If you regularly use any X11 apps in Lion, such as the Gimp image editor, then you might dislike to the confusion of each X11 app utilizing its own menu bar. A way to make X11 apps easier to work with is to integrate X11 with Mission Control’s spaces and to run X11 full screen. Here are the steps.
The untethered iOS 5 jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 has become available, and we have tutorials up for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 already. This is a highly-anticpated jailbreak, and millions will likely use it to jailbreak their A5-based iOS devices.
As you can imagine, many are trying to jailbreak their iPhones and iPads right now with the Chronic Dev Team’s Absinthe tool, and the Greenpois0n servers are getting hammered. This means that it may be nearly impossible for many to actually get Cydia up and running right now. If you can’t manage to finish the Absinthe jailbreak on your iPhone 4S or iPad 2, we have a handy fix.
If you don’t use Time Machine, you might notice that every time you attach a new and/or blank hard disk to the computer you get asked if you want to use it for backups. Here’s a simple trick that will stop that happening.
If there’s something you’d like to grab from a web page for which a download link isn’t provided, such as a movie file, Safari offers a handful of ways to download it–with no add-ons required. Read on to learn how.
Wouldn’t it be useful to click a link in Finder that showed only files accessed or created today, yesterday, or within the last week? That would make it significantly easier to find files you’ve been working on but forgotten the location of.
Users of OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard already have this at their fingertips in the Finder sidebar, but Apple saw fit to remove it from OS X Lion, its latest release. Here’s how to restore it.
Here’s a neat trick that can be used if you need to view the same images or PDFs repeatedly, or if you want to simply record your position within a long PDF document.
Gotta alotta fonts installed on your Mac, but never know which you’d like to actually use in a document? Most apps show font previews on the formatting menu, but with Microsoft Word and some other apps many people turn off this feature because it massively increases start-up times. The solution is to create (and print off, if you wish) a font sample document that you can refer to whenever you want. This is very easily done on your Mac, as follows.
Here’s a handful of tricks you can use when selecting text within a document or web page. Like many good tricks, these techniques are simple but could potentially change the way you work with your Mac.
Ever get tired of the dialog that appears whenever you run or access a file you’ve downloaded? It can be an annoying halt to a workflow, especially if you already know not to trust files downloaded from questionable websites. Here’s how to turn off the warning.
There’s no need to break-out the calculator (either real or software) when you want to do a quick calculation. Just use Spotlight, as follows.
Trying to get somewhere in a hurry? The folks at Apple figured this might happen, so they built a very neat feature into OS X Lion to help you see a map of any address you’ve been sent via email, or encounter in a web page or document. No copying and pasting required.
Here’s a neat and simple trick that lets you forward several emails at once if you use the OS X Mail application.
If you’ve written a book full of Mac tips, as I have, it’s inevitable people ask what my favourite tips are. So here they are, for one-time only—the top 10 tricks I use every day. They’re not all barnstormers, and they’re not guaranteed to be mind-blowing. They’re just the little things I do to make life easier and more efficient when I’m using my Mac. Please share your own in the comments!
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.
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?
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.