iPhoto is a great picture management app, but you may still occasionally want to access the original picture files for a variety of purposes, either to import them into another app or for backup purposes. This is easily done in Mac OS X, but what exactly you are looking for depends on which version of … Read More
If opening up Activity Monitor is confusing or intimidating to you, or you just find it hard to track down that errant Chrome Worker process, try sorting the list by “All Processes, Hierarchically”. Sorting by hierarchy breaks the processes down into apps and their child processes, grouping together things like all of the “Google Chrome … Read More
The first beta version of iTunes Match has been released for developers to subscribe to. The service stores an entire music library within iCloud and allows you to stream or download your music from anywhere, including iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, a Mac, or even Windows PC. This is done without uploading files, instead iTunes Match … Read More
An upcoming release of Mac OS X 10.6.9 may bring iCloud support to Mac users who haven’t made the jump to Lion and remain on Snow Leopard, at least that’s what a screen shot provided to MacRumors suggests. Sent in by a developer, the screenshot of the .Mac/MobileMe preference pane includes the text: “iCloud requires … Read More
OS X Lion brought greyscale icons to the Mac OS X Finder window sidebar, but if you’d rather have some color back in your desktop window sidebars, you can get this done easily through a third party plugin. If you’ve been following some of our other Lion tips, you may already have SIMBL installed, otherwise … Read More
The desktop in latter versions of Mac OS X has simplified the Finder window sidebars by showing just a few choices, with the emphasis on the ‘All My Files’ directory rather than individually pointing to your Pictures and Documents folders. If you prefer to see more options from the Finder and Desktop window sidebars, you … Read More
The very first Macs user manual is a fun look at the past, and despite being 27 years old, there are still some undeniably Apple aspects to the manuals imagery and text. The intro paragraph from the first page is classic: “You’re about to learn a new way to use a computer. If this is … Read More
AirDrop is a great local peer-to-peer file sharing feature in Mac OS X Lion that is surprisingly useful. That said, the ‘pop’ or drop sound effect that you hear when someone AirDrops you a file has always annoyed me because it’s the same sound effect you hear when you get a new iChat message. Like … Read More
Want to open the Finder and your standard desktop Mac OS X windows from LaunchPad? You can, but you have to drag the Finder application into LaunchPad. Here’s how to do this: From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up “Go To Folder” and enter the following path: /System/Library/CoreServices/ Within /CoreServices/ locate … Read More
Is autocorrect in Mac OS X driving you nuts? We’ve received a fair amount of complaints regarding Mac OS X spelling autocorrect feature erroneously correcting things like British English words to American English words, and changing the spelling of some words like “colour” to “color” and so on. The reason for this is a language … Read More
Reading App Store reviews and opinions from a variety of websites only does so much, if you really want to know what an app is like, you have to use it yourself. Some apps offer light versions as free downloads on the App Store, but what about the others? What if you’re on the fence … Read More
Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, and now that they are included in modern versions of OS X, the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings. Emoji are quickly taking the world by storm … Read More
If you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, that’s because the new versions of Safari has a separate spelling and grammar engine than the core OS. Admittedly, that’s a little confusing to have an app use it’s own unique spelling correction … Read More
Skitch, a simple image editor for Mac OS X, is now available free from the Mac App Store. Skitch calls itself an image swiss army knife, but you can think of it like Preview on steroids, with your standard basic image editing features of rotating, cropping, flipping, in addition to various screen grabbing features and … Read More
In modern versions of Mac OS X, the ability to resize any window from any corner or side of is possible; just grab onto it, and when your cursor turns into the little double-sided arrow, start dragging. That’s a great addition in and of itself, but the resizing feature gets even better when some modifier … Read More
The newest versions of Mac OS X brings a revamped Preview app that includes the extremely useful Digital Signature feature built right in. Using your Macs built-in front facing iSight camera to capture your signature, Preview can keep multiple electronic signatures on file which can then be appended to PDF’s as needed, allowing for a … Read More
Mac OS X 10.7.1 update has been released by Apple for all OS X Lion users to download. One of the most significant bug fixes pertains to dropping WiFi issues, so if you have been experiencing connectivity problems don’t miss this update. Other fixes address issues with HDMI and optical audio, Safari video, and migrating … Read More
Firefox 6 has been officially released and is available for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows users to download. The update is supposedly 20% faster and supports new HTML5 and CSS3 elements, in addition to having a variety of changes aimed at web developers. Somewhat disappointingly, version 6 for Mac OS X oddly doesn’t yet … Read More
