Mac OS Tips Features
How To: Import Your Spotify Playlists into Apple Music
With iOS 8.4 and iTunes 12.2, we got our first look at Apple Music, Apple's new streaming subscription service. While it's a little late to the party, there is definitely an incentive for iOS and Mac OS X users to switch over from competitors due to its heavy integration with the Apple ecosystem.
How To: Know When Apple Batteries Need to Be Serviced or Replaced
Not all batteries are created equal, but one thing's for sure—they all lose capacity over time. Thankfully, the advanced lithium-ion batteries in your MacBook and iPhone are meant to last for several years before they begin to lose their overall charge capacity.
How To: Laplock Protects Your MacBook from Thieves in Public Places
Coffee shops are a relaxing place to get work done on your laptop; there's free Wi-Fi, fresh coffee, and people generally leave you alone. Inevitably, those cups of coffee will go straight through you, resulting in a much-needed bathroom break. But while you're attending to your bodily functions, who's attending to your MacBook?
How To: Hide All Desktop Icons with One Click on Your Mac
Cleaning the clutter off of your desktop every so often is a great idea. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that you're actually going to do it. Whatever the reason, you may not have time to get everything organized, but luckily there is a way to temporarily "clean" your desktop in a hurry.
How To: Make Drag & Drop Way More Useful on Your Mac
Managing files can be time consuming on your Mac, for the simple reason that keyboard shortcuts and right-clicks sometimes lack the effectiveness we need. But with a simple third-part app, you can expedite the process of sharing, moving, deleting, and overall managing files on your computer.
How To: Set Up & Use Third-Party Extensions in Photos on El Capitan
For minor adjustments and color-correction, the Photos app is extremely useful, but its capabilities are limited to just the basics. Now, with Mac OS X El Capitan, Apple is opening the door for third-party extensions, meaning we can utilize additional, unique tools when editing pictures in Photos.
How To: Keep Your Mac's Display from Dimming on You While You're Reading Using Audio and Voice Detection
Sitting in the Powell Library at UCLA was a constant thing for me. Directly after class, I would streamline my way there to study all night until my eyes shuttered to sleep. For the most part, my classes and professors managed to keep my studying online via PDFs, emails, long essays and journal entries.
How To: Get Your 'Damaged' Mac Apps Working Again
If you're seeing "damaged" apps on your Mac, you're not alone. A huge digital rights management blunder in Apple's Mac App Store on Wednesday, November 11th has rendered some apps unusable. When opening certain apps, the following message could be displayed:
How To: 10 Surefire Ways to Speed Up & Fix Your Family's Mac OS X Computer During the Holidays
If you're marginally inclined towards computers, you've probably been approached at some point by a family member who wants you to "fix" their system during a visit home. With the holidays coming up, these opportunities (or ambushes) are even more likely.
How To: Prank Your Apple Friends with 1,000s of iMessages in Just One Click
Apple scrubbed the floor clean of all existing text-bombing apps in the iOS App Store, and even though there were once a ton of these apps in Cydia, the go-to store for jailbroken devices, there few and far between these days. If they do exist, they either cost money or don't work as advertised.
How To: Remove Duplicates & Customize the “Open With” Menu in Mac OS X
As a regular Mac OS X user, I have a love/hate relationship with the "Open With" contextual menu. Sometimes, it has just what I need. Other times, it's often packed with unnecessary or duplicate items, or missing the app I want to open the file up with the most.
How To: Take Screenshots & Save as JPEG in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard or Lower
This video demonstrates how easy it is to take a screenshot with shortcuts in Mac OS X. Pressing Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot of the entire screen, while Command-Shift-4 will let you take a screenshot of just a selected area of the screen instead. For the latter, once you use the shortcut, your mouse pointer will turn into crosshairs, and you would click on one point of the screen, then drag and release your mouse to take a capture of the selected area.
How To: Create a Bootable Install USB Drive of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks
Apple may have made Mavericks more accessible to Mac users everywhere at the fair price of zero dollars, but unfortunately, they made it trickier to create a bootable install drive of the Mac OS X 10.9 operating system.
How To: Create a Bootable Install USB Drive of macOS 10.12 Sierra
While it hasn't gotten as much attention as iOS 10, Apple's big 10.12 update to their Mac operating system is finally out for all to enjoy—and you can download it for free from the Mac App Store right now.
