Preview is an often underused Mac OS X app that can handle a lot of file and image conversion tasks without the need for downloading any third party tools. Preview also happens to be the default PDF viewer in Mac OS X, and as such it can be used to easily convert any PDF file … Read More
Mac OS X and many default apps have a built-in ability to quickly search the web. To quickly search the web, just highlight any text in the Finder, Preview, or TextEdit, and then hit Command+Shift+L to launch Safari with a Google search for the highlighted text selection.
By using AirPlay and the video mirroring feature, you can broadcast live images / video from your iPhone’s camera directly to an Apple TV on the same network. To do this, you’ll need iOS 5 or later, an Apple TV, and the AirPlay compatible iPhone 4S or iPad 2 with a camera. All hardware must … Read More
Whether you are disabling Spotlight or just wanting to reduce menubar icon clutter, it’s possible to hide the Spotlight icon. Here’s the best part though; if you just want to hide the Spotlight menu, you can do so without disabling the search abilities from functioning in the Finder or with other apps that rely on … Read More
“All My Files” is the all-inclusive folder in Mac OS X that includes, well, all of your files. It’s basically a smart folder that lists every user owned or created file, and by default it’s sorted by the files kind: Images, PDF’s, Documents, Music, Movies, Developer, and so on. You’re not limited to sorting by … Read More
Completely disabling and reenabling Spotlight in Mac OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, and OS X Mavericks can be done with the help of the Terminal. The following command unloads the Spotlight mds agent from launchd, thereby preventing the daemon from running or indexing any drives entirely. Open up the Terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/) … Read More
Although you can set scrollbars to always display in windows, there is no option to show the actual scrollbar arrows anymore in Mac OS X. A simple workaround to get used to this is to start using the keyboards up and down arrow keys instead:
The user caches folder sits in ~/Library/ and contains cache files from nearly all applications that are actively used in Mac OS X. While most apps maintain their caches reasonably well and don’t let things get out of control, some aren’t so good at it, and some apps leave behind rather large folders that serve … Read More
It’s extremely easy to selectively delete any single phone call from the iPhones call log, all you need to do is remember to use the simple swipe gesture described below:
I’ve gotten in the habit of immediately putting my MacBook Air to sleep by shutting the lid, by far the easiest method if you’re on the go. Typically this works without a hitch, but today the Air didn’t sleep when shut. Because the MacBook Air has no moving hard drive or sleep light, I didn’t … Read More
If you shuffle between the Terminal and the Mac OS X desktop often, you’ll get good use out of a Services feature which gives the ability to create a new Terminal window (or tab) from a selected folder within the Finder. You have to enable the Service inside System Prefs beforehand though:
We recently showed you how to manually change the login screen wallpaper, but if you don’t want to deal with resizing images and digging around in the filesystem, you can use a free app called Loginox. Loginox sets new background wallpaper at the click of a button, resizing the images for you to the native … Read More
Modern versions of Mac OS X have left behind the toolbar switch that used to sit in the upper right corner of all Finder windows as a rectangular button in favor of a cleaner appearance. That doesn’t mean you can’t hide the toolbar in OS X any longer though, it’s just now done through the … Read More
Want to get hexadecimal color codes easily in Mac OS? You can set the excellent Digital Color Meter application to display color as hexadecimal with a simple settings change. There are even keyboard shortcuts to quickly switch between hexadecimal, decimal, and percentage color codes!
Install the free-of-charge Xcode developer toolkit via the App Store (Apple gives it away to all those who’ve bought OS X), then open Finder and hit Shift+Command+G. In the dialog box that appears, type the following path:
iOS popularized the pull-to-refresh gesture, where pulling down and releasing on browser and app windows causes them to refresh their contents. With the help of a browser extension, we can bring the same pull to refresh feature to Mac OS X 10.7 in either the Chrome or Safari web browsers: Extension for Chrome Extension for … Read More
You can quickly sleep the display of a Mac or immediately start a screen saver by setting up Hot Corners, which are activated just by sliding your cursor into the specified corners of the screen. This is a great way to quickly hide what’s on the display, but also as a way to initiate a … Read More
Want to quickly find and select your boot disk amidst a variety of other internal and external drives that are sitting on the desktop? Just hit Command+Shift+↑ (Command + Shift + Up Arrow) to immediately choose the startup drive on the Mac OS X desktop from anywhere in the Finder.
