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Q: What is the difference between Intel and PPC? What is the hardware and software differences between Intel and PPC Macs? A: When it comes to Apple hardware, the differences between the last generation of PowerPC and the first generation of Intel were fairly minor, as far as the end user experience goes. They used the same form factors, and the all-new internals were quite effectively hidden by the unchanged exterior and the accommodations the operating system made for compatibility. The last PowerPC Macs were sold in 2006, so any new machine since then is Intel. In general, Intel Macs can run the vast majority of software created for PowerPC Macs. There is a performance hit for the emulation required, but it runs at acceptable speeds even for complex software like Photoshop. PowerPC Macs cannot run Intel software. The latest version of OS X, Snow Leopard, is available only for Intel-based Macs. Intel Macs have access to a feature called Boot Camp, which allows them to boot into Windows at full speed. Intel Macs can also run Windows inside virtual machines with the help of third-party software (VMWare Fusion, VirtualBox or Parallels); there is a minor performance penalty for this, but it's much faster than the emulation required for a PowerPC Mac to run Windows software. A: The Intel chips at the time of the transition were sourced to be far more thermal and power efficient than the PPC chips of the time. Intel had much more room to grow within the same thermal and physical envelopes in terms of clock rate and the amount of hardware needed to support a given processor choice. The PPC roadmap was shooting for massive clock rates in the 4 to 5 GHz range which amplified these disadvantages for future PPC chips when compared to future Intel chips. Moving to Intel processors did away with the need for exotic liquid cooling systems, massive heat sink design and complexity due to space constriants that went into the G5 PowerMac. Power supplies were also downsized. PPC design was heading directly into mainframe territory with chipkill memory, CPU virtualization, First Failure Data Capture and other high end / high cost features. Just check out this P5 heat sink and 4 processor MPM with associated L3 cache chips to get a feeling for how massive these processors would grow before Power7 manufacturing finally packed more power in a lower clock rate / smaller package. (and this is finally shipping in 2010). Now the Power5 and Power6 are still shipping and awesome at what they do in server land, just not so appropriate for the current Mac market space. Furthermore, there was nothing coming in the pipeline for a portable processor from PPC so even though the power was there for future desktop machines if one accepts the many tradeoffs already listed. Quite simply, portable macs were starving for horsepower on the PPC architecture and likely drove the urgency of a transition to anything but PPC. A: Hardware-wise: PowerPC is a microprocessor developed mainly by the three developing companies Apple, IBM, and Motorola. It is built with reduced instruction-set computer (RISC) which speeds-up the operation of MIPS (million instructions per second). PowerPC is mainly based on IBM’s earlier Power architecture because it has a similar RISC instruction set for microprocessors. Intel and AMD CPU's are based on CISC architectures. Typically CISC chips have a large amount of different and complex instructions. The philosophy behind it is that hardware is always faster than software, therefore one should make a powerful instructionset, which provides programmers with assembly instructions to do a lot with short programs. In common CISC chips are relatively slow (compared to RISC chips) per instruction, but use little (less than RISC) instruction A: PPC Macs refers to the generation of Macintosh computers created in the mid to late 1990s through to 2006 that used PowerPC RISC based chips made by IBM or Motorola. That last PowerPC based Macintosh, the PowerMac G5 stopped being sold in August 2006. The latest version of Mac OS X a PowerPC chip enabled computer was able to run was Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) (so long as the computer supported it). Intel Macs refers to the newer Macintosh computers (since January 2006) that use Intel's CISC processors. Intel Macs uses EFI instead of BIOS and can run the latest versions of Mac OS X. Intel Macs are also able to run PowerPC compiled applications through a translation layer called Rosetta which is optionally installed in 10.6. If a program is made available as a Universal binary it is able to run on both PPC and Intel Macs however many new applications released today are Intel only (eg. Google Chrome, Final Cut Studio, Mac OS X Snow Leopard). A: From the end user point of view, you don't need to worry about it much. Many applications were produced as "universal", meaning they run on both PPC and Intel-based Macs, and an emulator (called Rosetta) would let PPC-only apps run on the new Intel machines. However, as time passed, newer features were only available to Intel Macs, so some applications state outright that they require Intel chips. Also, the latest version of Mac OS X only runs on Intel CPUs. Apple did a reasonably good job of hiding the entire transition from users, so that everything just kept working as people expected, offloading any heavy lifting to software developers. A: Architecture: PowerPC: (short for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) and Intel processor. more information can be found at wikipedia: PowerPC A: I also wanted to know more on the Power architecture, I did find some good info on it. I'm glad to share the following information, specially for POWER8 (the latest from IBM): * *SMT8: 8 threads per core * *can also switch mode e.g. SMT1, SMT2, SMT4, SMT8 *CAPI: Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface * *first of its kind in industry *hardware attachment *eliminates the Device driver overhead when accessing the FPGA. *Increased coherency *NUCA - Non Uniform Cache Access * *though each processor is associated with a L3 cache, NUCA let's the L3 Cache be shared by the cores. *Benefits data-intensive workloads *NVIDIA partnership: * *through NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing we can obtain an 8x performance increase for Java programs, on Power8. More references: * *https://community.runabove.com/kb/en/instances/power8-features.html *https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273393397_The_cache_and_memory_subsystems_of_the_IBM_POWER8_processor A: One thing I know is that PPCs are big endian by default, but can switch modes if necessary. Intel are little endian. A: Power PC has its unique set of instruction in which overall is labeled RISC architecture and the way it performs its program goes way faster than that used on PC. About software there isn't difference except the way it was coded or compiled. For example Windows NT 3.51 was developed for PowerPC. PC most used processor are labeled CISC architecture which change the way you code and the advantage is operates more than a single task at same time. The term RISC and CISC doesn't make difference since some times RISC 32bits has more complex instructions than CISC 8bits.

Q: Turn on Back To My Mac via a Script or Command Line The VPN software I use for work (IPSecuritas) requires me to turn off Back To My Mac to start it's connection, so I frequently turn off Back To My Mac in order to use my VPN connection (the program does this for me). I forget to turn it back on however and I'd love to know if there was something I could run (script, command) to turn it back on. A: There is no supported way to do this. Having said that, you can do it using scutil: louis@Arios:~$ sudo scutil > set Setup:/Network/BackToMyMac > d.add <YYY> <XXX>.members.btmm.icloud.com > set Setup:/Network/BackToMyMac > quit louis@Arios:~$ Replacing <YYY> with the UID of the user account on the system (for most people with single account that is 501), and <XXX> with your iCloud account number. If you don't know that you can check your dns-sd registrations: louis@Arios:~$ dns-sd -E Looking for recommended registration domains: DATE: ---Wed 22 Aug 2012--- 9:11:04.789 ...STARTING... Timestamp Recommended Registration domain 9:11:04.789 Added (More) local 9:11:04.789 Added icloud.com - > btmm - - > members - - - > <XXX> The last line will list your iCloud user number. I think they are all 8 digit numbers, at least mine is.

Q: Why doesn't Microsoft Office/2008(& later) support RTL languages? I have Microsoft Office/2008 on my MacBook Pro. Office doesn't support RTL languages like Farsi and Arabic, and I know that Office/2010 (for Windows) also has the same problem. Do you think the lack of support is because of business competition, or some other reason? A: “Why” is a question for Microsoft, but I'm guessing it boils down to a simple lack of resources on the part of the Mac Business Unit. They have to prioritize certain features, and RTL support is not a priority for them. To address the underlying need, you have several options: OpenOffice and NeoOffice support RTL text in Microsoft Office documents. Mellel has a reputation as the best RTL/multilingual word processor (it certainly has a nice feature set for it, like a direction breaking space so you can mix RTL/LTR in a paragraph), but I don’t know how good its Microsoft Office document interoperability is. This would also be a use case where it might make sense to run Office 2010 inside a Windows virtual machine. A: Microsoft has dragged their heels on support for RTL languages such as Hebrew and Arabic for years. It's always been 'coming in the next version' for as long as I've been using a Mac. Until it shows up, if it ever does, the premiere word processor for RTL languages on OS X is Mellel. It's actually quite great. A: Microsoft probably doesn't have the manpower and it uses custom code for layout, plus the market is relatively small as well. What's strange is that Apple's iWork doesn't work with RTL, although the OS (Cocoa framework) does support it. Indeed, OpenOffice (or NeoOffice) are the best alternatives for RTL languages. Mellel should also work, but it's quite different in its approach to text editing.

Q: Repair Disk - Start up disk options I had a power failure and upon rebooting noticed that the OS drive needed to be repaired (Disk Utilities). I am running Snow Leopard and don't have the CD to start up from in order to perform the fix. Are there any other options for running the repair utils on the startup disk? A: One option would be to clone your startup drive to an external disk using something like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. Then you can use System Preferences->Startup Disk to select that external drive as the boot drive. Once you've rebooted and are running the system off the external drive you can use Disk Utility to run the repair. After you're done, re-select the internal drive as the Startup Disk and reboot. A: One option that doesn't require any external drives or disks: Disk Utility's repair disk is largely* a thin wrapper over the unix fsck (stands for "File System Check") utility. You can run it by: * *Booting into "Single User Mode" by rebooting and holding command-S during startup. *A command-line input will appear; enter /sbin/fsck -fy *Wait for it to complete. If you see **** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***** then run it again, since sometimes fixing the first errors will uncover more. *Repeat until it says that the disk appears to be ok. *Enter Reboot to boot normally. *I can't find any indication that Disk Utility's "Repair Disk" function does anything that fsck doesn't. Nonetheless, Apple recommends that you use Disk Utility instead when that is an option.

Q: How can I make focus follow the mouse cursor? I will often click on a button expecting it to be clicked but instead all that happens is the application it is in becomes active, and I have to click again to actually click the button. It would be nice if this second click wasn't needed, which leads me to my question: How can I make it so that when I move the mouse cursor over an inactive window, it becomes active? A: This is freely possible for the Terminal and X11 : defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES defaults write com.apple.x11 wm_ffm true Or, OS-wise, with a utility that seems to fit your needs, called MondoMouse. A: I originally wanted to do this with my first Mac a couple years ago as well, since that's how my Linux and Windows environments behave. But I think the driving force preventing this from becoming a reality is in how OS X handles application menus. What if you want to go to the menu at the top of the screen for an application you're using, but in the process briefly hover over another application? That would become infuriating quickly. In short, I don't think its doable for that and potentially other reasons. A: Best little utility I stumbled upon is Zooom/2. Strange name, hence hard to find. You can choose delay (Rather cumbersome, OS X and global menu is not designed to allow that). I set it to focus window under cursor instantly when Option key is pressed. Great value, no dock or tray icons, it just works. A: Amethyst (https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst) is excellent. Follow the README.md instructions to download, and then enable "Focus Follows Mouse" in the Misc. section of the Settings view.

Q: With multiple monitors, can I pick which one an application will load on? In Spaces it's possible to specify which space a given application will open on -- for example, my web browser always opens on Space 1 and iTunes on Space 3. Is something similar possible with multiple monitors, so that whichever space I'm on a certain application will always open on the second monitor? For even more control, can I specify that it will always open on Monitor 2 of Space 4? A: Not with the default Apple Spaces. There is an alternative, though. CocoaBots makes a small app called Hyperspaces which builds upon the default Spaces and adds a bunch of cool features. Multi-monitor support is coming to their next release. http://thecocoabots.com/blog/post/148/hyperspaces-104-and-the-road-to-11/ A: Stay App sounds like it might do what you want. If you’re fastidious about keeping your windows tidy, Stay is for you. Stay ensures that your windows are always where you want them to be, even as you connect and disconnect displays.

Q: How do I disable or get rid of the startup sound my Mac makes? Everytime I turn on my Macbook Pro it makes a start up noise. This is annoying since there is no volume or ability to turn it off. I just don't want the sound to play at all. How do I disable this startup sound? A: Open Terminal.app and type: sudo -s Give the password when asked for then: cat >/private/etc/rc.shutdown.local #! /bin/sh /usr/bin/osascript -e 'set volume with output muted' then press Ctrl-D and type "exit". Next time you'll reboot in silence BUT you'll have to manually reset the sound volume (F10, slider ...) if you want to hear some music again. Theoretically it should be possible to run under /private/etc/rc.local a script to do it ('set volume without output muted') but that seems to behave erratically. A: I haven't noticed that sound on my MacBook Pro for ages, and today I figured out why. The MBP seems to remember 2 sets of volume settings; both for having-no-headphones-plugged-in, and for having-headphones-plugged-in. I usually have my external speakers plugged in-when I'm at home, and when I'm travelling/way from home obviously I don't. At some point in the past I have turned the volume down to zero when headphones weren't connected, and now when I start the MBP up there's no sound. You could try this (though it's not particularly practical) - turn the volume on your Mac right down to zero, then restart the computer. I suspect you won't hear the startup-sound. Like I say, not really practical but if the start-up noise annoys you enough, you might just get into the habit of turning the volume down before switching off. :-) EDIT: Just realised this this point about turning the volume down has already been made in other answers here, so feel free to ignore this! A: For Snow Leopard and earlier machines download and install "StartupSound.prefPane" which will install a preference pane in system settings to allow you to adjust the startup volume and disable the startup sound: http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~arcana/StartupSound/BETA/index.en.html Note that the above has mixed results in Lion. For Lion users the following is recommended: * *Login as administrator and open a terminal window *Create scriptfile for muting sudo nano /path/to/mute-on.sh *Enter this as content, when done press control+O to save and control+X to exit: #!/bin/bash osascript -e 'set volume with output muted' *Create scriptfile for unmuting sudo nano /path/to/mute-off.sh *Enter this as content, when done press control+O to save and control+X to exit: #!/bin/bash osascript -e 'set volume without output muted' *Make both files executable: sudo chmod u+x /path/to/mute-on.sh sudo chmod u+x /path/to/mute-off.sh *Check if any hooks already exist (these will be overwritten, so make sure it is OK for you) sudo defaults read com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook sudo defaults read com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook *Add hooks for muting sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook /path/to/mute-on.sh sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /path/to/mute-off.sh Notes: * */path/to/ is the location of the scripts, I used /Library/Scripts/ *you can skip the unmuting loginhook (i.e. each logout will silence your machine), but I like it this way because I always have sound available exactly at the volume level I set last time *root has to be the owner of the script files - running an editor from command line with sudo is the easiest way to achieve that (otherwise you need to chown) *to delete the hooks, use the following: sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook sudo defaults delete com.apple.loginwindow LogoutHook (source) A: You can use StartSound.PrefPane which basically just sets the volume to 0 when you shutdown and then turns it back up after login. A: Hold down the mute button on your keyboard whenever you boot it A: If you keep your volume off when you shut down your mac/laptop it wont make the sound when you start it up again! I don't know if this is true but its what my laptop does :)! Hope this helps!