How To: Monitor System Usage Stats in Your Mac OS X Menu Bar
Like a car, your Mac needs to be monitored and cared for to keep it running as smoothly as possible. While your vehicle comes with a ton of gauges to keep track of your oil, temperature, and in some cases, even tire pressure, your Mac has no easy way to watch for low memory or high disk usage. Normally you would have to open up Activity Monitor to take a look at your usage stats, but now there is something better.
How To: Tired of Chess? Here's How You Find the Secret Games Hidden on Your Mac
I can definitely say that my MacBook is one of my best friends, but I was still very disappointed when I realized that the only game my laptop came with was chess. For starters, I'm not very good at chess. I haven't even beat the computer once, which really grinds my gears. But, it has come to my attention that chess isn't the only pre-installed game on my Mac—there seems to be some hidden gems that I simply wasn't cool enough to know about. For some of you, this may be old news, but for me, ...
How To: Increase the Sound & Quality of Your Mac's Speakers
During a power outage at my apartment this year, I watched movies on my MacBook Pro instead of on my television. While I had no complaints about the screen size, I did have an issue with how low the audio coming from my speakers was. External speakers would help, but I don't want to buy them or lug them around every time I want to watch a movie.
How To: Close All Open Apps on Your Mac with a Single Click
Normally, if you want to close all of the open apps on your Mac, you'd have to either quit them all one by one or restart, shut down, or log out while making sure to deselect “Reopen windows when logging back in." The latter option is great, but it doesn't always work in Mac OS X, and what if you don't want to restart, shut down, or log out?
How To: Create a Bootable Install USB Drive of Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan
Apple's latest update to Mac OS X, 10.11 El Capitan, is currently available in the Mac App Store for everyone to download and install at no cost. The new OS features Split View mode for better multitasking, a cleaner Mission Control, smarter Spotlight, a way to mute Safari tabs playing audio, enhanced Mail and Notes apps, and more.
How To: Control Spotify Music from an Easy-Access Notification Center Widget on Your Mac
After utilizing Spotify's My Year in Music tool, I came to realize that I listened to over 30,000 minutes of music in 2014. Most of that was played while working from my Mac using the desktop version of the service.
How To: Keep Your MacBook Awake with the Display Closed
It's pretty logical for your MacBook to sleep when you close its lid, but under certain circumstances, you may not necessarily want this feature to kick in.
How To: Use WhatsApp on Your Mac (A Guide for Both Android & iPhone Users)
Boasting over 800 million users a month, WhatsApp has quickly become one of the most popular messaging services available today. Thanks to its low price, ease of use, lack of ads, cross-platform functionality, and great features, its popularity is well-deserved.
How To: Watch Videos While You Work with This Floating Translucent Window for Mac
Like most people who spend a good deal of time in front of their computer—whether for work, school, or play—I jump back and forth from window to window, working and playing with different things at the same time to get my work done faster or procrastinate harder.
How To: Get Apple's RSS Visualizer Back as a Screensaver in Mac OS X 10.8 & Higher
Back in the day when computers relied on CRT monitors, having a static image displayed for too long actually resulted in the image being burned into the screen. For this reason, screensavers were developed, which display animated images in constant motion to prevent burning in when you stepped away from your computer.
How To: Upgrade to Mountain Lion from Leopard (OS X 10.5 to 10.8)
Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8) is out today, available in the Mac App Store for just $20. Unfortunately, installing Mountain Lion requires that you already have a Mac running Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) or Lion (OS X 10.7). If you're currently running a Leopard system, you're out of luck, and need to pay $29 to upgrade to Snow Leopard, and then an additional $20 to upgrade again to Mountain Lion. That sounds like way to much trouble to me. But why exactly is Leopard incompatible? Turns out it's not—m...
How To: Get the New iWork Apps for Free in Mac OS X Mavericks
If you didn't already know, Apple is giving away their newest operating system, Mavericks, for most of your computers. While the folks over at Microsoft surely despise this tactic, those of use Mac users still running Snow Leopard surely do appreciate it.
How To: 6 Tweaks You Should Be Using on Your Mac Right Now
All of Apple's products are praised for being extremely easy to use. So much so, that your grandma can pick one up and be a "pro" within a few hours. However, this isn't necessarily a good thing for us real power users who want more granular control of our devices.
