macOS

Spotlight is a great tool for sifting through the files on your Mac's drives to find exactly what you need. It isn't so great, however, when its Index file get corrupted and you don't see all of your files — or your Mac's fans start spinning incessantly. If Spotlight is having trouble indexing your hard…

I am certain that most people have at least one family member, friend or associate who has an uncommon first and/or last name that is tricky to pronounce. It would be considerate of everyone in our Contacts app to have easy names that won't flummox Siri. Not everyone has names that are a cinch for…

Apple's MacBook Pro and MacBook Air charger is great because it includes a built-in way to wind up its MagSafe cord. The problem is that it's kind of easy to bend and fray the cord over time where it goes into the power supply, even with the extra reinforcement Apple added. Thanks to a quick…

Teachers, trainers, and students are really swell people. I know this is true because I have been all three. The teachers and trainers are usually underpaid and overworked, and most students are just trying to make it through school with the best grades possible. So when I discovered an app that would make life easier…

Control-clicking a document to see the Open With contextual menu is a handy way to choose exactly which app you use to open a PDF, JPG, or any other file. OS X has a problem, however, where duplicate apps can show up and make the list grow longer and longer. You can fix that issue…

Sometimes you take tons of pictures only to discover that they're all wrong in the same way. Maybe the lighting was bad, or maybe you need to tweak the temperature slightly. iPhoto provides a really simple way to adjust one image and then apply those same changes to as many other photos as you want…

Preview on the Mac. Elegant, powerful, unpretentious, highly useful, free. Preview is an application that comes pre-installed on every Mac. Technically, it's a browser/viewer for images and PDF files. However, Preview can do quite a bit more than simply let you view pictures and documents. Here on TMO, Melissa Holt and Jim Tanous have covered…

Recent versions of OS X, starting with Lion and continuing with Mountain Lion, have introduced some great new features for Mac users. Unfortunately, much functionality was also taken away or modified as Apple continued to fine-tune its desired OS X experience. One of the best features of previous versions of OS X that has now…

Java has been showing its security flaws a lot lately, pushing some OS X users to remove the platform from their Macs. Killing Java outright is great for some Mac users, but there are plenty that need it for apps like Photoshop and InDesign, so simply disabling it in your Web browser is a nice…

The Finder's Go > Go to Folder (Shift-Command-G) menu item is a nifty way to access your file system.  First of all, you can use it to see hidden folders, so if you need to view /private/var, you don't have to open a Terminal window to do so. Secondly, the Go to Folder window is…

Mac Geek Gab listener Seth sent us 3 quick tips this week and as soon as I read them I knew we had to share them with you. Each of these is to be typed (or copied and pasted) into your Mac's Terminal, and we tested them here and each work great on our Mountain…

In a lot of programs around your Mac, if you need to insert a special character (like, say, the ellipsis or the trademark symbol), you can select Edit > Special Characters (Option-Command-T, where available) to bring up the Character Viewer. Double-clicking on an item from that list will insert the selected character into your document,…

An odd bug in OS X causes nearly any application to crash by typing in a short string of characters, according to a bug report published last Thursday and brought to our attention by tech site Neowin. Typing the world “File” (with a capital F), a colon, and three forward slashes will crash most apps…

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — At this week's Macworld Expo, Cloak announced the release (previously in public beta) of their Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution for both iOS and OS X. Dave Peck, Founder, gave us an overview of the benefits of their product. Everyone loves public Wi-Fi access, be it through your ISP, or available…

As I write this, it's the Macintosh's 29th birthday. This takes me back to the Mac's very early days in the mid-eighties when, even then, its operating system was outfitted with synthetic speech capabilities. Heck, we even used to have a talking moose! And, who can forget young Steve Jobs introducing the new Macintosh on-stage…

In lots of places around your Mac, holding down the Command key while you're clicking on an item will give you info about where it lives rather than opening it. For example, I've mentioned before that Command-clicking a Spotlight result will open it in the Finder.** I also often Command-click a program's icon in my…

When you open a new tab (Command-T) or a new window (Command-N) in Safari, you'll almost always want your cursor to start in the so-called Smart Search Field. After all, it doesn't make a ton of sense to open a new window, all ready and eager to start typing a URL or a search term,…

The Notification Center in Mountain Lion can be a life saver or, for some, it can be an annoyance. For those who need to, this TMO Quick Tip explains how to kill it for good. Previously, Melissa Holt explained how to disable the Notification Center temporarily, in several different ways. She also noted that if…

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, the ninth major release of Apple’s 12-year-old OS X platform, is now the most used operating system on Mac computers. The usage numbers, revealed Friday by Web analytics firm Net Applications and reported by Computerworld, show that Mountain Lion accounts for 32 percent of all online Macs, just 6 months…

Over the years, I've taught the wonders of Mac computing to many new as well as to more 'seasoned' Mac users. One subject that came up regularly – and still does – was how to manage files. Near the top of Apple's list of goals is that of  providing the best in personal computer user…

You may know about Finder's Get Info feature, especially if you're a Mac power user (or if you're just awesome). This handy little window'll give you the skinny on any item, quick as a wink. To invoke it, just select anything in the Finder and hit Command-I (or choose File > Get Info). When you…

If you're pretty familiar with iPhoto, you may be aware that you can select an image and choose Photos > Hide Photo (or hit Command-L) to hide embarrassing pictures in your library without actually deleting anything. That's awesome and all, but the problem is that your item count in the upper-right corner of iPhoto's window…

Safari's got a built-in way to jump back several steps in your Internet navigation. All you have to do is click and hold on the back button in the toolbar, and you'll get a history of the places you've been in that particular tab or window. Choose any one of those, and you'll be taken…

If you like using List View in the Finder, you're probably familiar with the fact that you can use the disclosure triangle next to a folder to see its contents in the current window. Here's a neat trick with that: If you Option-click that triangle instead, it'll open the folder as before, but Finder will…