Think Full Screen app mode wastes an external displays screen real estate in Mac OS X Lion? Think again. Despite various reports to the contrary, and even early experience with the Developer Preview, some Full Screen apps in Mac OS X Lion work just fine with multiple monitor Mac setups. In fact, the secondary display … Read More
Aside from the keyboard shortcuts, Grab, and other screen shot apps, you can also take screenshots of your Mac OS X desktop directly from the Terminal with the ‘screencapture’ command. Here is a detailed overview of this utility and how to use it, which allows capturing screenshots from the command line with ease.
If you use multiple Desktops (aka Spaces aka Virtual Desktops) in OS X Lion’s Mission Control, you can set apps to specific Desktops, all Desktops, or no specific Desktop at all. Right-click on the apps icon in the Dock Navigate to Options, and then from the “Assign To” sub-menu select one of the three choices: … Read More
Want to get the most out of Mac OS X native Full Screen app mode? Assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle Full Screen mode with a simple keystroke. This will work to flip in and out of full screen mode of Mac OS in any app that supports the feature, and it only takes a … Read More
A recent addition to Mac OS X and modern versions of Xcode development tools is a utility called Network Link Conditioner, a highly customizable tool that lets you simulate a variety of common internet connectivity speeds. The utility is aimed at Mac and iOS developers so they can test their apps response times on a … Read More
Ever wish you could access an applications menubar immediately, from anywhere? MenuPop fulfills this desire, activating an apps menu from anywhere with the click of a hot key or mouse cursor, by creating a contextual menu out of the main menu. This means you can access the Apple menu, File, Edit, everything, instantly from … Read More
Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, a small utility that provides the ability to create an external bootable recovery drive for Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. This should quell some of the complaints from users who didn’t want to make a Lion USB install drive or boot DVD, or who were otherwise unsatisfied with … Read More
Many users who upgraded to Mac OS X Lion discovered that their Wi-Fi connections were dropping periodically for no apparent reason. We published a reasonably thorough walkthrough with tips on fixing OS X Lion’s wireless dropping issues and that’s a recommended starting point because most tips are easy and less complicated, but among those was … Read More
You can now select any number of files from the Mac OS X desktop or a folder and create a new folder containing those selected items. This is a wildly useful Finder trick for file management and organization, since you can quickly group a collection of files by selecting however many you want to within … Read More
It’s unclear why, but the Mac App Store is running a lot slower in OS X Lion for some users, including myself. By slow I mean you’ll encounter nearly constant beachballs as you click from app to app, with the absolute worst offender being the main category sections. I’m assuming there is an underlying bug … Read More
If you’ve found yourself stuck in Chromes full screen mode, you’re not alone. Chrome has it’s benefits, like syncing and the native omnibar, but unfortunately Chrome does not play well with Full Screen Mode under Mac OS X Lion – at all. You are free to click the full screen button to get in, but … Read More
In Apple’s quest to simplify the Mac user experience, they hid the windows status bar in Mac OS X starting with Lion and continuing through with Mountain Lion, Mavericks, OS X Yosemite, El Capitan, and Sierra. Obviously that change is here for good, and while this definitely makes for a cleaner appearance when looking at … Read More
If you’re bored with the standard black text on a white background of Terminal, you can really spice up the command line interface by adding a custom background picture. One of our commenters recently asked how to do this, so here we’ll walk through the process. This was written for OS X 10.7 but it’s … Read More
One of the best things about Google Chrome’s user interface is the combined URL and search bar, where a single input bar serves both purposes, but is smart enough to know the difference between a search query and a URL. Safari doesn’t have this feature, but Omnibar fills that gap. Safari Omnibar combines Safari’s URL … Read More
You may know already that iOS has the same underlying unix architecture as Mac OS X, and because of this you can SSH into an iPhone or iPad just like you would connect to any other Mac or unix based machine. As it turns out for us nerdier users, this ability is disabled without a … Read More
If you hold down many keys in Mac OS X, particularly vowels but also letters like j and n, a little popup menu appears showing an accented character selection window. This is a fairly new change to OS X behavior, replacing the long existing default of a repeating key press instead, where if you hold … Read More
If you ever need to cancel an active download from the Mac App Store, you can quickly do so in OS X (on any version) with a really simple trick. There’s not much to the cancel download trick, here’s all you need to do: Hold down the Option key from the “Purchases” menu in the … Read More
Tired of the linen background image of folders in Launchpad? You can easily change it to anything you want with this simple walkthrough. If you recall our post on changing the Dashboard wallpaper, you’ll find this trick is very similar. Obviously this is OS X Lion only. First off, you have to use a PNG … Read More
