tips

You can have your iPhone display the character count of text messages by enabling an option within the settings, here’s how to do this in iOS:

Does your Mac need more memory? How can you tell? Often when a Mac needs more RAM things will start slowing down and you’ll suffer a noticeable performance hit. This can impact everything from the speed of the computer, to how long it takes to launch apps, to sluggishness when interacting with apps, and more. … Read More

Everyone knows that the delete key removes letters and numbers, but it does so one character at a time. That means if you want to delete and entire word, you have to hit the “Delete” key over and over again until it’s gone, right? Wrong! There’s a super handy trick that lets you delete complete … Read More

If you accidentally sent a file to the Trash can on a Mac, you can undo that file or multiple files movement into the Trash with one of two easy tricks to essentially undo that file action. You can use either method below to accomplish this, with the “Undo” command working if the trash action … Read More

We’re going to share several approaches to hide app windows in Mac OS X by using keyboard shortcuts. This is a great collection of tips that will undoubtedly speed up your Mac workflow once you remember the keystrokes and understand how they work. To be completely clear, hiding a window does just what it sounds … Read More

You can easily increase the font size of text displayed on webpages within Safari by hitting the text size change keyboard shortcuts Command and + keys together. That increases the font size on a per-page basis, and you can reduce the font size with the opposite, Command and -. But a problem with this is … Read More

Restoring an iPhone to a previous backup is really easy, and though it’s fairly rare that you will need to restore an iPhone, or any other iOS device for that matter, it can still be necessary from time to time. What restoring from a backup does is pretty straight forward: it clears everything off the … Read More

Updated 5/9/2012: If you don’t have a credit card you can still create an iTunes account. Effectively this is creating a free iTunes account, with access to download all the great free apps and other free content from the App Store. Setup iTunes Account Without a Credit Card This is the process to create an … Read More

You can easily convert any WAV file to MP3 format by using one of two free methods we’ll detail below, both are simple and fast. The first trick uses iTunes, and the second tip uses a utility called All2MP3 to handle the audio file conversion. iTunes is ubiquitous and cross-platform with Windows and Mac OS … Read More

Ever wanted to know where exactly a specific file came from? Perhaps some document that appeared in the Downloads folder of a Mac, or maybe a weird file that’s laying on your desktop, what is the origin of that file? Maybe it’s an archive file, maybe its an mp3 or m4a file that you want … Read More

There are numerous ways to eject a DVD from a Mac, but using a relatively unknown menubar item you can do this directly from the menubar too. To enable this feature, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/ and double click on Eject.menu The easiest way to do this is with the “Go To Folder” key combo, which … Read More

You can watch what a process is doing with your filesystem by using the opensnoop command. To try this out, launch the Terminal and then follow along to learn how to watch by applications, file usage, process ID, and more.

Mac users can quickly get the bitrate of any MP3, m4a, or other audio file from the command line of Mac OS X.

If you’re looking for a discrete and barebones keylogger for Mac OS X, logkext will likely fit the bill. For the unfamiliar, a key logger does what it sounds like; it quite literally records every single key press and key stroke on a computer, and stores that typing data within an encrypted log file so … Read More

Have you ever closed a window that you really wish you didn’t in Safari? It’s pretty common to accidentally close an important tab or browser window, and sometimes the Safari app will even crash too. But don’t freak out, you can re-open your last browser sessions in Safari regardless of why they were closed. Session … Read More

You can easily hide or show the “Macintosh HD” main hard drive from the desktop of Mac OS X, along with any other internal volumes and removable drives by adjusting some Finder options. If you like to keep your disk drives available on the desktop for easy access like this, here’s what you can do … Read More

If you come across a song playing in iTunes that is not playing at an appropriate level, perhaps it’s playing back way too loud, or maybe it’s far too quiet and it doesn’t play loud enough for your preference, you can individually increase the volume level of any specific song in your iTunes Library. Likewise, … Read More

An underused feature of Mac OS X is the ability to use any Finder window as an application launcher. This is actually a feature of the Toolbar, which is usually thought to just hold things like the back and forward buttons, list and icon views, etc. But in fact, that same toolbar can launch apps … Read More