Q: Multitasking on iPhone Does the iPhone close the background programs if it runs out of memory or battery? A: There are two ways to approach this question. From the end user's perspective, the answer is no. No matter what you do, the app will come back to the same state it was in previously, unless you close it from the switching interface. Technically: yes. When the device runs short on RAM, it will freeze the application's state from RAM to the main storage (flash). When you resume, it loads the state from flash back into RAM, and then resumes. This is intended to happen quickly enough and transparently enough to be indistinguishable, but you may sometimes notice that resuming takes a bit longer if you have loaded several other apps in the meantime (and therefore pushed the app out of RAM). A: They aren't really "in memory," more like cached to disk if and when necessary. Many apps don't even use the multitasking or aren't setup for it. When you switch it does actually close the app. Being in the task bar doesn't guarantee that it's actually in memory, actively running, or both. The OS manages that. A: No. Even restarting, complete power down and power up, will not remove the background applications from memory. According to the Apple Geniuses you must manually remove the applications from the task bar.

Q: Is there a configurable "word-of-the-day"-screensaver/ -widget I am looking for a "word-of-the-day" screensaver or dashboard widget where I can configure (e.g. in a text file) that "words" to be displayed? A: AFAIK - there's word-of-the-day screensaver that comes packed with every Mac OS X (since Tiger). You can configure it on a "per dictionary" basis. So if you need a limited list of some words, just create your own dictionary, install it on the system and I believe you'll be able to use it in a screensaver yourself.

Q: Strange loading screen when MBP battery dies and reboots I have a 2007 Macbook Pro and for nearly two years, the battery has been toast. In April, Apple replaced the logic board. Since the repair, whenever the power cable comes loose, the MBP shuts off as expected. Before the repair, when the power cable was unplugged, the MBP simply shut off. Now, when I plug it back in and turn it on, it boots back up in the previous state, but has a white screen with loading bars at the bottom. I haven't found anything related to this on the web. Is this related to the new logic board, or is there something else I should be concerned about? The MBP is running Leopard and is up to date. A: This feature is called Safe Sleep. Apple notebooks will keep the RAM contents alive (sleep in PC jargon), but write a copy to the disk (hibernate, in PC jargon) at the same time. If the battery runs out while the computer is sleeping, when it wakes up, it needs to read the RAM contents from disk, and thus you get the progress bar you are seeing. Apple doc about it is here A: This is so called "Hibernation" (my first met in windows). When battery dies, the OS dumps whole RAM into HDD (sort of swapping) so that no information is lost. When it's being booted back up, it loads the information back from HDD to RAM (hence you see the progress with those white bars).

Q: Faster alternative to ShakesPeer? I've used ShakesPeer for it's clean and Mac-like interface. But the downloads are really slow. Is there a faster alternative to ShakesPeer? Preferably having at least the same features as ShakesPeer itself if not more. Also preferable if the software follows the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. A: I haven't tried these but Jucy and EiskaltDC++ are two DirectConnect clients that work on mac. However, neither appears to use a mac interface. source: http://alternativeto.net/desktop/shakespeer/?sort=likes&platform=mac A: Whatever calavera pointed you at — also, try MLDonkey, NeoModus Direct Connect (DC original client!) and Valknut, they all have Mac versions. Since I'm not a DC user, can't comment on speed =(

Q: How do hide iPod icon with SBSettings? On my Jailbroken iPad, I have SBSettings installed. I chose to hide all my application icons, but iPod will not go away, no matter what the switch setting is. I was thinking about just going into the file system and manually deleting the icon, but I don't know where it's stored. Any suggestions? A: Are you running OS 3.1.x or 4.0.x? I've had some inconsistencies with hiding certain icons on my jailbroken 4.0.1 phone. It may be that SBSettings isn't fully compatible with OS 4.x yet. edit: Fail on my behalf. Somehow I missed "iPad" in both your question AND tag. /facepalm A: I just used Saurik's guide on theming and made my own iPod icon, a transparent 57 x 57 PNG. Kinda rudimentary, but it works for now. I then used iBlank to hide the shadow. Works for now lol....even though, the iPod is still selectable, kinda gotta be lucky to spot it.

Q: Is Apple's warranty international? I'm about to travel to the US, where iPods / AirPods / iPhone are much cheaper than in my country. I wonder if Apple's warranty is international, and/or what warranty coverage exists when I return to my country. Where can I understand what Apple Warranty covers in the US when products leave the US? A: I bought an ipad in January 2013 (10 mths ago) in the USA. It started giving problems a few weeks ago by restarting for itself every 2 mins. I took it at the apple dealer and repair center in South Africa where I currently stay, they tried fixing it but said that it needs to be replaced but they can't replace it since its under international warranty and they only deal with South African bought products. So I guess the warranty is not international A: Apples warranties are international except for the iPhone where the warranty is only valid in the country the phones was bought in. A: Apple Warranty is international and you can use your warranty on every country that apple has branch. but other than warranty you can buy AppleCare Protection. Apple has “global repair coverage” If you carry your Apple computer or iPod when you travel and happen to need repair service, AppleCare Protection Plan offers global repair coverage. but for this you need to purchase AppleCare Protection , and if you want go to other country to buy your product cheaper AppleCare Protection not a good Idea. A: Yes it's international. My friend bought a MacBook in the US and had a warranty case in Switzerland. The warranty case got solved without any problems. A: AppleCare warranty is international, sort of no questions asked (unless you take in a soaking iPod). Apple's limited 1 year warranty is sort of international. As in, your local Apple Service Provider may provide you with warranty or may choose to be very strict on the wording and not cover anything they don’t have to cover to the letter of the law and agreement. A: Yes, Apple's computer warranties are international. Worst case, you have to ship your product back to the purchasing country if Apple asks for that, but the wording and common practice is U.S. purchases generally get covered everywhere Apple has service globally. See Apple's Warranty Page for more details. The warranty is established in the country of purchase and if warranty service is not available in the country where the device is when service is requested, you may be on the hook for import/export duties as well as paying for the shipping. No, iPhone and some parts of AppleCare plus are not necessarily international. * *https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/ Pay attention to parts like: IMPORTANT RESTRICTION FOR iPHONE, iPAD AND APPLE TV SERVICE. Apple may restrict warranty service for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV to the country where Apple or its Authorized Distributors originally sold the device. That doesn’t mean you won’t get service, but you could be denied or could have to get the device back to the country of purchase on your dime to get service. Also, no in terms of consumer law varying widely between Europe, Asia, US and other countries: * *How does Apple's two year warranty in Europe work? To recap: * *Warranty is what Apple offers and you may have responsibilities or costs to get service *Consumer law covers things outside the warranty, so you need to balance both when choosing where to buy *Look for words like shall and may and must - these contracts are legal and /or prescriptive so details and words matter. Read all the document, several times before spending money if you don’t know the return policy or have limited time to return goods after purchasing them. A: Read my answer here: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/13285/34885 in the comments (look for my name: madivad). I can vouch that: iPhones warranties are NOT international. IMPORTANT RESTRICTION FOR iPHONE AND iPAD SERVICE. Apple may restrict warranty service for iPhone and iPad to the country where Apple or its Authorized Distributors originally sold the device. from https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/products/ipad-english-a.html UPDATE: I made this post in 2013, I have again checked the link above in 2017, and the situation is still the same.

Q: Can an iPhone be restored from an iPod Touch backup? If I have an iPod Touch backup on my computer, can an iPhone restore from it? How about vice versa? A: According to this forums post, somebody did it with success. Worked flawlessly for me I just activated my new iPhone 3GS and then iTunes offered to either set it up as a new iPhone or to restore it from my iPod Touch backup which I did. No problems so far... A: Yes, i can confirm this Works based on my experience. All my music and contacts from my iPod touch was magically restored to the iPhone 4S. A: It will depends only of the iOS version, because the Apple's script is not accepting iOS minor than 8 right now (That's called downgrade). But if want to make an "Upgrade" (or restore from a version to the same version) so you have no problem with that, even with different devices.

Q: How do I recover the administrator or root password on OS X? I received a hand me down white MacBook with 10.4 on it and it automatically logs into a user account that isn't able to change much in the preference pane. How do I recover or change the administrator password? The original owner told me to try a few passwords, none of which work to get logged in as admin. A: You can reboot into single user mode and change the password of a user with: passwd [user] Enter the new password twice and reboot. A: Boot to OS recovery, internet recovery or on older systems, with a Mac OS X DVD, then there's an option to change passwords. You can follow an how-to here. A: Getting admin access without the Setup Utility: another option, for the sake of completeness. * *Boot into single user mode by holding command-S on boot up. *Enter /sbin/mount -wu / when the prompt appears to mount the filesystem *Enter rm /var/db/.AppleSetupDone *Enter reboot At this point, it should run the colorful little setup utility that ran when the machine was new. This'll create a brand new admin account. This method can be useful if you don't want to mess up any existing accounts on the machine. Before step 4 you can use the passwd command to overwrite the current password for any accounts on the mac. The command ls /Users will show all the user names.

Q: iPhone Taskbar close all applications Is there a way to close all application in the taskbar at once? A: No. You have to manually remove each one. A: One nifty trick I learned from a friend: Enter "wiggle" mode for the taskbar, then tap the icons from right to left. This way you can close at least four apps in a steady motion without having to wait for the icons move one column to the right. Sounds obvious, but try it out and you’ll see what I mean.

Q: "Erase and Install" function missing in Snow Leopard When installing Tiger or Leopard, there was an option called "Erase and Install" that would delete the disk before installing the new OS. In Snow Leopard, this option seems to be missing. Is there any way I can add "Erase and Install" back to Snow Leopard? A: With Snow Leopard Erase and Install is now a two step process: * *When you start up off the Mac OS X Install DVD from the Tools menu choose "Disk Utility". You will then want to erase the hard drive you want to install on. *Install Mac OS X as you would normally. A: Use the tools menu --> disk utility to erase the partition you want to install Snow Leopard on. Then proceed with the installation. A: Because Snow Leopard is an technically a Leopard upgrade it might not be readily accessible. You can boot up and under the "Tools" menu open up Disk Utility to erase before you install.

Q: How do I turn off multitouch zoom in Safari? I'm using my wife's Macbook with the bigger multitouch track pad. Many times while in Safari, it thinks I want to zoom in and the page will zoom in. I want to just get rid of multitouch in Safari, or just disable the zoom feature in Safari. It's nice to have multitouch in other applications like iPhoto, but it just causes problems in Safari. A: In the trackpad preference pane (System Preferences) there is an option to disable Screen Zoom. There is an alternative. A small plugin, of sorts, that allows you to disable pinch zooming in Safari and Firefox. http://cubeyellow.blogspot.com/2009/01/mac-book-pro-trackpad-zooming-and.html

Q: Keyboard needs to be setup on every boot up I am being asked to setup my keyboard every time I reboot my computer. Is there anyway I can get this to keep the setup? I am on Snow Leopard and have a Logitech Wave wireless keyboard and mouse combo. This started happening when I switched to 64-bit mode. Booting into 32-bit mode doesn't fix it. A: Repair permissions: Run Disk Utility; select your (main) disk; click Repair Disk Permissions Viewing logs: Run Console A: Um, standard "stock" fixes: * *Repair permissions *Check logs *Erase (Logitech) software and reinstall You could also see if it is actually saving the connection details (by finding the pref file) or it is unable to.

Q: How can I move an iTunes library from one computer to another? I'm getting a new laptop and I want to move my iTunes library from the old to the new computer. How can I do this? Of course I want to preserve as much information as possible: metadata such as ratings and play counts, cover art, my purchased content from Apple. I also own an iPhone which I used to sync with the old computer and now I want to sync with the new one, preserving my apps, contacts, purchased content, etc. What would be the best way to do this? Is just moving the whole “iTunes” folder from one computer to the other an option? A: If they both have Firewire you can simply use the Migration Utility. A: Yes, moving the whole iTunes folder will work fine, as long as the music is in the same location or a subfolder (that's the default). You can even move from Mac to PC and vice versa. However, I would suggest copying first; just in case anything goes wrong. :-) If the iTunes Media folder and the Library files are in different locations, it can get more complicated. It's still possible, but if this is the case and you have the disk space, it's easiest to “Consolidate” the library into the folder that contains the iTunes Library file before you make the move. A: Yes, simply coping your entirely iTunes folder to an other computer will do the trick. This assumes all of your media is consolidated within the iTunes Media and iTunes Music folders. iTunes will assist in copying music to the folder and organizing a library if you would like to ensure all the media is portable when it comes time to transfer. Do not forget to reauthorize the old computer if you are not going to use it regularly in case it crashes and one of your 5 slots is taken up. You can reset things after a lost computer, but it is somewhat time restricted to prevent abuse of that feature. A: * *If you are a Windows user and don't want to go through all of this hacking, you can buy iTunes Transfer software at my partner site. It will help you back up your library – with playlists – and transfer it to your other computer. *If you're trying to transfer music from your iPod to your computer, unfortunately, Apple won't let you do this freely, but you can buy iPod to Computer software for PC (free trial download), or iPod to Computer software for Mac at my partner site that will allow you to do this. *If you just have the hard drive of your old PC, Ben has shared with us how to make the transfer *If you aren't keen on messing with XML files – and play count isn’t important to you - Oden has a simple process, involving smart playlists, for retaining song ratings when you transfer your iTunes library. *Collin has a simple way to find out those duplicate songs that you may end up with when transferring your catalog. *Aaron devised a clever way to transfer while retaining playlists in your collection. *If you are transferring between Macs, pbaron has a method involving FireWire mode. Source for above.

