Macs are distinctive among the computing fraternity in the melodious chime they make while booting. While PCs that do nothing more than beep might look on enviously, the fact is that the chime isn’t always welcome—boot your MacBook in a library, for example, and several annoyed faces will willingly hand out censure.
Here’s how to turn off the chime. These instructions are created for OS X Lion but should work with older versions of OS X.
Is your New Years’ Resolution to start video or audio podcasting? Mac OS X Lion includes all the tools you need to produce professional results. Here’s how.
Here’s a neat trick for iCal which can be useful for those who find the default list of views (day, week, month, and year) a little too limiting.
Here’s a quick trick that lets you open files in the application you want, even the app in question thinks it can’t understand that file type. This can be useful with some older word processing files, for example.
The world of iOS was set alight when it was realized anybody can utilize Emoji–full colour emoticons, popular mostly in Japan. Suddenly SMS got a lot more interesting! However, with OS X Lion you can also utilize them on your Mac, making for everything from better emails to more colorful documents.
Want to quickly edit a movie file but can’t be bothered battling with the complexity of iMovie or Final Cut Pro? Here’s how to use QuickTime Player, included with every Mac, to trim movie files and merge movie files together.
OS X remembers and autocompletes passwords for you, but what if you forget them? And then what if your hard disk should suddenly shake itself apart and you have to start with a fresh installation? Here’s how to view any password that OS X stores for you, for applications and websites.
Mariner Software just updated veteran writing/blogging app MacJournal to version 6, with a double helping of new features thrown in.
All Macs come with a powerful word processor in the form of TextEdit. Here are five tips to let you get the most from it and maybe even avoid the need to splash out on Microsoft Word or iWork Pages.
Your Mac will check your spelling as you type in many applications, underlining mistakes in red, but did you know that it can also check your grammar?
It’s here! After long years of waiting, you can finally – finally – get your hands on a copy of TextMate 2.
If your Mac has a multitouch trackpad, there’s a simple but amazing tweak you can make that could revolutionize the way you use your computer.
Got a new Mac? You’ve probably realised that OS X provides an excellent out-of-the-box experience. Unlike with Windows, few add-ons are required. There’s a great browser, for example, and full PDF support. But there’s still some tools that most experienced Mac users download the minute they boot-up a new Mac. Here they are, listed for possibly the first time…
Here’s a quick but useful tip for those who love their desktop backgrounds and change them on a regular basis.
There’s a secret gesture you can use with Mac multitouch trackpads that lets you double-tap with four fingers to switch back to the most recently used desktop space in OS X Lion (although not previous versions of OS X).
If you’re using your Mac to give a presentation, you might not want everybody to see your messy desktop! If so, you can run a quick command that will hide your desktop icons.
Christmas is coming, and instead of writing out holiday cards by hand, wouldn’t it be easier to just e-mail them to all your friends and loved ones? But e-mail can be so impersonal, at least without knowing the right trick. Here’s a fun trick that can be used to send entertaining emails to people on special occasions, such as birthdays or during the forthcoming holiday season.
Here’s a neat and simple trick that will slow down scrolling to a nice, leisurely pace — great if you’re trying to read while scrolling.
Smart Folders in Mac OS X Lion are finally something to talk about. In earlier versions of Mac OS X they were frankly kind of dumb, but not any more. They now act and work just like regular folders in Finder and they are incredibly fast. That is why Apple made a Smart Folder, All My Files, the default folder when you open a new Finder window in Mac OS X Lion.
I’ve had a few friends experience a problem with their Spotlight search results after upgrading to Mac OS X Lion and at other times for other reasons. They claimed to search for items that they knew were somewhere on their computer, but Spotlight wasn’t able to find them in both cases.
Here’s a down and dirty fix for Spotlight that is useful when Spotlight seems to stop providing the results you expect. It is also useful when you just want Spotlight to re-index your system.
Raven is a new browser for OS X (Snow Leopard and Lion), currently in beta. What sets it apart from the rest is a sleeker appearance, and a Twitter-esque side panel called the Smart Bar.
Apple changed many things on the Finder sidebar with the release of Mac OS X Lion. Probably one of the better changes was how Apple locked down the sidebar. It is now harder to accidentally remove an item from the Favorite section on the sidebar.
If you work in AppleCare or any other kind of support organization you probably want to hug someone for this change, because it probably generated a lot of calls for support in earlier versions of Mac OS X.
Mac OS X ships with a lot of default system preference panes and I have about 30 of these on my MacBook Air running Mac OS X Lion. There are an extra 11 preference panes that I’ve added by installing third-party apps. So out of a total of 41 preference panes there are more than six of these that I don’t really need or even use all that often.
Did you know that you can hide the preference panes that you don’t need? This will clear up your view when you launch System Preferences. You’ll only see what you need to see and I’ll show you how to do this in the tip for today.
I was exploring some of the new features in iTunes 10.5.1 this week and I found out that iTunes offers a lot of technical information about our iOS devices. The only problem is that the information is hidden on the device summary tab and unless you know how to get to it you wouldn’t think about looking for it.
Last week I wrote a few tips about disk encryption, but I didn’t write about what to do with the startup disk on your Mac. I cannot think of any reason you shouldn’t encrypt your startup disk after the release of Mac OS X Lion. Apple has made it just to easy for you to encrypt your drive. It is quick, fast and easy. I’ll show you how today.