Expose is an awesome feature of Mac OS X that functions as sort of like a window manager and app switcher all in one. I use the feature so often it is almost impossible to live without. If you don’t use Expose, you should start, and this simple little list of keyboard shortcuts with each … Read More
Want to see available disk space of drives and volumes on the desktop of Mac OS X? Perhaps you’d like to see information about files and folders that are on the Mac desktop as well, including dimensions of images, and data about file counts contained within folders. You can reveal this information easily with a … Read More
If you want to quickly shut off your Mac without seeing the warning dialog and without any sort of confirmation from the familiar power dialog box or otherwise, you can do that with a little known key modifier trick. Be aware that this approach is fairly abrupt, so you’ll want to use this sparingly for … Read More
The Mac has a built-in word completion and word suggestion feature that is intelligent and works incredibly well. This OS X feature is not quite predictive text or QuickType like exists in iOS, but it’s fairly similar and all you need to do is give it a start. You’ll find this very useful if you … Read More
The Mac OS X GUI and all it’s eye candy is a pleasure to use and look at. Perhaps you’ll remember a while back from our Fun Eye Candy Effects article that by holding down the Shift key, you can slow down virtually any Aqua effect in Mac OS X, from minimizations, window sizing, to … Read More
Reader Mathew Prairen asks a common question about forcibly opening files with an application on the Mac, and it has a remarkably simple answer: “I have a few documents and files from my PC that Pages refuses to open, is there any way I can force Pages to open these files?” As a matter of … Read More
MacPorts, formerly DarwinPorts, is a free open source app that allows Mac users to easily install command line software and x11 software in Mac OS X by using the ‘ports’ command line tool for package management. MacPorts is probably best for more advanced Mac users who have some experience with the command line, because MacPorts … Read More
Virtual memory serves a crucial task in modern operating systems, essentially how it works is that when you run out of real memory (RAM), the slower hard disk will take over as a temporary memory source. The downside is that the hard disk is slower, so running things in virtual memory is not ideal, one … Read More
I am frequently developing web pages and often times I find it frustrating when I can not restart my browser because I’m in the middle of a download. So when I need to download a large file and I don’t want to have to worry about whether or not Safari, Chrome, or Firefox continues to … Read More
Frozen apps happen to the best of us for reasons we don’t always understand, and a Mac application can just suddenly become unresponsive and we see the spinning beachball of death (sometimes called SBOD for short). For those new to the Mac platform, getting around the spinning wait cursor might be confusing, so here’s two … Read More
There are several ways to go about changing the volume on your Mac, but did you know you can use the command line? I’m a big command line junkie so the more things I can do from the Terminal the better. If you want to adjust your system volume level directly from the command line, … Read More
There has never been a time when I am saving a document in Mac OS X that I don’t click the expand arrow to see the full save dialog screen. That little button is situated alongside the file name input, and when you click on it, you have access to the expanded dialog that allows … Read More
If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro you’ve probably noticed that it can get a bit warm, no surprise considering the tremendous amount of processing power stuffed into their respective cases. The cooling system is simple to understand; when your CPU load goes up, your fans will kick in. Well, not all users think … Read More
Regardless of how many Mac’s you administer, there will surely come a time when you’ll need to retrieve relevant System Information. This can be done from the graphical interface with the Apple System Profiler utility, but often you’ll need to pull system details from the terminal as well. Gathering system information from the command line … Read More
Preview is the default application to open just about any image or PDF file on your Mac, it’s a great program that blows anything comparable in the Windows world out of the water. One of the greatly underused features of Preview is the ability to view images and PDF files in full screen mode. Entering … Read More
When you click the yellow minimize button in Mac OS X, the snazzy Genie effect pulls the window into the Dock. Although you can change between the Genie and Scale effect from within the Dock preference pane, there is a third hidden effect that Apple has chosen to keep out of the preference pane. The … Read More
Any Mac user that has shared files from a Windows PC has surely found the always annoying and completely useless Thumbs.db files scattered around their directories. We’ve been asked about deleting Thumbs.db files a few times before, and typically we run a simple script from the command line, but there’s another even easier way of … Read More
Updated: 11/27/2021 Ever wondered how to change the default web browser app on your Mac? Maybe you prefer Chrome to Safari, or maybe you want to use Firefox instead of Safari, or vice versa? Whatever your choice, it’s easy to do in macOS Monterey, macOS Big Sur, macOS Catalina, macOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS … Read More
