macOS

“My mind is going, Dave. I can feel it.” — HAL 9000 The idea that Macs should become simpler, more fun to use, and more like the iPad has its limits. There is a proper place in our technical society for awesome computational power, intelligent agents, and power tools on the desktop. That computational power,…

Apple’s Calculator app, included in OS X, is a handy tool for performing both quick calculations as well as more advanced functions. When calculating several numbers at once, however, it can become tedious to keep track of them, especially if you make a mistake at some point in the sequence. Thankfully, Apple includes a paper…

iTunes 11 has arrived, and now we see what Apple was up to. This version is cleaner, simpler, more logical and looks great. To be honest, I had some anxiety about iTunes 11. Would Apple deliver? Would the upgrade hose up the beloved iTunes? Would it deliver some kind of agenda, take away beloved features,…

Change sucks! Right? We know that's going through the heads of many people who just downloaded iTunes 11. The reality is that change is often great, but there is one thing we immediately missed in the new version of iTunes, and that's the sidebar. Fortunately, turning it back on is easy peasy. First, let's look…

Say that you're about to give a presentation, or someone else wants to use your computer. If you're running Mountain Lion, you may be a bit worried about what notifications may pop up on your screen. You never know when that asinine friend of yours is going to send another off-color joke, do you? There…

OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has returned to Apple’s Online Store as a physical disc purchase after being removed upon the launch of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion in July. The return of the product was discovered by French site MacGeneration and MacRumors early Wednesday and is good news for owners of older Macs. Snow…

Being able to capture a visual copy of all – or some – of what's on your Mac's screen is a very handy tool to have at your beck-and-call. Old-fashioned screen capture methods have now been replaced by state-of-the-art technology! There are many reasons why you would want to grab screen captures (aka “screenshots”): Writing…

Back in Lion, System Preferences > Software Update had some cool information under the Installed Software tab. You could check and see everything you'd installed using OS X's built-in updating system and sort by the names or the installation dates to find what you were looking for. This was very good to know when problems…

If you forget an account password in Lion or Mountain Lion, there are lots of ways to reset it. The first, easiest way starts like this: Open System Preferences > Users & Groups, click on the lock at the bottom-left of the window to unlock the pane, and then enter an administrator's name and password…

If you're having printing issues, there are lots of troubleshooting steps to try. You should check the printer's network connection and perhaps search for any new drivers your model has available. Another good idea is turning the device off and on again to see if the problem's just an intermittent one. You could even delete…

Do you ever create what in Mac-speak are Archive files? You know, the handy .zip files that you can create by right-clicking on a file or folder and selecting the option to Compress it? In OS X Tiger and older system versions, the action was called Archive. I'll be using the two terms interchangeably. For…

With Lion and Mountain Lion, supported programs will reopen their existing windows when you quit and relaunch them. You can turn off this behavior completely if you hate it—the setting's in System Preferences > General. (This screenshot is from Mountain Lion; Lion's checkbox reads Restore windows when quitting and re-opening apps.) But what if you…

One of the coolest tricks in OS X is the ability to drag a file from the Finder to the Terminal window to see its path. If the file is editable, you can enter an editor command before you drag the file. Let's say that you're preparing to edit a text file in the Terminal.…

Sometimes we need to export our Mac contacts in formats other than vCards, and Apple hasn't made it obvious how you do that. If you've got Numbers installed, it's actually really easy to put them into Excel or CSV format. You don't believe me, you say? C'mon. Haven't we known each other long enough that…

If you're a person who uses the right side of the Dock for quick access to your most-used files, this tip's for you. Did you know that you can email files right from the Dock, without having to locate the original file in the Finder? You can. Did you know also that I'm currently so…

I'm talking about the Keychain—I call it an OS X “security vault.” You may already know that your Mac's Keychain is constantly guarding access to data on your Mac in several different ways, and that it is the primary defense against the injection of malware onto your Mac. Your Keychain password – which is usually…

SCOtutor for Mountain Lion is hands down the best, and most time efficient, way of learning what you need to know about OSX 10.8 for the Macintosh. It's true that there are over 200 changes between Lion and our current cat, but most of them are under the hood, and for all intents and purposes…

Spotlight, the handy system-wide search tool first introduced in OS X 10.4 Tiger, is a quick and easy way for Mac users to find files and settings on their Mac. Many users have also come to rely on the feature to search for and launch applications, replacing the Dock and Finder. As Spotlight has gained…

If your Mac’s boot drive becomes badly corrupted and requires a reformat, one way to recover is to do a full restore from Time Machine. Here’s how my own adventure went, and included, free of charge, are a few hard lessons learned. ______________________ Our family server is a 2009 Mac Pro. It’s a great machine…

OS X 10.8.2, released last Wednesday, updated Apple’s Safari Web browser to version 6.0.1 and fixed an annoying issue introduced in the first version of Safari 6. Apple’s new unified search and address bar now allows users to access and copy the link of a Web search, giving users the option to save and share…

Earlier this month we conducted extensive testing on OS X battery life from Snow Leopard through the developer builds of Mountain Lion 10.8.2. The results of our tests showed that both Lion and Mountain Lion decreased battery life upon their release, with Mountain Lion notably causing a painful 30 percent reduction in running time that…

Apple released OS X 10.7.5 Wednesday, an update that adds the company's Gatekeeper technology to Lion for the first time. The update also includes a few bug fixes. Gatekeeper is a system-level control over what can be installed on your Mac introduced with Mountain Lion. Users can decide whether they want only applications from Apple's…

If you need to zoom in on an image you're editing in iPhoto, there are a couple of ways to go about it. The most obvious method is to use the Zoom slider at the bottom of the window coupled with the small Navigation panel to move around in your magnified image. I find, though,…

With the arrival of OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, Apple has changed the way software updates are handled. The Mac App Store is used instead. This also means a change to the way we suppress, or hide, individual updates or show all the available updates. Here’s how to do it the old way, in Lion,…