Mac OS X warns users in a variety of different ways if they have downloaded a file from the internet to their Mac, with a popup message that says something along the lines of “[NAME] is an application downloaded from the internet. Are you sure you want to open it?”, or even “this application can’t … Read More
Special characters can be accessed easily in Mac OS X through a special floating window called the “Character Viewer”. From within this characters menu, you’ll find a list of various dingbats, arrows, parenthesis, foreign currency symbols, pictographs, bullets and stars, math symbols, letterlike symbols, Emoji, and latin characters, plus a helpful “Recently Used” option which … Read More
Did you know that you can immediately open any directory from within the Open & Save dialog windows found throughout Mac OS X? Say you want to open a file contained in a folder which is buried deep in the file system and you know the path, or that you want to save a file … Read More
You may have noticed that when you select a song in iTunes a little arrow will appear next to the song name, the artist, album, genre, and every other sort category. If you happen to click on that little arrow, you’ll be directed to the iTunes Store for that album or artist. I’m really not … Read More
Apple took the functionality to buy a ringtone out of iTunes 10 for some reason, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have custom ringtones. You can make your own free iPhone ringtones directly within iTunes 10, iTunes 11, and iTunes 12 this is the best way to go since you don’t have to get any … Read More
If you have an older MacBook or MacBook Pro and you envy your friends with newer models and their fancy inertial scrolling, envy no more. InertialScroll is a simple freeware utility that allows you to enable inertia scrolling on older Mac laptops, the only requirement is that they have multitouch trackpads (this covers at least … Read More
The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific … Read More
Photo Booth on the Mac defaults to flipping your images horizontally, this happens automatically without any user input and without it being noticed, it’s just how the camera within Photo Booth displays pictures, making it function more like a mirror rather than a traditional camera. If you don’t images to flip like that, you can … Read More
Line numbers are so useful to have in a good text editor that I’m surprised they aren’t enabled by default in TextWrangler. Regardless, they’re easy to display so here are two different ways to show line numbers in a text file. The first is through the View menu: In TextWrangler, open the View Menu Navigate … Read More
Did you know that that Mac OS X includes a bundled VNC app? It’s called Screen Sharing, and you can quickly launch the bundled VNC client from either the OS X Finder, Safari by typing an address into the URL bar, or directly from the app itself.
Did you know you can download a file instead of opening it in Safari on the Mac, simply by dragging a link to the Downloads window of Safari? And did you know you can also start a download in Safari on Mac by pasting a copied download URL into the Safari downloads window? This combo … Read More
All versions of Mac OS X default to saving captured screen shot files to PNG format, but if you’d rather have screenshots save as another file type, it’s actually quite easy to modify the file format and change the default to something new. Whether the desired format output is JPG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, or back … Read More
Many new Mac users are coming from the Windows world where they would access the Task Manager to end tasks and stop errant processes. The Mac has it’s own Task Manager but it goes by another name: Activity Monitor. Activity Monitor functions in a very similar way to how Task Manager does in Windows, letting … Read More
EPUB stands for ‘electronic publication’ and it’s the accepted standard format for digital book publishing. If you want to make an ebook that can be read on a digital device, you’ll need it in this EPUB format. You can convert virtually any text containing document to EPUB format, which is the preferred format for reading … Read More
There’s a pretty interesting feature included in iOS that lets you run your iPhone in James Bond mode, causing the device to self destruct if an incorrect password is entered 10 times concurrently. Ok, well it’s not really called James Bond mode and it doesn’t actually self destruct, but it does erase all the data … Read More
If you have two directories you need joined together, you can either drag and drop everything together, use the ‘mv’ command to move files manually, or, as we’ll show here, you can quickly merge any two directories within Mac OS X by using the command line tool ditto or ‘cp’. The command line is generally … Read More
You can easily prevent changes being made on any files or folders in Mac OS X by locking the file or folder in question. This locking capability will also prevent the file or directory from being deleted, since the Trash will not empty while a file is in a locked state. Locking files and folders … Read More
In some situations, you may need to repair a Macs disk permissions but be unable to access the Disk Utility app, perhaps due to remote management or because of a problem with something in OS X. Fortunately there’s another method you can use to repair disk permissions in Mac OS X, accessible through the command … Read More