Q: Why does my MacBook Pro take so long to go to sleep? My MacBook Pro takes an awful long time to go to sleep when I close the lid. Considering that I generally want to close the lid and then carry it somewhere, I want it to be fully asleep so I don't have any hard drive issues. Is there anything I can do to speed up the process? A: I recommend a nifty little utility called SmartSleep that allows you to control when the saving of your RAM contents to disk for the Safe Sleep / Hibernate feature Mac OS X has. Alternatively you can disable Safe Sleep altogether by running: sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0. To change it back to the defaults, change the value to 3. 0 - Old style - just goes to sleep. 1 - Only Hibernate 3 - Default - goes to sleep but writes RAM contents to disk just in case. 5 - Only Hibernate mode but if you use secure virtual memory. 7 - The Default but if you use secure virtual memory. A: Use the command pmset -g log to find out what is delaying the sleep command. Look for "applicationresponse.slowresponse" and "applicationresponse.timedout" entries. A: Depending on what applications you are running it could take a significant amount of time (20-30 sec) to actually "sleep." OS X will "dock" the hard drive head if it detects sudden movement, so I wouldn't expect any issues there. A: Another use for the pmset utility (which, like most Apple utilities, is documented: do "man pmset" in Terminal) is to tell the system to sleep when you hit the power button. In Terminal, do sudo pmset powerbutton 1 and thereafter when you hit the power button a menu comes up with choices Restart, Sleep, Cancel, and Shut Down. I always sleep my MacBook Pro this way in order to be sure it has really gone dormant. On the other end of the sleep cycle, I don't want the machine waking up while traveling if it gets jostled enough to shake the lid open (even briefly). The Terminal command to estabish this is sudo pmset -a lidwake 0 For both commands, you will have to authenticate as an administrator.

Q: Is there a way to start a specific application with a keyboard short cut? Sort of like the Windows+R command in the windows world? That actually just lets you run a command but you get the idea. A: As of Snow Leopard, this actually is built into the OS. Launch Automator and create a service that receives no input from any application. From the Actions Library, add the 'Launch Application' action to the workflow. Select the 'Terminal' application in the drop-down list of Applications. Save your new service and then assign a keyboard shortcut to it in: System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts -> Services A: Solution suggested by @NReilingh is fine but it fails if Terminal.app is running and it has no opened window (I've tested it in OSX 10.7). Replacing Launch Application action with Run AppleScript action and setting the following code to be run does the trick: on run {input, parameters} tell application "Terminal" activate reopen end tell return input end run Here's the full post: Mac OS X: Launch Terminal from keyboard shortcut A: I wanted a shortcut to always open a new Terminal window regardless of anything else. Here is the code to do that: tell application "Terminal" do script "" activate end tell A: Assuming your running Snow Leopard ⌘+space will open Spotlight which can be used to run terminal. Spotlight can be bound to another key combination but the default is similar to Windows+R. A: In Mavericks there is an option to open a new terminal window at the folder you have highlighted in Finder. To enable this option go to Finder -> Services -> Service Preferences and check New Terminal at Folder. Then use it from the Finder menu: A: This solution works for MacOS Sierra. * *Launch Automator *Click 'New Document' and select 'Service' *Change "Service receives selected" to "no input" *Select "Launch Application" from the Action pane *Select the application that you need to launch from the pull down menu. For Terminal you will have to go to the bottom and select "Other" and find it in the Utilities folder. *Save the Service using some name. *Open System Preferences. Go to Keyboard option. Click on Shortcut tab. *Select Services from the left pane and scroll down to General in the right pane. You should see your Service. *Click the service. You should see a button on the selected service itself which says "Add Shortcut". Click on that. *Enter a key combination and close System Preferences. A: If you have the Alfred Powerpack, you can add a hotkey in Alfred 1: Or create a workflow in Alfred 2: Hotkeys have a short delay by default in Alfred 2, but changing the trigger behavior reduces it: A: I would recommend installing QuickSilver. It's an application launcher that will remember the applications you launch most frequent and recommend them first. It's easy to launch any application with a few keystrokes. QuickSilver is the first Application I install on every new Mac. A: Not built-in to the OS, but I've been using a free utility called Visor. What you do with it is leave your Terminal running in the background, but Visor hides it and invokes it in a Quake-style console when you hit a (user-configurable) key combo. It's pretty customizable as to how your Terminal shows/hides. Super awesome. A: DTerm is accessed via a user-configurable hotkey, and pops up a window in which you can execute a terminal command in the current directory. For example, if you're in Finder and want to tar some files, you just hit the hotkey and run tar, without the need to change directories. Pressing Shift+Enter instead of just Enter after typing your command will execute it in a new Terminal window, from which you can keep working. A: I use Spark and have ⌘+⌥+§ (I have a UK keyboard layout; § is just below esc) to launch the terminal. I prefer it to using Services/AppleScripts because it's faster. Also it doesn't add any visible UI elements like other solutions (I'm very anal about keeping my workspace as streamlined as possible). I think development for Spark has stopped but it works perfectly on Snow Leopard. A: I love Apptivate, it is like Spark. Apptivate lets you "assign system wide shortcuts to any application, document, or script file." It just does this one thing, and does it pretty well. It's very small, so doesn't use much system resource. One great feature of Apptivate is that if it detects the application, say Terminal.app, that has already been running, Apptivate will hide it, instead of launching a new instance of the application. A: Although I think the Automator / Keyboard binding to Services is better, I think I should mention Quicksilver, which gives you excellent keyboard services for the mac. You should read this article about Quicksilver. A: This is a bit opinionated and not a direct answer: you can use iTerm and set a global hotkey for it through Preferences (⌘+,) > Keys > Hotkey. A: I'm using FastScripts to do this. It's free for up to 10 keyboard shortcuts, $14.95 to enable unlimited keyboard shortcuts (I'm not affiliated with Red Sweater Software, just a happy customer). A: This is pretty close: CDTo. "Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd'd to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it's icon) to placed in the finder window's toolbar." Ideally, you want a tool that mimics the built-in feature of MacOS 9: A: I use Open Terminal. Check it out here. A: Thanks for the recommendation for Spark. I have just now tried version 3.0b9 and it worked perfectly in OS X 10.10.3 for creating a shortcut to launch the terminal. I use Ctrl+Opt+T, which is the same shortcut to open the terminal in my linux distro. A: You can use the Automator.app to make new shortcuts Automator app> and then service(gear icon)[no input]> followed by launch application.app service,> chose terminal.app > [SAVE] > system pref. >keyboard shorcuts >services > setup shortcut ctr+opt+cmd+T Its Explained in this link

Q: How do I turn off the Front Row keyboard shortcut? I keep accidentally hitting Command+Esc and bringing up Front Row. How can I disable this shortcut? A: Under Keyboard & Mouse on System Preferences there is a Keyboard Shortcuts tab.

Q: Why does my MacBook Pro reach high temperatures when running? I have my MacBook Pro sitting on my desk and it's consistently over 160 degrees. It is almost too hot to touch in some places on the casing. A: 160 degrees Fahrenheit, if it is CPU temperature, is normal for MBP. MBPs are designed to run pretty hot, with the aluminum case as the main heatsink the casing gets uncomfortably hot sometimes. If you want to remedy the problem: * *use a laptop stand (I use Belkin Cushtops, they are really comfortable), *put your laptop on steady, heat-transducing surface (human skin, blankets or soft chairs are bad — wooden/plastic/metallic tables are good), *open up the casing and clean the dust (can make it ~10 degrees Celcius cooler) *or, use less video- or CPU-intensive application =) A: If you're interested, I've had a lot of luck manually regulating my MBP's temperature a little better with smcfancontrol. I find that keeping the fans running at 3,000 RPM by default (instead of the normal 1,000) adds no ambient noise over what's already in my office and keeps the temperature a bit lower. I also use it to pre-emptively turn the fans up to 6,000 RPM when I know I'm about to do something that will make it run hot. A: That is within range. The chips can run up to 205*F according to the people at my local Apple store (I had the same question). There is a thermal trigger if it gets too hot that will yank power to the computer. Real pain when you're working on something and don't notice the heat output. A: Short answer: because of the crappy nVidia chip in it. See here for more details and don't forget to use some sort of app to see your actual temperature details. You'll see it's the GPU diode that's burning up. The rest should be hunky dory, at least 12 degrees centigrade below that piece of... extraordinary nVidia technology which I will forever remember for this snafu. Long answer: I currently have one of those pre-Unibody 17" MBPs, with the faulty nVidias. Oh yeah, I'm so happy, I can hardly hold it in. It initially ran at about 75 degrees Centigrade when I used it. After putting it on a smcfancontrol diet and keeping the fans revved up to 4500 as a default, everything was hunky dory except it still ran at about 69 degrees and was burning my forearms (though I love it in the winter). Long story short: bought a wireless keyboard, turned the fans down to their standard 2000, 4 weeks later I'm the proud owner of an MBP with a dead nVidia chip on it. Luckily, I had Apple Care so everything was fixed literally without any questions. The new logic board had the gpu diode running at 63 degrees for the first two weeks (with fans turned down). Now their default has become 72 degrees with the fans at 4000. I think I'm going to turn smcfancontrol off, make the default 2000 again and let it burn. I wonder how many dead nVidias I have to get in so that Apple replaces my notebook with a version that doesn't have a crappy nVidia card in it.

