macOS

So first, let’s do an overview of Mission Control. It’s essentially a way of organizing your workflow with what Apple calls desktop spaces. Doing so can be very helpful, especially if you’re a person who tends to use many applications at once and needs to access them all frequently. Putting your work applications in one…

Before: The User Library folder is nowhere to be found inside the user’s home folder. In Apple’s defense, it’s likely that 90%+ of Mac users will never have to go into their Library folder and, if they do, they may end up causing more harm than good. But for the remaining 10%, Mac Geek Gab…

Press your boot modifier keys after the chime, but before the spinning gear appears.One problem is that these boot modifiers seem not to work with Bluetooth keyboards, as many users who hold down the modifier keys immediately at startup find that the Mac boots up normally, ignoring the modifiers.  The solution is simple: wait to…

Let’s check out what I think is the most useful new feature first. For document-creation programs like Pages and TextEdit, right-clicking on their Dock icons shows that application’s recent files within the contextual menu that appears. Don’t ask me about these file names, ‘kay? That’s neat and all, but at this point, you may be asking yourself…

OmniDiskSweeper run from the Applications folder.  It shows that the user’s Documents folder is the largest folder on the drive.  Note also the size of the Spotlight Database as 0 bytes.When run normally, as above, Joe noted that OmniDiskSweeper only shows files that are visible to the user that ran it. Since few people ever…

Set Your Portable Mac to Stay Asleep When the Lid is Opened By default, Mac laptops will wake up if a sleeping machine’s lid is opened.  You can prevent this behavior and choose to wake the Mac on your own terms by entering the following terminal command: sudo pmset lidwake 0 Conversely, add the following…

So in Mail’s toolbar, you should see an icon that looks like, well…a flag. If you have a message selected, you can click on that icon to automatically flag that e-mail with your currently selected color, or if you prefer, you can choose the drop-down arrow next to the flag to use a different color. (If…

AirDrop, as an alternative, uses something called Wi-Fi Direct. It’s a fairly new protocol that allows to modern Macs, both with Wi-Fi, to see each other more visibly, connect more easily, and transfer files (or an entire folder) with just a drag-and-drop. They don’t even have to be formally connected to a Wi-Fi network —…

Substitutions (TextEdit and Other Software) Auto-dashes. If you write in TextEdit a lot, there’s an easy way to automatically turn a double hyphen (—) into a nice, neat long em dash (—), choose Edit from the Menu Bar, then Substitutions, and then just click on Smart Dashes so that a check mark appears next to it.…

Sophie’s Cards Inc. has just released version 6 of its card creating software and there are a number of interesting features that should be of interest to those who enjoy creating their own cards, note cards, postcards, business cards, and framable art. The software offers nine different card sizes including US and international sizes. The…

As TMO’s illustrious Mr. Landau pointed out, all you have to do in Lion is hold down the letter you’d like to accent, and what Apple refers to as the character picker appears.When you see that, go ahead and select the correct option with your mouse or by hitting the number underneath the one you…

So if you look in System Preferences > CDs & DVDs, you’ll notice that this is where most of your disc-handling options reside.But look at the funny little remnant that I’ve highlighted above! My computer is still set to open Front Row when I insert a video DVD, and it has that helpful little default…

Graphics Files Just as in Part I of this pair,  all you need to do is open the Terminal app, found in /Applications/Utilities, and use a simple but handy command. The command is “sips” (scriptable image processing system), and it will convert back and forth between these file types: jpeg, tiff, png, gif, jp2, pict, bmp,…

Text Files In this part I, I’ll discuss text files. All you need to do is open the Terminal app, found in /Applications/Utilities, and use a simple but handy command. The command is “textutil,” and it will convert back and forth between these file types: txt, rtf, rtfd, doc, docx, odt, html, wordml, webarchive Here’s…

To set it up, open System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver, then click on the “Screen Saver” tab at the top. When you do, you’ll see categories on the left, and what we’re looking for is the “iTunes Artwork” option under the Apple category.After you’ve selected that, you can click on the Options button…

When you enter the Time Machine browser, these snapshots will appear in the timeline along with regular backups, but they have a different color. According to Apple, “Gray tick marks represent local snapshots and pink tick marks represent backups stored on your external backup disk or Time Capsule. Note: Pink tick marks will be dimmed…

In Snow Leopard, if you didn’t have the appropriate software on your computer, your choices for viewing a Word document were checking it out with Quick Look or opening it into TextEdit. TextEdit, being the very basic editor that it is, tries its hardest, but it just can’t recreate a lot of the formatting that…

In Lion, if you click and hold the “Show All” button, you’ll see a popup list of all the Preferences. You can select one from the list, just as if you’d clicked on the icon.System Preferences in Lion What’s interesting is the “Customize…” option at the botton of the list. Selecting that will show each Preference…

The default Dashboard, Lego patternIn a previous tip, I described how to change Lion’s login screen. This technique is similar — you’ll need admin privileges to replace a system file. 1. Select an image that you want to use for the Dashboard background. It needs to be the same size as your main display. Alternatively,…