How To: Completely Trick Out Finder on Your Mac with XtraFinder
For the most part, Finder has had the same basic functionality through the various releases of OS X. But Apple's lack of interest in adding new bells and whistles to the backbone of their operating system simply means that 3rd-party developers get to shine, and Tran Ky Nam is one such developer. He created his own extension for Finder that adds tabbed browsing, dual pane mode, cut & paste functionality, and much, much more.
How To: Dual Boot Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan & 10.10 Yosemite
Since the new Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan is brand new, I recommend installing it on a separate partition on your hard drive. This will keep your current Yosemite system safe from harm, and will let you easily switch back to it should El Capitan become unusable for any reason.
How To: Mute Your Mac's Microphone Automatically When Typing During Zoom Meeting Calls
You're in a Zoom meeting, and you're click-clacking away at your keyboard, typing important notes from the call. More realistically, you're doing something unrelated to the meeting, such as browsing the web, playing a game, or messaging friends. Whatever it is you're typing, if your microphone is on, everyone on the Zoom call will be able to hear the sound of you typing.
How To: Get the Dark Mode Boot Screen on Your Pre-2011 Mac Running Yosemite
When Yosemite was released, a more detailed boot screen came to your Mac. So now, just like on Apple's mobile devices, you will see a loading bar telling you how far into the startup process you are. Apple also decided to add a black version of this boot screen to newer Macs, leaving those of us who purchased a computer before 2011 out of the loop.
How To: Trick Your MacBook's Touch ID into Registering Twice as Many Fingerprints for Each Account
While Touch ID has been a part of the iPhone's legacy since 2013, Apple waited until 2016 to add biometrics to its MacBook lineup, and it's not as impressive. An iPhone with Touch ID can register up to five fingerprints, but Macs can only register a maximum of three per account. If that seems unfair, there's an easy trick to doubling that number, meaning six of your fingerprints could unlock your laptop!
How To: 13 Terminal Commands Every Mac User Should Know
When you think of Terminal, you probably imagine some hacker sitting in front of their computer in a dimly lit room trying to break into an FBI database. In reality, it's just a simple tool that can make using your Mac much easier.
How To: Use Siri to Control iTunes, Put Your Mac to Sleep, & More from Your iPhone
While Apple's Continuity feature has certainly impressed me, I can't help but feel like it could be used to create a better connection between my iPhone and Mac. Sure, Handoff allows me to pick up where I left off in certain applications between the two devices, and it lets me pick up calls and send text messages on my Mac, but I want even more functionality.
How To: Seamlessly Use Your Mac's Keyboard and Mouse on Your iPad or Another Mac
With the release of iOS 15.4, iPadOS 15.4, and macOS 12.3, Apple unleashed a ton of new features. We saw a preview of one of the most anticipated new features way back in June 2021 when it was announced at WWDC, and now it's finally available for everyone with an iPad and Mac.
How To: Receive Notifications When Your Name Is Mentioned in Messages
Group chats can get annoying real quick if the people in them are sending rapid-fire texts without hesitation, especially if none of them are any interest to you specifically. Luckily, it's easy to mute notifications for specific message threads. You can even leave a group chat if everyone is using iMessages, but that could lead to you missing an important message.
How To: Check if Third-Party Apps Are Safe to Install on Your Mac
Malware often disguises itself inside of seemingly non-malicious files, such as installer packages, where it can then gain root access to your computer to track activity or steal your information.
How To: Quickly Encode a Video for the Web with This Drag & Drop Automator Action
Automator takes the work out of common repetitive tasks. I don't enjoy compressing videos for quick sharing or uploading to the web, so I created an Automator action to handle the process for me.
How To: Temporarily Override Your Mac's Sleep & Screen Saver Settings from the Menu Bar
Although sleep mode and screen savers contribute to the security and energy preservation of my MacBook, it can become a nuisance when they initiate unwelcomely. Yes, I could just change these settings in System Preferences, but to do this every time I momentarily leave my Mac unattended would be tedious, to say the least.
How To: Customize Spotlight Search in Mac OS X Yosemite
Spotlight, Apple's selection-based search system, received a major facelift on Mac OS X Yosemite. Packed with dozens of new features, such as a central search window and increased app suggestions, the reworked Spotlight was a breath of fresh air.