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
Did you know the iTunes Artwork screensaver in Mac OS X is interactive? By hovering over an album when the screen saver is active, a pop-up play button will appear similar to what is found by hovering over music in the Finder, click it and that album or song will begin to play.
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.
Using the lsof command, we can find out exactly what process or application is using a specified file at that given moment. This is similar to the opensnoop command, but rather than watching the changes to a file over time, lsof can give us a snapshot of this very moment, which can be helpful for … Read More
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
We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks. What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock … 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
In what is some of the strongest evidence that Apple is working towards bringing higher resolution retina style displays to Macs, a series of hidden HiDPI resolutions can be enabled in OS X Lion.
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.
When a new iOS software update is made available, you can download and install the update directly on the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch by using Over the Air updates, abbreviated as OTA. These work by downloading only the files that are different (this is called a delta update), so the file size is smaller … Read More
Occasionally through the standard iOS upgrade process, but most commonly when jailbreaking, the iPhone can reboot and get stuck on the Apple logo at boot. This basically looks like the “” against a white or black screen. Turning the phone on and off generally doesn’t help, as you’ll be continuously stopped at the white Apple … Read More
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
The root user is a special user account with high level system-wide access privileges intended for system administration, monitoring, and in depth troubleshooting purposes. By default, root user is disabled in Mac OS X for security purposes, but if you need to enable superuser, this guide will show you how to do so in OS … Read More
Don’t want to see the red badge notifications appear on iOS app icons anymore when an alert or notification has arrived for that app? You may have noticed that some apps display red notification badges on their app icons on iPhone and iPad, and though they’re certainly useful for many apps, if you’re not a … Read More
If you buy an iPhone 4S off-contract from Apple, the phone comes unlocked. This means the iPhone can be used on any compatible GSM carrier as long as you have that networks micro-SIM card, and the device is activated on that network. This guide will show you how to activate the iPhone 4S for use … Read More