Q: Is there a quick way to lock my Mac? On Windows you can hit the keys Windows+L to lock your computer if you step away. I don't want to have to remember if sleep currently asks for a password, if there is a time out where my screen isn't locked during a short period. Even with Lion supporting resume of many apps, I don't want to log out. I do want to be sure data is secure when stepping out for lunch or a smoke break. A: Your Mac can ask your password after it wakes up if you set it to do so in the Preferences panel (Security). From there on, you can use ⌥+⌘+⏏ to put your Mac to sleep. So all you have to do is hit that and walk away. A: If you enable screen locking within the screen saver pref pane you can put the computer to sleep and lock at the same time by pressing ⌘+⌥+F12 A: ⇧+⌘+⌥+Q will perform a "quick logout." Another option is to enable a password when waking from sleep or screen saver and adding a hot corner for one or the other. Then locking is as simple as tossing a mouse in a corner. A: To lock your screen using a apple keyboard try this Or do this by going to "System Preferences" then "Security" under "General" A: If you want to be able to remote control your Mac (with Synergy or something similar) even when it's locked, I'd recommend you to show the Keychain Status in the Menu Bar. You do that as follows: * *Launch the application Keychain Access *Press ⌘, to open up the Preferences window *Tick the Show Status in Menu Bar check box *Click the newly appeared lock icon in the menu bar *Click Lock Screen to lock the screen This will lock the screen with a login window, but still make the Mac possible to remote control. If you don't need to remote control the Mac, MacLoc is a simple and effective solution. A: On macOS High Sierra, there is a standard key sequence and Apple menu item to lock your screen. * *control-command-q or ^+⌘+Q The Lock Screen 2 app is a great little tool to make locking and unlocking much more adaptable. It is for sale on the app store priced below $5 lately. The promo video is quite entertaining even though it doesn't promote the ease of assigning a custom key command to engage a screen lock. A: Here is a good tutorial which will help you to create a short cut keys to lock your mac machine http://www.macyourself.com/2013/01/27/how-to-lock-your-mac-screen-with-a-keyboard-shortcut/ Lock Screen Service 1. Launch Automator from your Applications folder. 2. Select Service as the document type. 3. Select Utilities from the list on the left, then double-click Run Shell Script in the next column. 4. On the top-right side of the screen, adjust the drop-down menus so the statement reads: Service receives [no input] in [any application] 5. Copy the following command into the large text box that appears: /System/Library/CoreServices/"Menu Extras"/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend 6. Go to File > Save and name your service Lock Screen. Once saved, you can now quit Automator. Lock Screen Keyboard Shortcut 1. Launch System Preferences and go to the Keyboard pane. 2. Next, select the Keyboard Shortcuts tab. From the list on the left, select Application Shortcuts. Click on the plus (+) button below to add your new shortcut. 3. In the dialog box we’ll want to leave All Applications selected in the first menu. Enter Lock Screen as the Menu Title. Please note this has to be exactly the same name you entered when saving the service in Automator. Finally, enter your keyboard shortcut. Let’s go with Command+Option+Shift+L. 4. Click Add and you’re all done! Now when you press your keyboard shortcut (Command+Option+Shift+L), the Mac login screen will immediately be displayed. You’re still technically logged in and processes such as large downloads will continue in the background. But you can leave your Mac unattended without worry – no one will be able to access your account until you enter your password. When you do, everything on your desktop will be there just as you left it! A: Go to settings -> Mission control and then over to HotCorners on the bottom left corner. There are 4 corner setting appearing there. Choose anyone of them according to your feasibility as put to sleep. Just by dragging the mouse to that corner will put it to sleep and lock your system. I guess thats the best easy shortcut i have discovered. A: If you're using Alfred, just invoke Alfred and start typing "lock". I don't remember if it's activated by default, but if not, you can activate and change the keywords in the Alfred preferences. A: Via the Expose system preferences panel you can set a "hot corner" of your monitor that activates your screen saver. Say you set the Bottom Left corner, as soon as you move your mouse there the screen saver will invoke. If you've set a password on it, bingo, done. Yet another option is to enable Fast User Switching in the Login Options pane of the Accounts preferences panel. This puts a Users menu in the top right hand corner, from which you can quickly choose "Login Window...". This kicks you to the login screen, requiring a password to move away from, and also does not end your session/quit any running apps. A: Deskshade does exactly what you are asking. It locks the screen displaying only a huge padlock sign so intruders know the screen is locked which prevents unnecessary attempts to use the machine whiles you are away. http://macrabbit.com/ A: SizzlingKeys is a little Preference Pane that mostly lets you configure iTunes keyboard shortcuts, but one of the "Extras" included lets you specify a shortcut to actually lock the computer and take you to the Fast User Switching screen, not just start the screensaver. I keep Lock configured as ⌃+⌘+L but you can specify whatever you want. SizzlingKeys has a paid upgrade, but the Lock shortcut is configurable using the free version. A: Another program that can allow you to quickly lock your screen is Padlock. Note that the aforelinked Macworld review of Padlock also gives a comprehensive review of other solutions (many of which were discussed above) for locking your Mac. A: FTW! A keyboard short cut to launch screen saver which you can configure with a password lock. All free. Follow the link for better explanation and screens. I have been using quicksilver to launch the screensaver which works nicely as well. http://leafraker.com/2007/09/14/start-the-screen-saver-with-quicksilver/ The only thing left to do is to define a keyboard trigger. I’m using “Shift/Control/Command-L” as my trigger. This key combination may sound a bit awkward at first, but I’m using “Shift/Control/Command” for all my Quicksilver trigger. The nice thing about this combination is that it rarely cause conflicts with other keyboard shortcuts, and once you are used to this combination it’s really not this bad. So in this case I combined it with the letter “L”, for “Lock”. A: There is finally a native way to lock your screen, starting with macOS High Sierra (10.13). This can be done by clicking the Apple menu at the top left of the screen, and then pressing "Lock Screen." The shortcut associated with this action is ^⌘Q. Arguably, this is not as convenient as the ❖L (Windows + L) shortcut that exists on Windows. However, one can achieve a similar behavior on the Mac natively. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click on All Applications, press the + (plus) button at the bottom, type in "Lock Screen" (without quotes) for the menu title, and for the shortcut assign your own shortcut (such as ⌘L). Now you can use ⌘L à la Windows (or your own shortcut) to lock the screen. Note that using ⌘L as your lock screen shortcut will render it ineffective for other tasks such as focusing on the URL bar in Safari. A: Logging out to the fast user switching screen * *Run /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend. *Enable the fast user switching menu from the Users & Groups preference pane and then select Login Window… from the menu. *Use the lock action in Alfred. Locking the screen * *Check "Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins" in the Security & Privacy preference pane. You can then lock the computer manually by pressing control-shift-eject to turn off displays or option-command-eject to go to sleep. A power key can be substituted for eject in 10.8 and later. In 10.9 and later, you can also put displays to sleep by running pmset displaysleepnow. *Enable the Keychain menu extra from the preferences of Keychain Access and then select Lock Screen... from the menu. A: You guys should check out QuickLock to lock your Mac with. It locks with any desired keyboard shortcut, it's beautiful, and it's completely and totally customizable. Best of all it's free. Check it out here: http://www.quicklockapp.com A: On macOS High Sierra, there is a standard key sequence and Apple menu item to lock your screen. * *Control-Command-Q or ^+⌘+Q For older OS, ⇧+⌃+⏏ puts the display (only the display, not the whole computer) to sleep and will then prompt you for a password if you have enabled Require password [amount of time] after sleep or screen saver begins under System Preferences > Security. If your Mac does not have an ⏏ (eject) key, you can use ⇧+⌃+⌽ (power). A: Lock Me Now - a Free app. Found it great for myself after searching and trying various options. Nothing redundant, just all-you-need-out-of-the-box: * *Lock your screen *Set a global shortcut *Unlock with just a password P.S: I'm not affiliated with this product. A: With the track pad, you can configure gestures for locking your mac. I do it with a four finger swipe left. To confiugre this, you need a (free) tool like the BetterTouchTool. A: Use a keyboard shortcut and use Automator to make a screen lock service. This will allow you to set any keyboard command you would like to lock or start a screen saver on your mac. As referenced below is a nice article on how to do the process. Handy screen locking tips for Mac If mousing to part of the screen isn’t your thing, you can use the keyboard to lock the screen, but it takes Automator (or a third-party application, but Automator is the better bet if you’re using OS X 10.6). Launch Automator and create a new service. Tell the new service that it receives “no input” (rather than the default of “text”). The default is also for “any application”, make sure to keep this set. Next, drag the Start Screen Saver action from the Utilities action group to the workflow. Finally, save the service and give it a name, such as Start Screensaver. Go back to Keyboard Shortcuts in the Keyboard section of System Preferences and look in the Services group. Scroll down to the General section and you will see the newly created Start Screensaver service is enabled. Click in the whitespace to the far right of this entry and a new entry box will appear. Type the keyboard shortcut, such as CTRL-OPT-L. Exit System Preferences. You will now be able to hit CTRL-OPT-L and activate the screen saver in order to lock the screen. If you wish to return to the login window instead (you are still logged in, but the computer is locked) rather than activate the screensaver, change the Automator service to Run Shell Script instead of Start Screen Saver and have it run the following command: /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/user.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend A: From my answer in Super User. Using Keychain Access's Lock Screen menubar. Activate it here, in Keychain Access.app's Preferences: Then lock. A: I've used Salute for years - works beautifully. A nod to Windows' three finger salute - ⌘+⌃+⌫ gives you quick access to screensaver (set a password on the and your done) - terminal or activity monitor. It's no longer actively developed but doesn't need to be - worked great on Leopard through Mavericks. A: You have some app on the App Store who provide you a lot of way to lock your Mac. Like this one : https://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/lock-me-now/id464265594?l=en&mt=12 Or this : http://www.knocktounlock.com [Lock and unlock your Mac with your iPhone bluetooth] A: Just hit these 3 buttons at the same time and hold shortly until you're locked: Control-Shift-Power (⏏ or ⌽) Works in the latest macOS Sierra. A: Beginning with OS X Mavericks, all you need to do is press the power button of your MacBook to put it to sleep. This has the advantage of preventing you from having to close the lid to get the same effect. This will put your MacBook to sleep, however.

Q: When using Spaces, is there a way to set each "desktop" background independently? For instance, say I had a few sweet background images I wanted to use to identify each one. A: There's no built-in feature in OS X for that but there are two applications that can do that for you, Hyperspaces and SpaceSuit. A: You have to use a third-party tools, like SpaceSuit. A: Mac OS X Lion supports this out of the box now. Simply switch to the Space you want to apply a certain background to, then change it as usual (with System Preferences or the desktop's context menu). Repeat for your other Spaces and background images. For older versions, you will still need to use a third-party tool as recommended by the other answers.

