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Archive for the ‘Tips’ Category

Fonts 101: A Font Primer

Written on March 16, 2009 by Weldon Dodd and 10 people have commented

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 [...]

Give Your MacBook a Thick Skin: Seven Laptop Skin Companies Worth Your Money

Written on March 16, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 23 people have commented

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 [...]

Become a Mac Power User: System Preferences

Written on March 12, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 1 person has commented

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 [...]

Jailbreak: Five Things You Need to Know

Written on March 11, 2009 by Clayton Lai and 17 people have commented

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 [...]

Tweet Directly in Safari With Safari140

Written on March 11, 2009 by Darrell Etherington and 6 people have commented

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 [...]

Using Git With OS X: 6 Tools to Get You Up and Running

Written on March 10, 2009 by Andrew Bednarz and 8 people have commented

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 [...]

Become a Mac Power User: General OS X

Written on March 05, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 12 people have commented

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 [...]

Resource Roundup: Automator

Written on March 02, 2009 by Jon Buys and 6 people have commented

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 [...]

Sync Your iPhone/iPod With Any Computer

Written on February 26, 2009 by Jenny Kortina and 46 people have commented

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 [...]

Syncing Apps With Dropbox

Written on February 25, 2009 by David Appleyard and 27 people have commented

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 [...]

Task Scheduling With Lingon

Written on February 24, 2009 by Andrew Bednarz and 4 people have commented

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 [...]

12 Subversion Apps for OS X

Written on February 23, 2009 by Andrew Bednarz and 30 people have commented

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 [...]

Taking Control of AppStore Reporting With AppViz

Written on February 20, 2009 by Andrew Bednarz and No one has commented

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 [...]

Apple Mac OS X Window Management: Way Ahead of Windows 7

Written on February 18, 2009 by Tom Reestman and 33 people have commented

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 [...]

UPDATED: Twittering Without a Client App

Written on February 17, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 26 people have commented

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 [...]

Separating Your iPhone Favorite Contacts

Written on February 12, 2009 by Nick Santilli and No one has commented

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 [...]

Syncing iCal Birthdays to Your iPhone

Written on February 11, 2009 by Clayton Lai and 16 people have commented

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 [...]

Discount AppleCare On eBay

Written on February 10, 2009 by Nick Santilli and 33 people have commented

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 [...]

Scripting iWork: Numbers and Yahoo! Finance

Written on February 09, 2009 by Bob Rudis and 8 people have commented

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 [...]

Certified Refurbished Macs One Way to Help Weather the Economic Storm

Written on February 04, 2009 by Charles Moore and 14 people have commented

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 [...]