Aliases are wildly useful on the Mac, offering quick access to anything in the file system. Most Mac users make aliases through the File menu, but did you know there’s a fast trick for dragging and dropping to create an alias of anything?
The Command-Tab key sequence in Mac OS X works to summon a quick application switcher, it’s an excellent trick that many advanced users frequently use to switch apps and help multitasking, but it seems lesser known amongst Mac users in general. Even if you know of the Command+Tab trick, it turns out there are many … Read More
Did you know you can quickly access Wikipedia from anywhere in OS X by using Spotlight? Yes seriously you can, similar to the Spotlight dictionary feature. Here’s how Wikipedia access from Mac OS X works:
Grave, tilde, acute, circumflex, umlaut… all the fun accent codes that you might need to use. So if you need to type an accented letter in Mac OS X, we’ll show you how to quickly type them using the special option key based keystroke modifiers.
You can securely delete files from Mac OS X right from the Finder. This is by far the simplest method to securely delete something on the Mac, and the process is pretty straight forward, very similar to the normal procedure of deleting a file except that you will access a separate option to enable the … Read More
Want to type the Apple Logo with your Mac keyboard? The Apple logo is actually a special character available to type rather easily from a keyboard in OS X. This is a fun little typing trick that looks pretty cool too, here’s what it looks like typed out: Shown larger, it’s the exact … Read More
The next time you need to quickly reboot, shut down, log out, or sleep a Mac, all you need to do is hit the right keyboard shortcut. When we say quick we mean it here too, because these keyboard shortcuts will not prompt you to confirm, they are quite literally instantaneous in their results, and … Read More
Even if you have the Mac Dock icon magnification turned off in your system preferences of Mac OS X, you can still force Dock icons to magnify on the fly by using a simple keystroke. This can be a helpful trick if a Mac Dock is set to be small and you want a better … Read More
You can use Spotlight as a calculator on the Mac, and it actually works impressively well. Yes, the Spotlight search feature can do calculations! While many longtime OS X users probably know this, there are tons who are new to the Mac who aren’t aware that Spotlight is so robust, so the next time you … Read More
The Mac OS X Dock becomes animated when an app is launching, with a continuous bouncing animation, and also when an app wants to get your attention, with a less consistent and more urgent animated bounce. Both of these can be effect alert methods, but they can also annoy some users. Regardless, you can make … Read More
Rather than disabling the Caps Lock key on your Mac, consider a better idea for many users: simply reassign the key to a new keyboard function. This means that if you press the Caps Lock button, instead of initiating THE SCREAMING CAPS LOCK ALL UPPERCASE function, it could trigger something like the Control button, Command … Read More
Need to migrate all of a Spaces set of windows to another Spaces screen in Mac OS X? Using a simple keystroke you can do just that. To sweep all of your open apps and windows into a group via Spaces, here’s what you need to do and a quick overview of how this great … Read More
If you’re a web developer you probably do a fair amount of development on your local machine using either the built-in Mac OS X Apache server or, in my case, something like MAMP. Because a local web server like this is really handy for testing this, you can make your local development life a bit … Read More
Ever wanted to play music while you’re working in the command line? Maybe you want to play a podcast from the command line on Mac? With the command line tool ‘afplay’ you can do just that, you can play practically any audio file format, whether it’s M4A, AAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, or whatever else is … Read More
It really drives me nuts when files can be of the same kind but different type open different apps, I want to open all my images in Preview and all my video files in VLC. You can make Mac OS X open every file of a certain format type with a certain application by changing … Read More
I use my MacBook almost exclusively at home and so I frequently forget to discharge and recharge the battery, which is a recommended procedure to have your notebook battery last as long as possible. For people like me who often run with the powercharger attached to their Mac laptop, Apple.com offers a nice simple reminder … Read More
Ever heard of MD5 and not sure what it was or what that meant? You’re likely not alone, but MD5 is important, and, with a little explaining, easy to understand. Let’s explain a bit about MD5, MD5 checksums, what it is, and why you should know about it.
You can easily check the MD5 Hash of any file on your Mac, all you need to do is launch the Terminal and type the ‘md5’ command and point it at the file you wish to check the md5 has for. How to Check MD5 Hash of a File on Mac First launch the Terminal … Read More