Q: Which OS X Applications do you find indispensable? Please Search Prior To Posting! There are many applications already listed. In all likelihood, this includes the one you are thinking of. Please check the existing answers to avoid duplicates, and the resulting cleanup it necessitates. To search, use the search box in the upper-right corner. To search the answers of the current question, use inquestion:this. For example: inquestion:this Evernote If it hasn't already been posted, please follow a few simple rules when adding it as an answer. Rules * *Limit to one application per answer. *Add a short description of the application. *Add a link to the website in the name of the application if possible (no direct downloads). *Use ## [appName](link) for citing the application name. *Only Mac OS X (not iOS, OS 9, compatible, etc) applications. All versions of OS X are accepted, but if the application requires a specific version please note. A: Perian Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats. A: Transmission Transmission is a cross-platform BitTorrent client that is: Free and Community-Driven. Easy. Lean. Native. Powerful. A: The Unarchiver The Unarchiver is a much more capable replacement for "BOMArchiveHelper.app", the built-in archive unpacker program in Mac OS X. The Unarchiver is designed to handle many more formats than BOMArchiveHelper, and to better fit in with the design of the Finder. It can also handle filenames in foreign character sets, created with non-English versions of other operating systems. Supported file formats include Zip, Tar-GZip, Tar-BZip2, RAR, 7-zip, LhA, StuffIt and many other more and less obscure formats. A: Notify Notify is an awesome email notifier for Mac OS X. It fits seamlessly into your menubar, only vying for your attention when you have new mail. Notify supports mutliple accounts, including Gmail, MobileMe, and Rackspace Email. A: Echofon A really simple, intuitive twitter client. This is the one that got me to switch from Tweetie. A: X Lossless Decoder X Lossless Decoder(XLD) is a tool for Mac OS X that is able to decode/convert/play various 'lossless' audio files. Supported audio files can be split into tracks with a cue sheet when decoding. It works on Mac OS X 10.3 and later. XLD is Universal Binary, so it runs natively on both Intel Macs and PPC Macs. A: Unrar This is a command line utility to unpack the .rar files on Mac OSX. You can't unpack the .rar files natively on OSX, where this small util is useful. A: Aperture Aperture is a fine app for photo management and editing for professionals and advanced amateur photographers alike. It supports many file-formats and raw image file formats. For a complete feature list see the link above. One of my favorite features is having a full screen view while still having image control for editing via a HUD. A: Caffeine Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ^-click) the icon to show the menu. A: Transmit FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 and WebDav client. A: Cyberduck for Upload, Download and Sync of FTP, SFTP, WebDav, iCloud, S3, ... A: Skype With skype, you can make * *Voice and video calls to anyone else on Skype *Conference calls with three or more people *Instant messaging, file transfer and screen sharing A: MacPorts The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system. To that end we provide the command-line driven MacPorts software package under a BSD License, and through it easy access to thousands of ports that greatly simplify the task of compiling and installing open-source software on your Mac. A: MacVim A very good port of Vim. I used both Emacs and TextMate for quite some time, but finally became a Vim user. I think I'll have a look at TextMate 2, if it will actually be released some time… A: Isolator Isolator is a small menu bar application that helps you concentrate. When you're working on a document, and don't want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand. It's a small utility, but one that I find pretty indispensable. One of the first apps I install on new Mac. A: A Better Finder Rename A Better Finder Rename has long been the file renamer of choice for tens of thousands of professionals, businesses and hobbyists across the world. A: Mathematica If I need to choose only one software to install on my Mac, I would install Mathematica by Wolfram. A: XBMC XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, Windows, and the original Xbox. A: iMovie iMovie is the best amateur video editing software out there. It has a very small learning curve, which makes it great for doing quick projects. I used iMovie for the longest time, then switched to FCE. I still use it for minor projects. A: Quicksilver More then just an application launcher, Quicksilver is an intuitive, self learning, application launcher and system manipulator. It can also assign global hotkeys to actions, store clipboard history, show the current iTunes song and much more. A: iWork Pages is both a streamlined word processor and an easy-to-use page layout tool. It allows you to be a writer one minute and a designer the next, always with a perfect document in the works.   With great-looking templates, easy-to-create formulas, and dynamic tables and charts, spreadsheets suddenly make perfect sense.   Create your presentation in Keynote, and you’ll be a hard act to follow. Powerful yet easy-to-use tools and dazzling effects put the show in slideshow. I use iWork constantly. Both on my Mac and iPad. It's just great :D A: VirtualBox VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). A: MusicBrainz Picard MusicBrainz is an audio file metadata (or "tag") editor. It has options for both automatic and manual modification of audio metadata. It's cross-platform (Linux/Mac OS X/Windows) and written in Python and is the official MusicBrainz tagger. Picard supports the majority of audio file formats, is capable of using audio fingerprints (PUIDs, similar to other fingerprinting apps like Shazam and SoundHound), performing CD lookups and disc ID submissions, and it has excellent Unicode support. Additionally, there are several plugins available that extend Picard's features. A: Clean My Mac The world's easiest-to-use maintenance solution. This all-in-one tool includes everything you need to keep your Mac clean and healthy. A: Opera Because it's still my favourite browser. After having used it on Windows for eight years, I took it with me when I "switched" four years ago. Browsers are always subjective, but I like Opera because I rely on its single-key shortcuts, used its mouse gestures a lot before I moved over to a glass trackpad, I have dozens of tabs open at any time, it has session handling, bookmark syncing, and dozens of other neat, small things. And everything is built in and just works. I could probably get Firefox to do everything Opera does for me, but it would be a hassle, and it would be even slower than it already is without any extensions. I could never get Safari to do everything I need. A: NTFS-3G (Tuxera) We still need to learn how to play nice with windows systems (and filesystems). I use this to access my NTFS drives. NTFS-3G is a stable, read/write NTFS driver for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris, QNX, Haiku, and other operating systems. It provides safe handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 NTFS file systems. A high-performance driver is available commercially for embedded devices. A: CrashPlan A very powerful backup application that allows you to backup to external drives, other computers, and/or their own cloud at a very reasonable price. It has an impressive compression rate and allows you to create multiple backup sets to backup different data to different locations. It has a well-designed interface and allows you to specify scheduled or continuous backups. It offers versioning and 448-bit encryption. For a home user the software is free to use if you choose not to backup to their cloud. A: I Love Stars Displays iTunes’ current song’s rating in your menu bar. Click to change rating. Supports keyboard shortcuts. Has a configurable sound to remind you to rate an unrated song. Disappears when nothing’s playing. A: Evernote Evernote is an app for note taking that features online syncing, much like Dropbox. Install Evernote on your desktop, laptop, iPhone and iPad and have access to all your notes, and if you've left all them all at home, access them on the web. A: Safari While I adore Chrome, but Chrome on Mac is not on the same level as Chrome on Windows yet. A: Firefox Firefox is an open-source web browser from Mozilla, based off Netscape. With a few OS X specific tweaks it can be made to behave like a OS X browser should, including font rendering, Keychain Access and Retina display support. A: OmniGraffle The only diagramming application worth using. A: Pomodoro Pomodoro Desktop is a desktop application for Time Management on your Mac OSX. It is a simple but effective way to manage your (coding) time, and it's based on the Pomodoro technique you can find here. A: Air Display Technically this is both an iOS and Mac OS X application. What it does is let you use your iPad as a second monitor with your Mac. When I am using my Mac my iPad isn't usually in use (unless a family member stole it) so I use Air Display to make it useful while I am using my Mac. You get a 1024x768 or 768x1024 display that rotates and flips automatically - like you would expect. The Mac portion is free, but you buy the iPad App. Runs with Windows too. Operates over WiFi, but you can always create a private network if one does not exist or it is too slow! A: OmniDiskSweeper OmniDiskSweeper scans your hard drive telling you where your largest files are, making it easy to delete cruft. It's intelligent in how it presents this information hierarchically. A: VMware Fusion Yet another virtual machine product. I have tried Parallels and am using VirtualBox on and off, but VMware's Fusion is what I find to be most efficient and feature-full. Unity view is quite efficient when you want to run something side-by-side, while full screen or windowed modes are good for when you need a focus or are just testing out something. A: iTerm2 iTerm2 is a full featured terminal emulation program written for OS X using Cocoa. We are aiming at providing users with best command line experience under OS X. The letter i represents a native apple look and feel of the program interface, and an emphasis on complete international support. Note: iTerm2 is based on the old iTerm and is supported by the original author. A: Reeder for Mac A gorgeous RSS reader based on the iOS app. * *Syncs with Google Reader *Can manage Google Reader subscriptions *Has full Readability integration *Supports multi-touch gestures *Switches between reader and webpage view in a swipe *Has customizable interface and shortcuts *Supports Lion fullscreen mode *Offers quick access to services (including Twitter, Readability, Instapaper, ReadItLater and Evernote) A: VirtualHostX For web developers who develop websites locally on their Mac. VirtualHostX manages your Apache Virtual Hosts and enable the use of domain names that point to your local machine (even non-routable domain names.) VirtualHostX does this by managing your Mac's hosts file and your Apache httpd.conf and httpd-vhosts.conf config files. It even supports MAMP (although I don't use MAMP.) It's one of my top 5 favorite apps and one I'd hate to do without. I use it every time I start a new project! A: iChm iChm is an ebook reader for CHM (Microsoft Compiled HTML Help) files. A: SABnzbd SABnzbd is an Open Source Binary Newsreader written in Python. It's totally free, incredibly easy to use, and works practically everywhere. SABnzbd makes Usenet as simple and streamlined as possible by automating everything we can. All you have to do is add an .nzb. SABnzbd takes over from there, where it will be automatically downloaded, verified, repaired, extracted and filed away with zero human interaction. A: KeePassX password vault KeePassX is a cross platform secure password saver. Like Keychain, but you can use it on your mobile phone and windows computers. A: Postbox Postbox 2 is first class email software that puts you in the driver’s seat. Stay on task, find information quickly and act, not react. Unified Account Groups Focus Pane Quick Reply Exist both free and paid versions A: Kod a programmers' editor for OS X An open source project that is slowly replacing TextMate for me. A: Papers Designed for scientists, Papers manages PDFs of journal articles. Articles imported to Papers can easily have their metadata applied from journal databases. Articles can then easily be sorted by author or journal, and labeled with different categories. Papers has an associated iOS app that it syncs with. A: SizeUp SizeUp allows you to quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide shortcuts (hotkeys). Similar to "tiled windows" functionality available on other operating systems. A: Plex Media Center for OS X Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing user interface that provides instant access to your media. Plex can play a wide range of video, audio and photo formats as well as online streaming audio and video. The real power of Plex is found in its library features: Organize your media into versatile libraries, automatically retrieve metadata from the Internet, and display your libraries using one of the visually stunning skins. Plex has all but replaced VLC as my primary media application. A: Forklift A Finder replacement. Two panes file management program. Not as cutomizable as Total Commander but has a lot of features builtin. A: Shady If you're finding your laptop screen too bright at night even on the minimum brightness, Shady's the right guy for you. Basically, it puts a transparent overlay over your entire screen, dimming it anywhere between 0% and 90% of normal. A: muCommander muCommander is a lightweight, cross-platform file manager with a dual-pane interface. It runs on any operating system with Java support (Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris...). Here's a non-exhaustive list of what you'll find: * *Virtual filesystem with support for local volumes, FTP, SFTP, SMB, NFS, HTTP, Amazon S3, Hadoop HDFS and Bonjour *Quickly copy, move, rename files, create directories, email files... *Browse, create and uncompress ZIP, RAR, 7z, TAR, GZip, BZip2, ISO/NRG, AR/Deb and LST archives *ZIP files can be modified on-the-fly, without having to recompress the whole archive *Universal bookmarks and credentials manager *Multiple windows support *Full keyboard access *Highly configurable *Available in 23 languages : American & British English, French, German, Spanish, Czech, Simplified & Traditional Chinese, Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Romanian, Italian, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, Slovak, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Ukrainian and Arabic. *Free Software (GPL) A: Voodoopad VoodooPad is a place to write down your notes and thoughts. Ideas, images, lists, passwords, your mom's apple pie recipe. Anything you need to keep track of and organize. VoodooPad will grow with you without getting in the way. Drag and drop folders, PDFs, applications, or URLs into VoodooPad, and they will link up just like on the web. And with powerful search, nothing will be lost or out of reach. A: Adobe Creative Suite / Master Collection The absolute KING of creative tools. Sure, the price is a bit up there, although there really isn't anything that can touch the versatility of having seventeen applications at your disposal. I've used some of these tools since their very existence (Illustrator, Photoshop) and I honestly can't imagine working without them. It would be difficult to describe what they all do; infinite possibilities. Photoshop Extended, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat X Pro, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Contribute, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, OnLocation, Encore, Bridge, Device Central, Media Encoder, Media Encoder ◆ I'm a bit shocked this is just now making it's debut here. A: Audio Hijack Pro Audio Hijack allows you to record any sound from your Mac or input device. You can also mute certain applications. This is my go-to-application for any audio recording. A: Stickies It's Apple's program for taking notes. Very minimalistic and fast. Your notes can be: * *formatted how you like *edited with hyperlinks *drag and drop pictures *export as *.txt *custom color of note A: Soulver An amazing calculator that does it all with a nice text-based interface. Just type your problem as you'd write it on paper. You see your answer instantly. No setting up formulas, no equals button. If you make a mistake, you don't have to start all over again, you just hit delete. A: Hiss Hiss is an OSX app that forwards notifications from Growl enabled apps to Notification Center in Mountain Lion. Currently in beta, but it does an awesome job of piping all your Growl notifications into the Notification Center of OS X Mountain Lion. The only real downside to it is that it flags all notifications with the Growl icon. A: Sequel Pro Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases. Sequel Pro gives you direct access to your MySQL databases on local and remote servers. Whether you are a Mac Web Developer, Programmer or Software Developer your workflow will be streamlined with a native Mac OS X application! A: Things Task management tool with an that UI strikes a nice balance between simplicity and functionality. Can be synced with iPhone and iPad versions. It's a commercial app, and not even very cheap (40€ / $53 currently), but I've come to rely on it a lot. A: BetterTouchTool Take your Magic Mouse and add some more magic to it. Lets you do tons more gestures than OS X alone. Works for the new trackpad and the multitouch trackpads in laptops too. It's still a bit buggy, but really, really cool. A: MacTeX -- TeXLive distribution and assorted goodies for the Mac. A: Sublime Text 2 Sublime Text has grown to become my favorite GUI code editor. It feels like a spiritual successor to TextMate (even allowing support for some TextMate bundles like snippets and themes), and has many original+natural features like fully independent text cursors, a very nice search feature, and a rapidly-growing plugin API and surrounding community. I liked it so much I wrote an inline lint plugin. A: Skitch Skitch allows you to take screenshots on your Mac, edit them and share them with others. It makes the sharing process seamless by making it a natural workflow to send the image (with edited arrows and other highlights helpful to your client) to them via email or automatic website uploads. It is especially popular with the designer community, as they show their clients rough drafts of their work in a nearly automated process. It makes it simple to work remotely with someone and pass on work revisions and get feedback quickly. Other uses include: * *Snap a website *Capture a chat moment *Screenshot an application *iSight snap your bad hair day *Quickly sketch an idea *Tap into your iPhoto Library *Re-open images from your Skitch History A: Coda Coda is the only web-language-text-editor I like. It does everything you really need for web applications. It remember some common part of code in clips that you can load just by typing their tag name, it completes your html tags, it shows you the list of functions with related variables and autocomplete, it has the powerful Transmit ftp engine built in, it has a great visual CSS editor, it allows you to personalize the text colors and it has HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP doumentation maulaus available from within the application. Never seen all these features in just one application! From the developer's website: So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, adjusting SQL in a Terminal, using a CSS editor and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we declared. “And much cooler.” A: InsomniaX Disables sleep mode, so you can shut your lid without the system hibernating. A: Google's Quick Search Box An application launcher, like Quicksilver. Having tried both, I found Quick Search Box's UI to be cleaner and the overall application to be faster. A: TinkerTool This handy tool allows you to customize OSX in various ways so that it is more efficient for you uses and allows you to access settings that you normally couldn't A: PCalc This is an awesome calculator that I have been using for at least 10 years. For basic arithmetic and quick calculations this app can't be beat. It is also available from the Mac App store. A: Fraise Fraise is a free text editor for Mac OS X Leopard 10.6 which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to neither confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced users. General-purpose text editor with extensive syntax highlighting support. Can be downloaded via MacUpdate. A: 0xED a free, native OS X hex editor based on the Cocoa framework. * *Fast editing of large files. *Unlimited file size (limited by what the actual file system supports). *Small memory footprint. *Instant opening of files of any size. *Resource fork editing. *Full hex/text search/replace. *Binary/text Cut/copy/paste support. *Plug-in system to display your custom data types. A: Nocturne For all those low-light situations, Nocturne is a tool for inverting colors, changing screen tint etc. So I can make the screen dimmer while keeping it readable, when the dimmest backlight setting is too bright. I especially like the Invert hue option, which can be used to keep colors the same while inverting black/white. A: LaunchBar LaunchBar is a smart and powerful, keyboard driven productivity utility that lets you access and control every aspect of your digital life. Whatever you want to get done on your Mac – with LaunchBar it’s only a few keystrokes away. Indespensible as a keyboard utility to launch applications, open websites, search the web and a million other things. A: F.lux f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you're in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again. Tell f.lux what kind of lighting you have, and where you live. Then forget about it. F.lux will do the rest, automatically. A: TotalFinder Improves the finder by adding a tabbed view, as well as other less interesting features. I didn't realize how addicted to this I was until I got a new Mac and couldn't figure out why I couldn't open another finder tab. :-) A: CloudApp What a fantastic little App... it makes easy to share allmost any file instantly and when you create a screenshot it automatically uploads it to the web and you have the short URL ready to be pasted anywhere. a simple Cmd + SHIFT + 4 and ... Paste the url :) ...and you have RainDrops to share other content as photos from iPhoto directly and more A: TextWrangler TextWrangler is the (free) powerful general purpose text editor, and Unix and server administrator’s tool. It is a powerful and richly featured tool for composing, modifying, and transforming text stored in plain-text files. Among other things, it can open files from (and save them) to remote FTP and SFTP servers, offers a powerful grep engine, supports multi-byte and non-Roman text files, can perform Find Differences on pairs of files or folders, and can be invoked from the Unix command line. A: iTunes quote from Thilo: I absolutely hate this app, but at the same time I (or rather my iPods) cannot live without it. Please, Steve, make iTunes optional for iPods and iPads. A: iStat Menus Displays customizable system monitoring information like CPU, memory and network usage and hardware temperatures in the menu bar. So like MenuMeters but a bit nicer in my opinion. A: Notational Velocity is an application that stores and retrieves notes. It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist. A: BBEdit Hands down the best plain-text editor I've ever used. A: Sparrow Sparrow's hallmark is a simplified user interface reminiscent of Twitter clients such as Tweetie or iOS apps, as opposed to a more traditional e-mail style such as Apple's Mail or Mozilla Thunderbird. Sparrow currently supports all IMAP email accounts. It also includes features such as drag-and-drop attachments, Growl support, and keyboard shortcuts, as well as threaded replies and easy switching between Gmail accounts. A: Microsoft Office Office for Mac 2011 is the best option for Mac users who share documents at home, work, or at school. It comes packed with powerful features for creating artful documents, dynamic spreadsheets, and effective presentations. Plus it’s compatible. You can be confident that your documents will open correctly on Mac or PC. A: