If you use Twitter to keep an eye on things or to livestream news and events, this feature in the Twitter for Mac desktop app is a must use. It allows the Twitter app to automatically update and scroll to the most recent tweets, giving you a live and constantly updated feed of what’s going … Read More
iPhone backups contain a huge amount of personal data, from various account and service logins, contact list and phone logs, personal notes, emails, health data, messages, fully readable SMS conversations, just about anything that is used or stored on the device gets placed in the backup file. That’s excellent for backup restoration purposes, but technically … Read More
You can get desktop Growl notifications in Twitter for Mac, here’s how: From Twitter for Mac, go to the Twitter menu and open Preferences Click on the Notifications tab From the drop down menu, select ‘Growl notification’ for either Tweets, Mentions, or Messages Close out Preferences and changes are immediate Now just a word of … Read More
By default, anytime you take a screen capture in Mac OS X, the resulting screenshot file will save to the current users desktop. This makes retrieval very easy and is very appropriate for the average Mac user, but for those who take a lot of screen shots in Mac OS, they may find their desktop … Read More
Using a Terminal command, you can turn any screensaver into your background wallpaper on the Mac. In the screenshot above I have the iTunes Album Art screensaver running as the Mac OS X desktop, but you can choose any screensaver you want. Here’s how to do this: Launch System Preferences Click on Desktop & Screen … Read More
There are several steps to password protect a Mac, we’ll cover the essentials so that if someone is to turn on your Mac, wake it from a screensaver, or wake from sleep, they will be required to enter a password in order to use the computer.
You can check your entire print history in Mac OS X by accessing the browser based CUPS utility. This is a very helpful tool for managing printing as well as tracking down origins of printed items, and it works on all versions of Mac with all printers.
You can add blank spacers to the Mac OS Dock as a way of customizing the appearance a bit. This is accomplished by issuing a defaults write command in the Terminal. Each spacer is about the same width as an icon would be, except nothing takes the place of the space, it simply separates other … Read More
Any time that you are away from your computer, it’s a good idea to lock the screen. This provides a level of privacy and security to the Mac that is very easy to use and implement and it should be considered a must-use trick, particularly for anyone working in public spaces, offices, schools, or anywhere … Read More
FaceTime is the video chat protocol available to Mac users in OS X as well as iOS for iPhone and iPad, and it works great to beam images from one camera to another device over the internet. One lesser known feature that is hidden from the general usage of the Mac FaceTime app however is … Read More
If you forgot your iPhone passcode you can bypass the lock screen completely and reset the passcode by using iPhone recovery mode. This will get around a locked down iOS device that is stuck on the password screen, but there are some important considerations to take before proceeding. We’ll cover the requirements, the considerations, and … Read More
The Apple Remote Control used to be bundled with all new Macs, but unless the remote is paired specifically to your Mac a single remote can control multiple Macs at the same time. This is annoying if you’re trying to control a single Mac with the remote and suddenly FrontRow is activated on all other … Read More
The Twitter for Mac client has a great feature that lets you send tweets from just about anywhere in Mac OS X, including the Finder. I’ve tested this out in the Mac OS X Finder, iTunes, Chrome, Safari, iChat, TextEdit, Terminal, and can confirm that this works all over the place. To access the ‘Tweet’ … Read More
Want to update Mac OS software from the Terminal? You can check for available updates, ignore packages, and install any or all Mac OS X Software Updates directly from the command line. To see what updates are available for a Mac, or to install a software update from the Terminal of Mac OS X, amongst … Read More
If you want to quickly access the Mac OS X System Preferences, you can do so with an indirect keyboard shortcut trick by holding down the Option key and then hitting various function keys. This jumps directly to the System Preference panel corresponding to the function key. For example, Option+Brightness pulls up the Display preference … Read More
The Mac App Store includes a hidden Debug menu that can be enabled with a simple defaults write command. The menu includes a variety of interesting options and tweaks that are clearly intended for internal development purposes.
If you’ve ever accidentally used cat on a binary file, you’ll have seen the gibberish that results and how it can totally screw up your Terminal window with loads of weird characters. Of course there are many other ways to bork up your command line prompt which seems to become unrecoverable through the typical clear … Read More
Want to remove and uninstall Flash Player from a Mac? Some users install Flash but later decide they do not want the app and plugin on their Mac, thus will want to remove it. Adobe Flash Player is known to cause a slew of issues, slowdowns, battery drain, crashes, and other problems for Mac OS … Read More
