Archive for the ‘OS X Features’ Category

As users of 10.8 Mountain Lion settle into their new environment, some of the most common questions about the new operating system relate to Gatekeeper – OS X’s newest security feature. While Gatekeeper is…

It was previously very difficult and even unreliable to password protect Time Machine backups in older versions of Mac OS X. In Lion, however, Apple has made encrypting backups as easy as checking a single box. Most Mac users have no need to encrypt their Time…

If you are perplexed as to why Mac OS X’s green Zoom button doesn’t always maximize windows to full screen like in Microsoft Windows, there’s a perfectly good explanation. In fact, it truly makes sense when you think about it. As mentioned in…

Switching from a Windows PC to a Mac is a big step. At first, Mac OS X can seem like a foreign land to folks who have only used Windows in the past. But with an open mind and a little re-training, it’s not so daunting after all. It’s actually pretty exciting!

The Mac Application Switcher is that handy list of open programs that comes up when you press Command+Tab on the keyboard. Add more functionality to this feature with a few keyboard shortcuts. For folks coming from…

Spotlight – Mac OS X’s fantastic system-wide search tool – helps find files, launch applications, make basic calculations, look up definitions, and more. Best of all, it can do all that without ever needing input from a mouse. Whether…

The latest version of Mac OS X includes a couple important enhancements to Open/Save dialogs. While these mini windows are not quite as full-featured as real Finder windows yet, they’re getting there. I rarely say this, but Windows beats Mac OS X in the…

Rather than focus on specific system applications like we’ve done for the past few articles, let’s take a broader look at 10.6 Snow Leopard and cover some random odds & ends. According to our statistics, the latest version of Mac…

Continuing our coverage of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, we take a look at enhancements to Preview. Primarily used as a PDF and image viewer, Preview is becoming more powerful and lightweight at the same time. The raw…

Perhaps the most radical and obvious change in Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the totally revamped QuickTime X player. Taking what they learned from the iPhone’s media player, Apple has started with a clean slate on the Mac side…

Exposé was fantastic before, and with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard it just got even better. Apple has made great changes to the way it displays windows and how users can interact with them. Snow Leopard, the new version of Mac OS X that shipped this past…

Although Leopard’s Spotlight search function is more powerful than the one found in Tiger, some of that power is hidden. Searching for OS X system files, for instance, can only be done when special parameters are set. Spotlight is configured out of the box to produce…