Parallels Desktop Gives almost(!) seamless Windows OS and apps integration. A: Skim * *PDF reader and note-taker. A: Overflow Overflow is an application designed to quickly launch applications, open documents, or access folders while reducing the number of items needed in your Dock. A: Base Base is an awesome tool for managing SQLite databases. It has an intuitive interface and allows you to easily create or alter tables. I especially like that the transcript shows you exactly what queries Base is executing against your database. A: Clipmenu A simple yet powerful clipboard management tool. A: JustNotes A simple notes app that syncs with Simplenote--my favorite notes app for iOS. A: AppFresh AppFresh helps you to keep all applications, widgets, preference panes and application plugins installed on your Mac up to date. All from one place, easy to use and fully integrated into Mac OS X. AppFresh works by checking the excellent osx.iusethis.com for new versions and lets you download and install available updates easily. A: QuickCursor QuickCursor lets you use your favorite editor to edit text in any Mac app that has a text input field. It's particularly useful for editing textboxes on web pages. A: AppTrap When you move a .app to the Trash, AppTrap notices this and offers to remove all associated library and preference files. A: AntiRSI A timer that detects when you're using the computer and tells you to take breaks if you've been at it too long. I like it because it has two timers running concurrently, one for small, frequent breaks, the other for long, rarer breaks. It's intelligent, configurable, and can show the timers on the dock icon. A: TinyUmbrella TinyUmbrella is a great app for anyone who has an iOS device they want to downgrade to a previous firmware for one reason or other. It backs up and saves the SHSH blobs or "Keys" required to complete the restore. A: Bowtie Bowtie (free) is a little app for controlling iTunes and Last FM. It comes with several features, and it's really well done. Here's a brief description from its webpage. Bowtie is a free application that allows you to control iTunes and your iPhone (requires 99¢ companion app) with customizable shortcuts, submits your songs to Last.fm with support for Loving and Banning, and sports a very simple, yet very powerful, HTML5 + CSS + JavaScript theming system. It's got some pretty cool "Bowlets", or little controllers/information displayers that can sit on the screen. There are plenty to choose from (these are just a few I have downloaded from the theme browser): This is one of my favourite (PaperRift by creeze): Download on App Store. A: Port Map Easily configure ports, assuming you have a UPnP router. A: Hex Editor Practically every editor, including text editors, lie about the contents of files. Even programming languages change or omit certain characters. In general this is intended to help you see what they think you are looking for, but sometimes you just want to see things how they really are Note: The original hexeditor I linked to is no longer on offer, so I have updated the link with the suggestion from neoneye A: NetBeans IDE A free, open-source Integrated Development Environment for software developers. All the tools needed to create professional desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications with the Java platform, as well as with C/C++, PHP, JavaScript and Groovy. A: LibreOffice LibreOffice is the FLOSS office suite. It's comparable to Microsoft Office while available for free. A: Boom * *provides a system-wide equalizer *boost the overall volume of your computer *boost volume of specific audio files *fast access via menu icon A: Hands Off! Firewall * *Prevents applications from phoning home *Block outgoing/incoming network connections *Block subdomains *Supports IPv4, IPv6 and local networks *Block read/write file operations *Monitoring network connections and disk access *export/import rules *default rules for certain applications (Mail, Safari,...) *access via menubar A: Moom Moom is a very configurable window management tool. Some useful features include convenient and fast window placement and resizing using grids, saving window layout profiles, configurable hot keys, and much more. A: Little Ipsum It’s my favorite dummy text / lorem ipsum generator for OS X (free). What it makes so special is the selection mechanism from the menu bar (words… sentences… paragraphs): A: Bark From their site: Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? Bark intelligently brings notifications from Growl into Notification Center under OS X Mountain Lion. Much like Hiss, Bark forwards your Growl notifications to Notification Center in Mountain Lion. The catch though is it forwards them not as "Growl Notifications", but as notifications from the actual app that sent them, making the experience totally seamless. Screenshots might make it more clear. I reckon Bowtie and Coda 2 don't support Notification Center natively, but with Bark this is what you get: And on notification center they look like this: Correct icons, correct grouping, the plugin is completely free and works with the newer versions of Growl (App Store versions)... definitely worth checking out! PS: Coda 2.0.3 I think now supports Notification Center natively, but you get the idea... A: Secrets Secrets is a PrefPane that lets users access hidden settings in many Mac OS X applications. It is also open source and user driven, any user can submit a secret and have it immediately available in the Secrets for anyone to use. A: Spotify For listening to music off the internet. This definitely has become one of the pieces of software I would first install (on a Mac or any other computer). Note: Spotify is available only in some countries; currently: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Wikipedia article has details. A: Carbon Copy Cloner Clone, synchronize, backup. CCC 3 features an interface designed to make the cloning and backup procedure very intuitive. In addition to general backup, CCC can also clone one hard drive to another, copying every single block or file to create an exact replica of your source hard drive. CCC's block-level copy offers the absolute fastest performance and highest fidelity in the industry! A: Acorn I have Photoshop, but Acorn is an amazing, lightweight and cheap alternative I go to way, way more often. A: TotalTerminal (formerly Visor) * *"A system-wide terminal on a hot-key." I press ctrl-T (the hot key I chose), and a tab-able terminal window slides down from the top of my screen. This invaluable for anyone who, like me, is constantly between the terminal and other apps. This great little tool was originally by Blacktree, who made Quicksilver. A: OmniFocus OmniFocus is designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items. Perfect for the Getting Things Done® system, but flexible enough for any task management style, OmniFocus helps you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on top of all the things you need to do. A: µTorrent One of the best light weight BitTorrent clients. A: Hyperdock Brilliant. HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select single application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more. Control iTunes. Hover the mouse over the iTunes dock item to view information about the current song, You can pause or skip songs and even adjust volume just by scrolling on the itunes icon. And many more... A: Cinch I literally couldn't stand to use the Mac without this software. When I want to full screen an app I just drag the app's title bar to the menu bar and it "cinches" itself to full screen. A must have for Mac. Edit: Cinch also allows making a window fill the left/right/upper/lower half of your screen (similar to Windows Snap). Very useful for copy-pasting and comparing. A: Daisy Disk DaisyDisk scans your disks and presents their content as interactive maps where you can easily spot unusually large files and remove them to get more free space. The map gives you an overview of your data, so you always know what your hard disks are filled with. A: Dropbox Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they'll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you've installed Dropbox on. A: Eclipse IDE (free) Awesome, open source, well-featured IDE primarily for Java, but also supports C++, PHP, and Python, among others. Also has a wealth of third-party plugins. A: Versions GUI Subversion client. From their website: Versions provides a pleasant way to work with Subversion on your Mac. Whether you're a hardcore Subversion user or new to version control systems, Versions will help streamline your workflow. I will say up front that it doesn't inherently support all of Subversion's features, but it does make managing source code and important document for solo developers and small groups much, much easier than dealing with the command line. It's one of the three apps that gets opened with my "AM" script. A: Calibre calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories: * *Library Management *E-book conversion *Syncing to e-book reader devices *Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form *Comprehensive e-book viewer *Content server for online access to your book collection A: Lastpass Yet another password manager (actually, probably the first one online, I believe prior to 1pass) that integrates well with every browser (well, at least Safari, Chrome and Firefox). You have even an option to use yubikeys with it. I use it for long time and it's just amazing. It does everything I would expect and little more. It monitors when you change password, have a KB of websites and really gets almost all of them, while allow you to configure whenever field with login and password you want. And it's multiplatform. Back in 2010 it bought Xmarks and must integrate with that as well. It's completely free to use but it does offer a premium subscription for extra (and unnecessary) features. I personally paid for it as a donation, since I really never use the features. A: Terminal Terminal.app opens a UNIX terminal and allows you to access many power-user tools and features, just as you would on a machine running Linux or BSD. A: iChat I know a lot of people use Adium, and I did too for a long time. But iChat just does what I want and does it slightly more elegantly, so I switched. I personally can't live without: * *audio and Video calls; *it can stay in the menu bar without launching the application, and log in at startup (if you are familiar with UNIX, it's like a daemon mode); *support for Jabber. I also use it for MSN via a Jabber transport, which basically lets me connect to MSN through a jabber server, integrating the two seamlessly. Since there are a lot of transport-enabled servers – for ICQ and AIM (which, by the way, are also supported natively in iChat), IRC, Gadu-Gadu, QQ and of course MSN – you can benefit from iChat's simple interface with whatever IM service you use. A: Divvy Application for moving and resizing windows using a "grid" approach. A: AppCleaner It's small and powerful tool for remove/ uninstalling your applications on OS X. I use it frequently, it even helps you to remove Cache created the the application from your Mac. A: Colloquy Excellent IRC client that is open source. A: Activity Monitor A task manager, a utility for performing different tasks to a computer processes, in the Mac OS X operating system. Some of its functions include: * *Quitting or "killing" a computer process *Viewing the computer's CPU load *Checking the amount of random access memory in use or swapped out *Checking the amount of hard disk read-ins and write-outs *Checking the capacity of storage devices *Monitoring the computer's network usage *Inspecting running computer processes *Viewing a process identifier number *Viewing information about a particular process A: xGestures * *adds mouse gestures to every program. A: Rulers from the webpage: "Rulers" allows you to create rulers on the entire screen area like most common graphic editors allow on their working areas only. The guide lines enable you to measure and position objects with precision. Rulers is incredibly useful in many fields, such as computer graphics, desktop publishing and web design. Rulers can also be used to select a screen area and take a screenshot that is automatically saved to your desktop or copied to system clipboard. A: Rip Rip is an application for accurate CD audio extraction. It uses a smart combination of the AccurateRip database and CD Paranoia to ensure that the CD will be ripped accurately through the fastest means available. A: Spirited Away Spirited Away checks each running application's activity, and if an application isn't active for a certain fixed time, Spirited Away hides the application automatically. It is, in effect, Spirited Away :-) This is a great productivity app, keep your workspace clean and focussed, by hiding all the apps you are not using. No more distractions in the background! A: Breakaway Pull out your headphones, and iTunes pauses. Plug it back in, and it starts again. A simple application that makes your life that much easier. A: FinderPop This tool provides a ton of enhancements to the contextual menu. It allows you to select move,copy,alias a selected item (icon) to pretty much any folder via pop-up hierarchical folder lists. Built-in preview stuff, and more. A: Textual: IRC for Mac OS X Textual is a lightweight IRC client created specifically for Mac OS X. It was designed with simplicity in mind. Textual has taken the best of IRC and built it into a single client. Its easy-to-use functionality combined with scripting support makes it an ideal IRC client for novice to advanced users. I tried Colloquy; I tried MacIrssi; I tried X-Chat Aqua; but for a GUI client, I have happily stuck to using Textual. A: Vox Vox is a little and simple music player for Mac OS X with support for many file types, including FLAC, MP3, AAC, Musepack, Monkey's Audio, OGG Vorbis, Apple Lossless, AIFF, WAV, IT, MOD, XM, Games Music and many others. Includes numerous effects like Equalizer, Reverb, Time Stretch, Pitch Shift, Echo. Moreover, all supported files can be exported to AAC+, Apple Lossless, WAV and other formats with enabled effects. This is one truly awesome little app which is sadly not well-known. I'd even say Vox was one of the reasons I switched to Mac. Nothing but the essentials for a music player. Besides, it offers some nice audio features (e. g. resampling with antialiasing) as well as built-in Last.fm integration and nifty controls in menubar. I prefer to organize my music in folders by artists and albums and not bother with music libraries used in most modern audio players, so Vox's ability to play all files in a folder is the single most important feature to me. If you feel that iTunes has grown far too big for a music player or just don't like messing with audio libraries you should really give Vox a try. A: Pianopub Pianopub is a free Pandora internet radio player for OS X. It is a port of Pianobar, so please support the original developers. It is for use with your account from the Pandora.com internet radio service. By far the best Pandora client ever — in form of a native Mac OS X app. A: The Hit List THL is a to-do list/GTD organizer that supports tagging, contexts, tabs, unlimited nesting, alarms, cloud syncing, keyboard shortcuts, and a ton of other features. It's a great piece of software, and comes from a developer with impeccable attention to detail. There's a companion iPhone app as well. A: Prism by Mozilla Labs Prism allows you to turn any webpage into an application. I've used this numerous times. A: Readiris OCR software for OS X. Readiris 12 family quickly converts your paper documents into editable text or PDF files you can edit, share and store! A: Grooveshark I know what you are thinking: "This isn't an application!", but wait a second, it actually is! I made Grooveshark into a standalone application with hotkeys. I love it and use it all the time! Information about turning Grooveshark into a standalone application here. A: Sloth Sloth is a graphical frontend for the console tool lsof. If don't know what that is, it doesn't matter! Sloth makes it easy to find out which applications are using which files. Sloth displays a list of all open files and sockets in use by all the applications your user account is running on the system. This list is presented along with the names of applications using the file and their process IDs. Includes support for regex list filtering, process killing, sorting and more. A: ControlPlane ControlPlane supports multiple contexts where a context is defined as a location or activity you are performing. Using evidence sources you can create a set of rules that tell ControlPlane what context to apply to your environment. When ControlPlane enters or leaves a context a set of Actions are performed. In other words: it will turn off screen saver protection when You arrive home and turn it back when You leave. And so much more. A: CheatSheet Just hold the ⌘ a bit longer to get a list of all active short cuts of the current application. It's as simple as that. A: ScreenFlow With ScreenFlow you can record the contents of your entire monitor while also capturing your video camera, microphone and your computer audio. The easy-to-use editing interface lets you creatively edit your video, and add additional images, text, music and transitions for a truly professional-looking video. The finished result is a QuickTime or Windows Media movie, ready for publishing to your Web site or blog or directly to YouTube or Vimeo. A: WebStorm & Co. These are the best IDEs for Web development I found so far. The features go way beyond what simple editors offer. Intellisense, refactorings, debugging, source control integration are my favorite. A: XtraFinder XtraFinder add Tabs and features to Mac Finder. • Tabs. • Dual Panel & Dual Window. • Cut & Paste. • Colorful icons in Sidebar. A: TextExpander Simply the best. Save keystroke even if you just use it to write your email address. A: SizeUp Allows you to set keyboard shortcuts for moving windows to certain halves and quarters of the desktop, as well as between desktops when using multiple monitors. A: Preview A lot of people (especially newcomers) completely overlook what the humble built-in Preview app can do. Apart from handling PDFs (including printing them in various layouts etc), you can join PDF files together with it (open the sidebar and start dragging pdf files into it, rearrange pages etc). You can crop & resize images, adjust colour & saturation (etc), save as different image format and even add text & simple diagrammatical annotations to pictures. Like a lot of the built-in software, there's an awful lot of flexibility that you simply don't appreciate at first because it's hidden in the GUI - as opposed to huge nested menus of functions, you have to try things with the mouse - often things just work! A: Jumpcut Minimalist Clipboard Buffering for OS X Jumpcut is an application that provides "clipboard buffering" — that is, access to text that you've cut or copied, even if you've subsequently cut or copied something else. The goal of Jumpcut's interface is to provide quick, natural, intuitive access to your clipboard's history. A: NetNewsWire Easy-to-use RSS reader that syncs with Google Reader (but it doesn't have to). I think my favorite part is that the UI can be completely and logically navigated with the arrow keys even the action of opening a feed entry in your default browser. A: Path Finder Path Finder = Finder + Automatic viewer + Shell + Screen Capture + Almost everything you need A: Twitter The best Twitter client there is. In perfect sync with the web app itself. A: Air Video Server (Free) Associate to an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, through their 2.99 App this is the best solution to see all your downloaded movies in your devices. There is a Windows version as well. Added Since iOS 4.3, iTunes Home Sharing is now available for all iDevices, and there is no need of having Air Video, though, you wil need to import all your movies into iTunes in order to be accessible cross network. For me, I will still stick with Air Video for a long time :o) A: Thunderbird On the whole, still the best email app I know for any platform. A: gfxCardStatus gfxCardStatus is an open-source menu bar application that keeps track of which graphics card your dual-GPU MacBook Pro is using at any given time, and allows you to switch between them on demand. (free, donationware) If you have a dual-GPU MBP, you absolutely NEED this program! Did you know that some common applications such as Skype enable your high-powered Nvidia graphics card the entire time they're running? I use it to force my MBP to switch to the power-saving Intel graphics chip when I'm on battery. It adds an extra hour or so of battery life which would otherwise be wasted just because I keep Skype online for chatting. A: Little Snitch - Firewall * *rule based traffic filtering *connection alert for undefined rules *network monitor also see: Hands Off! A: Aquamacs * *emacs on the Mac. A: Filezilla No matter what OS, Filezilla had been everywhere I go, and when you start to use it, you can never really get rid off it. The interface is simple and intuitive, with bookmarks, tree sync, multiple connections on tabs, etc. A: MacFuse MacFUSE allows you to extend Mac OS X's native file handling capabilities via 3rd-party file systems. It is used as a software building block by dozens of products. A: DTerm A terminal window for every application. Press a hotkey (I have mine set to Cmd-Opt-Space), and a floating command line pops up over your current window, initialized to the current directory of that window. Another hotkey allows you to easily paste the name of your current document or Finder selection. A: MenuMeters I have a hard time using a Mac without it these days. How does anyone -- especially a programmer -- work without having the pulse of their Mac at their fingertips? How else do you tell when your browser is stuck or is really downloading something, if you can't see the network traffic? When the computer pauses, and you want to know if it's working, just look at the menu to see that the CPU gauges are pegged at 100% -- and much of that is in the kernel. At a glance, I can instantly see that memory consumption has rocketed up, and with a click I can see that I'm heavily into swap space. It's just so useful. A: Growl Growl is a well-known 'notification' system for the Mac; many different programs support Growl and will pass notifications to it. You have a surprising degree of control over how the notifications appear, how they group themselves together, how they are dismissed from the screen etc. This can be configured universally or on an app-by-app basis, so it's very flexible. One of the most useful features for me has been the way you can configure it to send notifications to selected other Macs on the network - I can leave one of my Macs doing something (such as downloading a large file) while I'm using my other Mac, and when the first Mac has finished doing its stuff the notification will pop-up on the Mac I'm in front of. Growl is free, though you can donate to the cause! Programs that can use Growl include Coda, Dropbox, Firefox, Handbrake, NetNewsWire, SuperDuper!, Transmit, and also Mail & Safari (via helper plugins). A: MAMP (MAMP = Mac Apache MySQL PHP) Apache Webserver, MySQL Database and PHP in one Package. Easy installation and easy to use for local development of Websites/Webapps. A: Movist The best movie player for Mac OS X based on QuickTime & FFmpeg. Opens all types of video files and loads quicker than any other app for movies I've ever used. Features I like: * *file support - plays amazingly well .mkv not to mention all the rest *simple and minimal UI *excellent keyboard shortcuts support *switch from FFmpeg to Quicktime playback with a single click A: Garageband This program is, in some ways, the embarrassing bastard child of the audio world. It's an underpowered, feature-crippled version of Logic, one of the best-regarded multitracking applications in the recording world. Nonetheless, Gagareband is very powerful, and does what I need it to do. While I'd appreciate more flexibility (tempo matching would be nice, and the ability to change time signatures within a project), and the program doesn't handle multiple layers of effects as well as I'd like, it performs brilliantly at what it does do, and it's insanely easy to learn. Garageband is one of the main reasons I haven't ditched my G5 Mac for a Windows or Linux machine I took so long to replace my G5 mac. (Now I use GB and Logic on a Macbook Pro.) A: SuperDuper! I'm amazed it hasn't been mentioned as an answer