When I lose track of my mouse cursor, I’ve always just wiggled it a bit to find it on the screen. It’s a natural gesture, and Apple’s capitalized on it with its new “shake to find” feature in El Capitan.
If you’re constantly shaking your mouse or swiping quickly on your mousepad, maybe while gaming or editing, the new feature might bug you.
Here’s how to turn it off (and turn it back on again if you want to).
Seriously, people, we have families to feed. Kittens to adopt. We need your ad impressions.
The new iOS content blockers, as well as traditional ad-blocking browser plugins, threaten the wallets of every ad-supported website, including Cult of Mac. Luckily, it’s easy to whitelist us (and any other sites you want to support). It’s incredibly easy to restore order to the online universe, whether you’re using an iPhone or a Mac.
Let’s be honest: there are a handful of sites that you visit a lot, open in tabs in Safari.
If you want to keep these tabs ready to go in every Safari window you open, even after you’ve quit Safari and re-launched it, you can use El Capitan’s new tab pinning feature to keep pages “open, up to date, and easily accessible.”
The sites you pin will stay active in the background, pinned to the left side of your tab bar. Here’s how to create (and get rid of) pinned tabs in Safari.
Sometimes you need to use your entire screen at once, like when you’re working on a serious photo-retouching project or need more screen real estate for an epic GarageBand session and you don’t want to maximize the app you’re using.
If you’ve ever wanted to regain a little bit of space on your Mac’s screen, the time is right to make sure you’re running the latest version of OS X, El Capitan. It will let you hide the menu bar up top to give you more space to work with.
Here’s how to have your menu bar hide itself when you’re not using it.
Ever wish you could watch all those great Key & Peele or Inside Amy Schumer clips from YouTube on the big television in the living room?
Sometimes the small screen on your MacBook just isn’t large enough to contain all that hilarity. It’s times like these that you’ll want to send video to that massive HDTV, and El Capitan makes it even easier with a new AirPlay feature.
Here’s how to beam your favorite clips to your favorite screen.
OS X El Capitan promises to redefine the Mac experience with a host of new improvements that make working (and playing) smoother than ever.
There’s a lot to learn about all the new goodies in El Capitan, which finally became available to the public for free today. Everything from Notes to Safari, from AirPlay to Spotlight, has seen gains both big and little.
After spending a lot of time with the new OS, which has been in beta for months, we’ve found 13 killer features every Mac owner needs to know to get the most out of El Capitan. Here they are!
Are you getting something like following message on your Mac every time you log in?
talagent wants to use the "local items" keychain. please log in with password.
If so, you’re in luck, because we have a fix. Here’s how to get this utterly annoying pop-up out of your face.
Websites these days have another tool to engage you: the desktop notification. Many sites, this one included, allow you to opt in to a system of popup notices that encourage you to click through and see new content.
Of course, not all content is created equal, and you might someday wish to stop being notified of new cat photos from that feline-friendly website.
Here’s how to manage web notifications using two of the Mac’s most popular web browsers, Safari and Chrome.
The worst part about vacationing is coming back home and getting hit in the face with cold, hard reality. Excessive food consumption, relaxing atmospheres and sugary alcoholic beverages are out of your life and work is back in. But what if you take the travel part (not to mention the cost) completely out of equation? You get Flyover in Apple Maps.
Why vacation in this costly, unforgiving world when you can live vicariously through your iPhone, iPad or Mac?
Flyover, the immersive 3-D view in Apple Maps, now supports hundreds of cities around the world and Apple adds more all the time. In fact, seven more were added to the list just today so we thought it would be fun to take a look at the hottest vacationing spots of 2015, without even leaving the couch.
Get your summer vacay on at these hot Flyover spots:
If you’ve got an Apple developer account and a Mac, you might want to instal the latest OS X 10.11, better known as El Capitan, onto your machine right now.
Until it’s out of beta, though, you might want to consider installing it on a second partition of your Macintosh, in case things get wonky. It is a beta, after all, and you should never rely on a beta for a mission-critical device.
If you’re un-daunted still, here’s how to install El Capitan safely onto another partition on your Mac to try it out without nuking your current install of Yosemite.
I took the plunge and downloaded a password manager today, and when I was researching how to use it on my iPhone, one help page said I needed to put some bookmarklets onto my Mac and then move them over to the iPhone.
Problem was, I wasn’t sure how to make that happen; I figured it was just automatic.
It might be magically enabled for you, but if you’re like me and don’t know how to get your Safari bookmarks from one device to the other, here’s how to get it to work.
There are a ton of Mac keyboard shortcuts to make your digital life easier and more productive. Last week, we showed you 10 of the best shortcuts to keep in mind when using your Mac, and you responded with even more.
Here are Cult of Mac readers’ suggestions for even more fantastic Mac keyboard shortcuts.
As of OS X Yosemite, the little green button in the upper left-hand corner of all your apps and windows has recently undergone a change in function. Instead of maximizing or re-sizing the windows, as in all previous versions of OS X, now the green button will take your window or app full screen.
If you’re tired of going full screen every time you click the green button, here’s how to avoid the screen take over.
Keeping your kids safe on your computer is one of the more important things you can focus on as a parent. Mac OS X has a great tool built right in to do just that: Parental Controls.
It’s fairly easy to set up Parental Controls on Mac, but if you need a quick hand at making them work for you, our video will walk you through the process.
If you dig creating fresh beats and smooth grooves on your Mac, you’ll likely love GarageBand. It’s a fantastic bit of musical creation kit for anyone, regardless of native ability or experience. You can use loops to make new songs, play your own music with MIDI keyboards–even make your own ringtones for your iPhone. It’s quite versatile.
