’s … Read More
Some MacBook Pro or Air users may want to disable their internal screen when the laptop is connected to an external display, this is generally achieved in two ways but ever since Mac OS X 10.7, 10.8, and 10.9, OS X 10.10 Yosemite, and OS X 10.11 El Capitan, the internal screen is more persistent … Read More
Apple’s Digital Color Meter utility took a turn for the worse in Mac OS X Lion, inexplicably removing the ability to view color values in commonly used formats like hex. This is a pain for graphic and web designers, and nobody but Apple knows why they removed that feature, but thankfully there’s a handful of … Read More
The font size of the Mac Finder window sidebar is customizable, allowing you to adjust to a larger or smaller font size of both the text and icons found in the Finder sidebars of OS X. If you’ve been busy customizing the Favorites folders and colorizing the Finder sidebar icons, you might want to change … Read More
If you dual boot Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 then you may have noticed that some apps installed in one OS don’t necessarily work in the other. Some of these are because of 10.7 Lion specific features or Rosetta, but others throw random errors that don’t make much sense. Case in point: Adobe Photoshop. … Read More
If you’re an advanced user and setting up a new Mac, you probably customize the OS with a ton of defaults write commands and .alias adjustments. These are things you can either enter manually, use an easy tool like LionTweaks, or check out this new great script from GitHub called .osx. Note: this is obviously … Read More
If you have a mixed network of Mac and Windows PC’s, chances are good that you’ll be wanting to move files between the two operating systems. The easiest way to share files from Mac OS X to Windows is to enable Samba support for a given user account on the Mac. This tutorial will how … Read More
You may know by now that Mac OS X Lion has Emoji support, which is easily accessible in most applications. This brings a wide range of icons and emoticons to the Mac, and some of them are perfect to customize the appearance of LaunchPad folder names. Here’s how: Open TextEdit and then hit Command+Option+T to … Read More
The Mac App Store has a hidden element inspector that lets you view the source of any page or element drawn within the App Store, letting you extract text or images, and even enter your own code into the console (which can lead to all sorts of fun things). This is probably most useful for … Read More