already. It's saved my data on more than one occasion from catastrophic hard drive failure. From its website: SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. It's the perfect complement to Time Machine under Leopard and Snow Leopard, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume—and it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs! A: Google Chrome Google Chrome is a lightweight, minimalistic web browser based off the open source project, Chromium. A: Homebrew "The missing package manager for OS X". Like MacPorts and Fink, but simpler to use and easy to contribute to. A: Xcode A good IDE for cocoa developers. Xcode 5 is now available on the Mac App Store. A: VLC media player At its simplest, it's a video player that'll play nearly anything. File extensions supported include: mov, mkv, flv, wmv. It's actually considerably more powerful than that in terms of streaming and converting, but even as a straight up video player, it's impressive. A: Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. A: MPlayer OSX Extended It is a media player. I like it more than VLC player. A: Audacity A free software, cross-platform digital audio editor and recording application (from Wikipedia). If you want to record plain old audio onto your computer, Audacity is a pretty easy way to do it. (Apple's optical drives from the past several years have implemented region lockout DRM in firmware, rather than simply software, so I can't play back DVDs from multiple regions on my Mac. It's a laptop, so "just buy a second DVD drive" isn't really feasible, and I'm not brave enough to try flashing it with a third-party firmware. Plugging in my DVD player to my Mac is quick and easy, though!) A: 1Password 1Password can create strong, unique passwords for you, remember them, and restore them, all directly in your web browser. A: Xee Xee is a lightweight, fast and convenient image viewer and browser. It is designed to be a serious tool for image viewing and management, with a sleek and powerful interface. Xee is useful as a more powerful replacement for Preview, or most any other image viewer available on Mac OS X. A: Onyx OnyX is a (free) multifunction utility for Mac OS X which allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure some hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, QuickTime, Safari, Mail, iTunes, Login window, Spotlight and many Apple’s applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more. I've seen this utility majorly improve the performance of Mac OS X. I run it about once a month to automate maintenance scripts and it's helped identify problems like the need to repair a disk several times. A very useful and effective tool. A: nvALT Unbeatable note-taking app, featuring online syncing with the plain text notes web service, Simplenote, and the simplenote apps for iPhone and iPad. nvAlt is a fork of the existing application, Notational Velocity. A: Fantastical Amazing background app for quickly accessing and adding events to your mac's calendar. Supports Caldev Sync to keep your mac's calendar always up to date, as well as natural writing event creation. Bring up fantastical with a keyboard shortcut, and then type out your new event. Hit return and it's in. Quickly view all the upcoming events for the next month and beyond. Next time you open iCal, all of your data will remain intact as Fantastical works with your software in the background. A: TextMate TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike. If you’re looking for a good editor, Sublime Text 2 is quite good too by now! A: Shift It (Uses the same principles as SizeUp, but free) This application will let you resize and move your windows without having to using a mouse. Here are some of things you can do with Shift It: * *Shift the focused window to left/right/top/bottom half of the screen. *Resize the focused window to fill the whole screen. *Move the focused window to the center of the screen. Shift It is a great tool that lets you organize your windows. Now you can read documents side-by-side without having the pain of manually resizing the windows. A: cdto Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd'd to the front most finder window. This app is designed (including it's icon) to placed in the finder window's toolbar. A: Default Folder X Augments the Open Folder and Save Folder dialogs from any application to allow you to immediately jump to any folder currently open by Finder. (Also works for folders open with Path Finder). Once you start using this app, it's really hard to live without it. A: Gitbox Gitbox is a Git repository manager. A: Airfoil Play any audio across your network to a whole host of devices, all in sync! Airfoil sends audio to remote speakers including iOS devices, other computers, and hardware devices like the Apple TV and AirPort Express. Airfoil for Mac gives you any audio, everywhere. Basically, what previously only iTunes could do (send audio to an AirPort Express) you can now do with all applications. A: Geektool Geektool allows you to put a tail of your syslog on the desktop, or the output of some command, or some graphic/chart/picture. It's a bit like a more single-minded Dashboard for your desktop. You can make awesome clocks, or beautiful server monitoring, or just a fortune cookie (if you install fortune with HomeBrew). It's not perfect (it would need sticky borders, continuous command output and sane multi-monitor behavior for that) but it's a lot of fun, using little resources. A: Alfred Alfred is a productivity application for Mac OS X, which aims to save you time in searching your local computer and the web. Whether it's maps, Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, you can feed your web addiction quicker than ever before. It's a wonderful piece because it enables you to: * *Increase your productivity by launching apps with shortcuts *Instant access to web searches, bookmarks & more *Browse and play music from your iTunes library quickly *Perform actions – copy, move & email files & folders *Ward off RSI – skip using the mouse with easy shortcuts A: Handbrake HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder. A: Adium Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X that can connect to AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more. It provides enhanced security by supporting the OTR messaging protocol out of the box. A: Tunnelblick Tunnelblick is a free, open source Graphic User Interface (GUI) for OpenVPN on Mac OS X. It provides easy control of OpenVPN client and/or server connections. A: VideoMonkey This is an open source replacement for VisualHub. It's free and lets you do all kinds of mass video conversions as well as auto-tagging your video with tv show / movie metadata. A: Hyperspaces Set names and separate background pictures for different spaces. Really helps me focus on one specific project at a time and helps me avoid tangents. A: Clyppan This is a really good clipboard manager. A: Zooom/2 Zooom/2 is a Mac desktop utility that redefines how you can resize, move and align your application windows - making you faster and more productive. On many X-based desktops (such as KDE and Gnome) you can resize windows from any side, move windows by clicking anywhere on the window, and switch windows simply by pointing your mouse. Zooom/2 brings the same functionality to Mac, and I can no longer live without it. For example, in my configuration I hold Shift-⌘ and click anywhere in a window to move it. No more hunting for the menu bar or the resize corner! A: Minuteur Quick and easy to use timer. It's programmable, so you can do (10+2)*5 or the Pomodoro technique on repeating intervals. The App is localized into English, but the linked webpage is French. The MacUpdate page is in English. A: Warp From the website: Warp is a preference pane that allows you to use the mouse to switch between Spaces rather than using the keyboard. Warp offers the ability to display a live preview of a space when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, allowing you to see what you have on another space before actually switching to it. Clicking the preview will then warp you to that space. A: Alarms Alarms app is the reminder system you never knew your Mac was missing. Just drag the items you want to be reminded of to the Alarms menu and place them on the time line. A: Pow Pow is a zero-config Rack server for Mac OS X. Have it serving your apps locally in under a minute. Simple to use and indispensable if you are doing any kind of Rails/Sinatra/Rack development A: Final Cut Express, a discontinued video-editing software made by Apple. Final Cut Express is one step above iMovie, with up to 99 video tracks, 99 audio tracks, and 12 compositing modes. My favorite features of FCE are Chroma Key, Color Correction, and Livetype, which comes with Final Cut Express. A: DragThing is a utility that provides an alternative to the Dock. It is tremendously flexible and customizable in letting you design your own way to organize application launchers. Let me be frank; I've been using a Mac every day since 1987. I cannot live without DragThing because I could never get used to using the Dock, which appeared with the first Mac OS X circa 2000 (and I was using developer builds of Mac OS X before the first version went public). While you can configure DragThing to perform many functions, what I use it for is to provide an application menu and an application launcher that behave the same way they did in Apple Macintosh System 7 through Mac OS 9. That's the way I want it. A: Final Cut Express I am so amazed no one has mentioned this! The best video editor for the price. Unfortunately Apple has abandoned FCE to go on to FCPX. I couldn't live without FCE! A: SecondBar SecondBar adds a second menu bar to your secondary monitor. Although there are a few bugs, it's a great little application. A: Keyboard Maestro An indispensable macro tool. Trigger a macro based on a hotkey (overriding the frontmost app if appropriate), typed strings (a la TextExpander, the status of an app, the system waking or your logging in, at certain times or dates, etc. A macro can do pretty much anything you can do manually -- manage apps, choose menu items, click on windows or dialog boxes or whatever, display text or Growl or other notifications, etc. -- including running scripts. Macros can also include flow control (if, while, etc.) for less straightforward tasks (e.g. in Photoshop CmdDelete deletes the current layer if a layer is selected or the current group of layers if a group is selected). One great use is unifying commands across apps, e.g. have Cmd- zoom out and Cmd= zoom in for every app that supports the concept rather than having to remember how, say, OmniGraffle does it vs Photoshop vs Numbers. Keyboard Maestro enables you to create or record custom macro shortcuts that you can activate at any time. For example, your macros could help you navigate runnings applications or work with an unlimited number of clipboards. Best of all, every macro you create is available using simple keystrokes you choose. A: Growl Extras - Hardware Growler, Growl Mail,... HardwareGrowler Find out when a hardware status changes on the Mac. Growl Mail Notifications for incoming mail. A:  MarcoPolo MarcoPolo brings context-aware computing to your Mac! It allows your computer to determine its context through gathering evidence from your environment (evidence sources), using flexible rule-based fuzzy matching to make an educated guess (rules), and then performing arbitrary actions upon changing context (actions). I use MarcoPolo to run scripts (actions) when I arrive at work, as determined by WiFi hotspots detected or IP addresses assigned (context). A: teleport Okay, did a search of all eight pages posted to date, and didn't see "teleport" listed. This little free System Preference gets installed on two computers, and then you can move your cursor off the screen of one, onto the screen of the other. I run a dedicated Mac Mini server, but my main computer is a Mac Pro. I have the server screen above the pro screen, and I can simply move my cursor up to the server, like you'd do with multiple monitors on the same computer. BRILLIANT! This is so much simpler and easier than using Screen Sharing or other such tools. It also copies the clipboard of one computer to the other. This can cause a significant delay if you have something huge on the clipboard. A: Simple Comic Simple Comic is the most intuitive comic reader on the Mac. Its clean interface gives you full control of your viewing experience without getting in the way. Reading comics on a computer has never been easier. A great program for looking any any set of archived images. Simple Comic viewer window http://dancingtortoise.com/simplecomic/images/screens/two_page.png A: Yep * *I scan all my documents to PDF and use Yep to track & find them. *No filing! Everything goes to a single target folder, Yep takes care of it. *Tag documents *Automatically finds all PDF, iWorks, Office, et.al. documents anywhere on your hard drive. *Does not use a database like some similar apps. So I can access documents via finder; move, copy, delete, etc. easily. *In conjunction with a Fujitsu Scan Snap scanner Yep is a dream to use. A: Tweetbot for Mac Though relatively new. Tweetbot for Mac is bringing the same innovation to the Mac platform that it's had established on iOS for a while now. A: EVE From website: EVE helps you to learn shortcuts, in order to increase your productivity with MAC OS X. Every time you execute an action using the mouse, EVE will show you the matching shortcut. Great application! I use it with Cheatsheet. A: SparkleShare SparkleShare allows you to create your own DropBox. In this way you don't have to pay for more space, if you have your own server, and you don't have to share data with no one else (service provided) except the people you decide. How does it work? SparkleShare creates a special folder on your computer in which projects are kept. All projects are automatically synced to their respective hosts (you can have multiple projects connected to different hosts) and to your team's SparkleShare folders when someone adds, removes or edits a file. Why SparkleShare? The idea of SparkleShare sprouted at the GNOME Usability Hackfest in London, where a couple of designers came to the conclusion that they didn't have a good (Open Source) collaboration tool to share their work (for more background, read “The one where the designers ask for a pony”). They didn't like how the good collaboration tools were proprietary, and that using them meant having to give up privacy, control and other rights. What they needed was something that they could run and control themselves, without having to depend on other companies. A: Vienna Viennna is a free open source RSS/Atom reader. Very flexible and version 3 will have Google Reader support. A: Glui I never really enjoyed using Skitch, even before Evernote bought them. Not too long ago I heard about Glui and have fallen in love ever since. It's quick, provides some useful annotating tools, uploads to Dropbox and the automatically copies the share url to your clipboard. Really has improved my workflow as a programmer. Makes it super easy to share screens when working with others. A: Monosnap Monosnap is a free screenshot program for Mac OS X and Windows. The program allows users to create screenshots, annotate them and upload them to the cloud. A: Hub List Very promising successor of The Hit List. Description: A HTML5 compliant productivity application From the author: Hub List tries to strike a balance between simplicity and customization. If you’ve every managed a software project then you’ve probably spent more time then you care to admit inside an ugly bug tracking application that a bunch of developers convinced you would make them more productive. You probably use another app to manage your business projects and then something else to help you remember all those pesky personal todos like getting your mom a card for mother’s day. Rather than try to replace all those tools Hub List strives to provide real-time two-way integration with all of them so you can be more productive using the tools you already have. Website: hublistapp.com A: switchDiskSizeBase In Mac OS 10.6 disk and file sizes are measured in base 10 (one kilobyte is defined as 1000 bytes, one megabyte is defined as 1000 kilobytes, etc.) in Finder and Disk Utility. Unfortunately this has created a lot of inconsistency even when working with Apple’s own programs since most of them still define file sizes in binary units (one kilobyte is defined as 1024 bytes, one megabyte is defined as 1024 kilobytes, etc.). This utility will switch the measurement of disk and file sizes in both Finder and Disk Utility back to binary units (or if the measurement has already been switched to binary units it will restore the system back to using base 10 units). After the switch in Snow Leopard I never could get used to read file sizes in Finder with base-10. This application patches the Foundation framework in order to get back base-2 units. I can now again compare disk space and file sizes with other operating systems or output from shell tools. A: Podworks I recently referred to the app in this thread. If you own both a Mac and an iPhone or iPod, this application is a must-have. Podworks works around iTunes to allow transfer of media to/from Mac and iOS devices. A: iMote I use it mostly to rate songs and get Growl to display the currently playing song. From the website: iMote is a simple, elegant, and lightweight program for controlling iTunes from just about any application. Play/pause, change tracks, select playlists, adjust volume, rate tracks, and more using fully customizable hot-keys or a universal menu bar item. iMote includes a beautiful iPod-esque floating window, indicating current track information, and Growl support if you want an even more streamlined experience with your other Growl-enabled applications. Written using Cocoa, iMote is lean and mean, consuming minimal system memory and CPU time. iMote is the original iTunes controller. A: News Anchor One of the few RSS readers that doesn't try to imitate an e-mail application, News Anchor converts inanimate text in news feeds into lively television-like news broadcasts. With News Anchor you can now "read" news feeds while eating or doing other things. A: Vuze Vuze, the most powerful bittorrent app on earth A: Monocle A great utility to make a web search (Google, Wikipedia, any other search engine) just a keystroke away regardless of what application I'm in. A: Livetype Livetype is an awesome title generator that came with FCE. It does have a rather steep learning curve if you aren't used to keyframing, but it generates professional-looking titles at a great price. A: Spark Spark is a powerful, and easy Shortcuts manager. With Spark you can create Hot Keys to launch applications and documents, execute AppleScript, control iTunes, and more... You can also export and import your Hot Keys library, or save it in HTML format to print it. Spark is free, so use it without moderation! I use this all the time and love it! A: App bar App Bar displays a quick list of all your applications. This is the quickest way possible to find and open any application launched from your Status Bar or Dock. All apps are listed alphabetical and the scroll list is well laid out and always just a click away. A: JiTouch JiTouch is similar to BetterTouchTool, but with many, many more options. The one thing it doesn't have is Windows 7 snapping, so keep BetterTouchTool around for that. I would highly recommend this application, though it's a paid application. A: Shimo - VPN management for the Mac Receive notifications via Growl. Assign network locations and wireless networks to profiles. * *CiscoVPN Support *OpenVPN Support *IPSec Support *PPTP/L2TP Support *Hamachi Support *SSH Support *Use Keychain for Passwords *Certificate Management *Advanced Notifications *Automatic (Re-)Connection *Syncing Profiles with MobileMe *Scriptable with AppleScript *Global Keyboard Shortcuts A: Sophos Anti-Virus Mac Home Edition Free commercial AV software. * *Fast signature updates *Low cpu usage *Live scan *Define custom scan scopes *Define action upon treat alert (log only, cleanup, move threat, delete threat) A: Scrawl Scrawl is nifty little note taking app for the Mac that I made with iCloud support. A: iProcrastinate iProcrastinate is the ideal task manager for anyone who doesn't want their todo list to get in the way of actually getting things done! Great for anyone who is looking for a mobile, easy-to-use task manager. (Not just for students!) Add birthdays, soccer practice and conference calls, all without missing a beat. Uses iCloud to sync between Mac and iOS. Couldn't do my homework without it. A: AppCode From JetBrains, the makers of IntelliJ. Has a lot more refactoring support than XCode and a more powerful editor. Especially useful to anyone coming to iOS development from the Java world. A: Emacs 24 Best text editor ever...Supports VIM bindings plus has org-mode and can run a shell, edit directories, view images, etc. Make sure to use the built-in package manager to load add-ons. Solarized-dark is an excellent color scheme. A: Herald Allow notification plugin for Mail.app. In ML you have notification center, but with Herald you also get the full message body which I really like. A: CCleaner One of best cleaning utility. CCleaner is the no. 1 cleaning utility for Windows PC. In Mac it does the same function, cleaning temp files, cookies, cache etc. for making more space available. The tools section provides utilities to uninstall an application, change startup option, erase free space and manage permissions. A: SafeWallet SafeWallet is a very useful and complete password manager, which allows you to safely keep you passwords, credit card pins, notes, and many more stored on your Mac. It also provides functionality for sharing your wallet with the iOS App (SafeWallet for iPhone). In this way your wallet is always with you and always synced. A: ControlPlane (free/open-source) This application can trigger a wide range on actions based on different events, its mainly use being to start/stop application based on your context. For example when you bring your laptop to work it can start Outlook. You can detect that you are at work based on the network IP, presence of a wireless network, or many other options. A: Debookee Debookee is a network traffic analyzer that allows you to see your traffic by protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, TCP, DHCP, DNS, SIP etc ... It can also scan all the devices present on your network, and intercept the traffic of any of them, perfect to see what your iPhone or tablet is sending over the network. A: PogoPlug There's a software version as well as the hardware box that creates a cloud server. The software version allows me to set a folder or drive on my Mac and link to it so I can let others access. I know there are other ways to do this, but for me the $20 ($30 now, I think) was well spent as the software is simple and no glitches. If you have a good friend and you both agree to leave your computers running, you can use the other's extra drive to store your backup with no monthly fee, just install a decent size drive at the friend's house. A: Airmail After last year Sparrow acquisition from Google and development freeze, Airmail is new, actively developed mail client. It does not hide it's Sparrow roots, but exceeds it and new features are constantly added. A: Entropy dEntropy Logo http://bit.ly/16BItjE I use it as my daily productivity booster since it moves all files I haven't touched within the last week from my Desktop into my archive. It has many more features you may find interesting. Here is a trailer. Disclaimer: I'm the creator. Ask me anything. ;) A: Unclutter Main features: * *Instant, configurable access even in full screen mode *File Storage, to keep your Desktop clean from temporary files *Notes, your digital notepad *Clipboard preview, so you always know what you're about to share *Draggable cards that can stick on top of other windows *Retina display support A: Gimp Very powerful and free and open source image editor, inspired by PhotoShop. Has layers, RGB and indexed modes, and more tools and filters than you can shake a stick at. Since version 2.8 Gimp is OS X native. Screenshots - Features A: Fuzzyclock "Often you don't need the exact time in hours, minutes and seconds. A more human readable style like "five past ten" makes more sense. For that, you can now use FuzzyClock. FuzzyClock is a menubar clock which displays the current time in a "fuzzy" style." I use the handwriting font. (Alfred, Cloudapp and Growl have been said). A: StockMeter