When you download GarageBand from the Mac App Store, you’ll immediately get 50 sounds, 500 loops, 1 drummer, and 2 basic lessons for guitar and piano. Likely, though, you want the full package, which is available as a free download that expands the content to 200 sounds, 2,000 loops, 15 drummers, and 40 basic lessons for guitar and piano.
Here’s how to get it.
The advent of iTunes 12.1 gave us a sweet new widget that lets you control iTunes from the Notification Center’s Today section, without ever having to switch to the app itself. You can even favorite songs and buy currently playing tracks if you’re listening to iTunes Radio.
Unfortunately, this widget doesn’t seem to appear by default. To enable it, you need to drop into System Preferences. Here’s how to get it up and running.
Let’s face it – not all of us want every purchase we complete via the iTunes or App stores available to anyone who uses our iPhone, iPad, or Macbook. Some things just need to remain, well, private.
Luckily, it’s pretty easy to hide the evidence from unauthorized users via a quick trip to the iTunes app on your Mac or PC.
Pulling up apps and finding files is super easy on OS X Yosemite thanks to the new Spotlight feature, and thanks to GitHub user slong1987, you can now use Spotlight shortcuts to shutdown, restart, logout and put your Mac to sleep.
The clever workaround uses four small apps that you can download from GitHub and then add to your Applications folder. Once installed, all you have to do is pull up Spotlight (CMD+SPACE) type in Restart, hit Enter and you Mac will reboot.
I’ve found the Sleep shortcut especially useful at coffee shops when you have to step away for quick second. Slong1987 says shortcuts for Empty Trash and Securely Empty Trash are also in the works.
In the past, using the Messages app on a Mac could be an irritating experience. And what if a friend dared to send a green-bubble text from an Android phone? When texting from your Mac, messaging those friends wasn’t possible until now.
In today’s Cult of Mac video, find out how to enable Text Message Forwarding between your iPhone and Mac. With iOS 8.1 and Yosemite installed, enjoying this seamless feature is just a few short taps and clicks away. Find out how to do it all in this speedy tutorial.
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Macs are solid machines, but just like their owners they have a tendency to get lethargic as they age. Launching and switching programs takes longer, simple tasks become arduous, and the dreaded beach ball of doom appears more often than it did when your machine was new. The operating system just starts to feel crufty, and can get worse over time. I see these issues in my IT consulting business regularly.
You may be asking, why does this happen? There are many reasons, but some are more common than others. Sometimes your hard disk (or solid-state drive) gets too full and interferes with normal computer operations. Crashes or misbehaving programs can corrupt the disk directory or application cache files. Remnants from old software may still be running behind the scenes, or you don’t have enough RAM to deal with your OS and workflow.
Is there some sort of tune-up you can do to sort it out? Your tech always tells you to just reboot the computer, but there’s got to be more than that. The good news: Yes, there are some things you can do. And, perhaps, adopt some more-efficient computing practices for yourself along the way.
The OS X sidebar, introduced in Mac OS X Panther (10.3), has gotten an increased set of features over the years, including the most recent changes in Mountain Lion, which let you Hide and change the order of your Sidebar items.
These changes carried over to Mavericks, and it’s possible some of us forgot that we could do these things, if we even knew it in the first place.
In the spirit of showing you how to do do stuff you may have missed, here’s how to add things to your Sidebar, hide them when you don’t want to see them, and then move them into a different order over there on the left-hand side of your Finder window.
Many videos that you purchase these days via iTunes or other sources have subtitles, those little words beneath the screen that were created to help caption videos.
These can be useful for someone with a hearing impairment, or who reads a different language than the one being spoken in the video, to watch these during a movie.
In OS X Mavericks, you can easily get subtitles going in any supported video, and you can customize the way they look, as well. Here’s how to find out if your video supports subtitles, how to turn them on and how to change their look and feel.
When you travel with a Mac laptop, whether a Macbook Pro or Air, you may be leaving it open to malicious users to get into your machine.
One of the things you can do to keep them out of your precious files is to turn off File Sharing completely. Then, if you still want to share files with other Mac users, you can use AirDrop, which is more of a temporary opening of the security gates than File Sharing is.
Note that you can indeed improve security while using File Sharing on and setting up your Firewall with specific ports, but that’s the subject of a different tip.
While the latest version of Apple’s fantastic (and free!) music production suite, GarageBand, has lost some functionality like podcasting and Magic GarageBand, it still has plenty to recommend it for those new to music or old vets alike.
One of these cool features is the Learn to Play function, which has some pretty good basic music tutorials baked right in, along with the capability to purchase videos from hit artists like Sting and Norah Jones, who teach you how to play some of their famous songs.
It’s a pretty heady set of music learning; here’s how to access it. Getting really good at your instrument will take more than watching a video or three, but this is a great start if you want to try your hand at the guitar or piano.
I’m all for getting my stuff into iTunes more efficiently, aren’t you? Jordan Merrick is, too, and he’s come up with a brilliant way to do just that. He’s also got a great site full of clever tips there as well. Really, go check it out.
The default way, says Merrick, for media to get to iTunes is like this: drag and drop a folder full of music or a video you’ve converted from DVD to iTunes. iTunes takes said media, copies it, and places it into its own special folder structure.
What happens in this case is that you’re left holding two copies of that album or video — one in your iTunes folder and one wherever you pulled it from. That’s kind of silly, if you ask me, especially if you back up regularly. No one needs two copies of anything on their hard drive.
Luckily, there’s a cool folder in your iTunes folder that lets you add stuff directly to iTunes. Sadly, it’s pretty buried, but Merrick will show you a better way.
