Many Mac applications and downloads arrive as a PKG package file, but have you ever wanted to open a PKG file to view exactly what is being installed and where it’s going from the source .pkg? Assuming you get a .pkg installer from a trusted source like Apple there is generally nothing to be concerned … Read More
Since many of us spend significant portions of the day sitting at a desk and working on a Mac, it can be nice to know for just how long you have been working at the computer for. Sure you can keep track of this yourself by watching the clock or using a stopwatch, and there … Read More
Many Mac users like to keep a watchful eye on their system stats, including processor utilization, memory usage, disk activity, network usage, CPU temperature, fan speed, and perhaps battery stats. The Activity Monitor Dock icon offers one way to do this, but it’s on a limited basis, so if you’d rather see all kinds of … Read More
Mac OS X may come with plenty of great apps and utilities to get you started, but there are a few incredibly helpful utilities that are either missing or could be improved. That’s what we’re focusing on here, with four of the most helpful third party utilities for Mac OS that everyone should have on … Read More
TotalTerminal is an excellent tweak for those of us who frequently use the command line, it provides instant access to the Terminal from anywhere in Mac OS X with just a keyboard shortcut. Modeled after the classic Quake console, an official Terminal.app prompt drops down from the top of the screen where you can quickly … Read More
The Unarchiver is a one stop shop for extracting and uncompressing virtually any archive file that you’ll come across on a Mac. Easily managing the usual archive formats of zip, sit, gzip, bin, tar, hqx, it’ll also easily tear through less common archive types including rar files, 7z, bzip2, cab, sea, exe, rpm, cpgz, and … Read More
Platypus is an excellent utility that lets you turn virtually any script into a self-contained Mac OS X application. Free and remarkably simple to use, Platypus will support just about any shell script, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Tcl, AppleScript, Expect, and even other scripting languages.
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
Private Eye is a free real-time network monitor app for Mac OS X that is extremely easy to use. Upon launching the app, you’ll start to see all open network connections by application and process, and you can then filter connections by app, monitor all open connections, or watch only incoming or outgoing transfer. Connections … Read More
If your Mac OS X desktop quickly turns into a cluttered mess of files and folders while you work, you’re not alone. The busier (or less organized) you are, the quicker this accumulates, until finally the Finder is so covered in files that you can barely see the wallpaper. Sometimes mine gets so full that … Read More
Web designers and developers are well aware that creating CSS gradients is somewhat of a painful process. Sure there are a variety of web-based generator tools that make it easier, but you’ll often be left to scout around for different versions to get different CSS & CSS3 code pieces which then require manual tweaks in … Read More
Reverse scrolling, better known as ‘natural scrolling’ for OS X Lion users, is when the content on screen follows your finger movements, just like iOS. This is activated by default for vertical scrolling, but what about horizontal? Oddly enough, scrolling left and right maintains the old style scrolling behavior, moving the content away from your … Read More
If you’re one of the many Mac users who uses multiple Macs, say an iMac at home or work, and a MacBook on the go, you should get DropboxAppSync. This free utility syncs your ~/Library/Application Support/ folder across multiple Macs via the free Dropbox service, allowing you to have the exact same app setups, like … Read More
Mac OS X Lion’s App Resume feature is both loved and hated. Most people seem to love the feature for most of their apps, but don’t want it enabled for others. Up until now, you’ve had to issue either app-specific defaults write commands or lock saved states folders, or just disable Resume completely. These are … Read More
Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue! This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of … Read More
A recent addition to Mac OS X and modern versions of Xcode development tools is a utility called Network Link Conditioner, a highly customizable tool that lets you simulate a variety of common internet connectivity speeds. The utility is aimed at Mac and iOS developers so they can test their apps response times on a … Read More
Ever wish you could access an applications menubar immediately, from anywhere? MenuPop fulfills this desire, activating an apps menu from anywhere with the click of a hot key or mouse cursor, by creating a contextual menu out of the main menu. This means you can access the Apple  menu, File, Edit, everything, instantly from … Read More
The problem with traditional solutions like a defaults write command to show hidden files in Mac OS X is that they’re permanent unless another defaults write command is executed, this isn’t a big deal for some users but if you just want a quick glance at invisible files than busting out the command line is … Read More
