Over the next few days, I will be covering everything from font management apps to how to deal with font problems. By the end of the week you’ll hopefully have a solid handle on how to manage and troubleshoot fonts on your Mac. We’ll begin this series by taking a look at the history of [...]
The latest unibody aluminum MacBooks are fantastic, and I truly love mine, but I found out quickly that the aluminum surface doesn’t take kindly to scratching. Within the first week of owning it, I had an inch long nick in the top cover…it mocks me daily. So finding some adhesive skin options to protect my [...]
The great thing about using Apple computers (loaded with OS X of course), is that some of the tasks that can be frustrating and difficult on another operating system are simple and possibly even fun. So assuming you’ve got a handle on using that Mac of yours, it’s probably time to step it up, and [...]
So you’ve just jailbroken your iPhone. Congratulations! Your iPhone life is about to improve in so many ways. Be sure to follow our Jailbreak series to get the most out of jailbreaking your iPhone. Going forward, here are some tips to bear in mind.
1. Never upgrade firmware directly via iTunes
In the process of jailbreaking the [...]
One of the reasons I can’t completely cross over to using Safari 4 as my full-time browser, aside from its dangerous (considering my line of work) incompatibility with some WordPress features, is its lack of add-on support. Firefox’s rich user community and extensibility makes sure that if there’s an add-on I need or find [...]
Who are you calling a Git? When I say ‘Git’, I don’t mean the British derogatory term that was immortalized by the TV show Red Dwarf. I mean of course the latest generation of revision control systems, designed by Linus Torvalds for use on the Linux kernel. You can read up on the history of [...]
An attribute of Apple’s OS X operating system that I love above nearly all others is that there’s so much power beneath the simple and elegant interface. Although there are many undocumented features of OS X, we’re going to look at some that are fairly well publicized, but that you may not be familiar with [...]
Since first appearing in Tiger, Automator has brought programming to the masses in a simple drag and drop interface. An entire ecosystem has sprung up around Automator, using its ability to create and distribute complex workflows and actions, and the ability for developers to provide Automator with actions specific to their application. If you are [...]
One thing I have always wanted to do is be able to sync my iPhone or iPod with any computer. Lifehacker had an article a while back on doing this, but the software they used does not support the iPhone or iPod touch. So, I have developed a method to connect any iPod or iPhone [...]
Many Mac users are fortunate enough to have more than one machine. Whether it’s a home desktop and laptop, or a home and office machine, it can be very useful to keep some form of continuity between the two systems. This is easy enough to do with individual files — simply using an online service [...]
In the Windows world, system administrators are likely to be familiar with the Scheduled Tasks service. This allows you to schedule processes, scripts or applications to run regularly at a specific time. In the Linux (and UNIX in general) world the cron daemon has traditionally handled this task.
Until the Tiger release, OS X also used [...]
Subversion (also known as SVN) is a popular version control system. Accessing SVN repositories with OS X is easy – and there are numerous options to do so. In this article we’ll cover 12 different applications that let you access and use Subversion in OS X.
Version 1.4 of the command-line SVN client ships with OS [...]
Like the majority of Apple products and solutions, Apple’s App Store is sleek in its presentation to the consumer. However, one of the less polished aspects is the developer back end, iTunes Connect. Don’t get me wrong, this is functional, but it’s not targeted at the consumer market and as such it just does the [...]
Much is being made lately of Microsoft Windows 7 and it’s new taskbar. I’ve been running the beta myself and consider it a nice improvement over Vista. One of the improvements is in the area of window management. The new taskbar shows previews of all the open windows in an app when you hover the [...]
Many of us are hip to Twitter these days, and there are a myriad of options for keeping track of the resulting tweets. I personally bounce between the webpage itself and Tweetdeck (while on my Mac). But sometimes I want to trim down my open windows to the bare minimum. Here’s one way to keep [...]
Has the Favorites list within your iPhone’s Contacts app grown so long that you might as well be using the entire Contacts listing? As it turns out, I have a lot of favorite people too. So as the list grew out of control, I started using a little hack that has helped to organize the [...]
One of the perplexing limitations about MobileMe is its inability to sync birthdays in iCal to the iPhone and iPod touch. As you may already know, iCal can take birthdays from Address Book and add them into a special “Birthdays” calendar, which is really a subscription calendar.
But while the latest updates to MobileMe now allow [...]
I’m rarely one to buy into extended warranties. I worked at Best Buy (I was young and stupid, cut me some slack) long ago, and swore I would never waste money on those coverage plans. All that being said, I recommend all my friends cover their Mac with AppleCare — it can be expensive (depending [...]
When iWork ‘08 was released it felt like a half-implemented suite for a whole host of reasons: lack of interoperability between the applications, very basic functionality, performance issues — especially with Numbers ‘08 — and lack of scripting. Apple’s new iWork ‘09 suite has addressed many of those issues, and the one feature that truly [...]
Apple is taking a lot of stick (even more than usual) about hanging tough with premium pricing despite the global financial meltdown, and it almost never offers discounts or sales. So how can budget-constrained Macheads economize on system upgrades? One solution is to buy a less-expensive model than the one you would have perhaps [...]