macOS

Let's say you've copied an older version of a folder off of your backup drive, and you need to find out how its contents compare to the current version on your Mac. A lot of folks don't know that there's a built-in way to do that, and it's pretty easy to use and understand. It's…

Mobile Safari in iOS 7 wants to do its best to help you work more efficiently, so it automatically preloads the top hit from your Web searches. That's great, unless you don't want Safari to auto-load top hits. You can disable that feature, and it's easy to do. Read on to learn how. To disable…

In iOS 7 Safari, at first, it's perhaps counter-intuitive how to move a folder of bookmarks. However, once you get the hang of it, it's easy. Here's how to do it. The best way to show this is with a real world example. I have a Safari bookmark folder labeled “TMO-editor”. For the sake of…

The keyboard is a great way to get around your Mac, and you probably know quite a few of those ticks already. But I have two that every single Mac owner should know, and they both help you deal more easily with text. In fact, I'm using them even now to write this article. They're…

When you're emailing to a group from your Contacts program, you can just type in the group name to have Mail autofill all of those addresses for you. Depending on your Mail settings, you''ll either see this expanded view after you press Return… …or this: So how do you figure out which addresses Mail is…

Starting with Safari 5.1, Apple changed the amount of cookie details, for the worse, that we can see in the Safari Preferences. But we could still get to them with Developer tools. In Safari 6, the raw cookie detail is stored in binary format, but we can still see the data in “classic” mode with…

If you've created an encrypted disk image to keep your sensitive documents in, then there may come a time when you want to change its password. Maybe you drunkenly gave it out to all your friends, even that shifty-eyed dude. Maybe you just want it to be something more secure than “fido123.” In any case,…

So you're typing into a Pages document, and you've gotta include a Web address (like www.apple.com). The problem? Pages will automatically format the text as a hyperlink whenever you start a URL with “www” or “http.” You could leave that part of the address off (and just type “apple.com,” for example), but you can also…

When using Twitter, most of the time it's sufficient to log a Favorite or retweet (RT) a given tweet. But what if you want to publish a link to that tweet? Every tweet has its own unique URL, and that's what you'll need. Here's how to find it, either from your browser or from a…

If you do a lot of Web browsing, Safari's Reader feature is pretty much the best thing since ever. And if you've gotta print out an article, it's even better than that. Especially what with printer ink costing more than I could sell my first-born child for, and all. So take a look at how…

As invariably happens with the release of a major new operating system revision, bugs and other issues are practically guaranteed! Additionally, due to some new software technologies, you can expect there to be incompatibilities with some current software applications installed on your Mac. Some of you are really “into” this kind of thing – you…

There was a time when your Mac's Finder and application windows all had visible scroll bars that made it easy to move up or down in long file lists, and also gave you a nice visual cue to let you know there was more to see than the current window was showing. That's missing now,…

If you visit System Preferences> Displays under Mountain Lion, you may notice something odd. The familiar “Detect Displays” button isn't there anymore. Huh. Well, that was useful, and I'm sad to see it go. No, I'm kidding. You can get it back, in a completely non-obvious way. “Detect Displays” is handy if you use different projectors,…

“Judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” — Mulla Nasrudin It'll be some time before Tim Cook is ready to step down as Apple's CEO, but I'm thinking ahead about the process for selecting the next Apple CEO. _____________________________ Back when there was some discussion about who would replace Steve Jobs at Apple,…

OS X is great at running lots apps at once, many of which can interact with one another. Of course we have Exposé to handle switching between windows, but what happens if you don't want to switch to another window, but rather maintain the focus of your current window while doing something in another. Well,…

As you may know, if you have a troublesome file that keeps trying to open with the wrong program, you can change that setting. To do that, select the file, press Command-I (File> Get Info), and then look for the section labeled “Open with.” Pick the correct program from that drop-down list, and you're golden.…

There's a neat trick that you can use to open everything inside a bookmarks folder in Safari at once. Haven't used folders with your bookmarks before? Let's go over that first. So open Safari, and then click on the “Show all bookmarks” button in the toolbar (or press Option-Command-B). Once you're there, you can click…

Spotlight – Apple's system-wide search engine – was introduced way back in 2005 when OS X 10.4 Tiger was unleashed. Our favorite search tool has improved markedly over the past eight years, and it seems to improve with every iteration of OS X. It's even integrated within iOS. In spite of Spotlight's nimble and highly…

Just like earlier versions of OS X, Lion and Mountain Lion lets users see all of their Mac's open windows with the press of a button. Mission Control groups all of those windows by application, but some long-time Mac users prefer the old show-ever-open-window-in-a-grid style view instead. Long-time users of OS X may remember when Exposé…

There are several ways an OS can telegraph the status of its health and well-being. However, how that's communicated to the user, the developer and Apple are all very different things. Providing information to the Mac user that they can really use is a better approach. No intelligent agent required. I've been thinking lately about…

iWork – Apple's office productivity software suite. Pages for word processing and page layout, Keynote for developing and delivering presentations, and Numbers for creating spreadsheets and charts. Let's talk templates; specifically, iWork's document templates. For me, the ability to work with document templates is one of the most valuable productivity features in any app, but…

When I get a new Mac, one of the first things I always do is turn on Finder's Path Bar and Status Bar. Those features give me critical information for troubleshooting and moving around the file system, and heck, they're just cool anyhow. To turn ’em on, go to Finder's View menu and select Show…

Apple dropped its cat-themed names for OS X with the introduction of OS X 10.9 on Monday and is now naming its operating systems after locations in California. OS X 10.9 is Mavericks, which isn't as high profile as other California spots such as San Francisco, or maybe the Golden Gate Bridge. So where exactly…

Apple gave users their first glimpse into OS X 10.9 on Monday during a keynote event at the company's annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The next version of OS X does away with the cat naming scheme in favor of California locations — starting with Mavericks. OS X 10.9 Mavericks will also…