Q: Windows print screen when using Boot Camp I have bootcamp installed on my Mac, and when on Windows, I need to frequently capture screens using windows shortcuts such as Print Screen. Using virtualization is not an option, since I need to run a virtualized environment within Windows already. On the Mac keyboard (I have a MacBook Pro, and an external think aluminum keyboard), there isn't a print screen key. Is there any equivalent when using a mac keyboard? A: Follow these instructions in order to map the F13-F15 keys on an Apple keyboard to the functions, Print Screen, Scroll Lock, and Break commonly found on PC keyboards: * *On your PC, copy the following lines into a text file. REGEDIT4 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout] "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,04,00,00,00,46,E0,5F,00,46,00,5E,00,37,E0,5D,00,00,00,00,00 * *Rename the text file remap.reg *Double click on the file remap.reg and answer yes to the question about adding the information to the registry *Reboot Function keys are now remapped to their PC equivalents Source: MacWindows.com A: This article at Apple's KB includes the mapping of Windows keys to each of their keyboards. A: Under Windows (with Boot Camp software installed) you can press F13 or Fn+F11 to take a screenshot.

Q: How can I get DoubleTwist to differentiate between music and podcasts? Since iTunes has no way to sync with my Motorola Droid, and all of my music is on my Macbook Pro, I recently tried out DoubleTwist. It detected my Droid right away. The problem is that when I chose to sync all of my music, DoubleTwist also synced all of my podcasts, which quickly filled up my sd card with stuff I don't want on there. Is there a way to have it only sync my iTunes music library and ignore podcasts? A: Judging by the screenshots, doubleTwist allows syncing specific playlists and has smart playlists. Create a smart playlist that would contain all your library but not podcasts (excluding genre Podcast), and sync it.

Q: Sync iPhone with multiple Macs Is it possible to sync an iPhone with multiple computers? I know the music will be restricted, and I don't mind. I want the contacts, bookmarks, etc. to be in sync across my home iMac and my MacBook. A: The best way to synchronize contacts and bookmarks between several Mac and/or iPhone is to use MobileMe (now iCloud). It will sync all as you need where you want. A: You actually don't have to buy MobileMe to sync contacts and calendar to multiple Macs and multiple iOS devices. This can be accomplished with only a free Google account. If you want more details on how to set it up, please ask. As far as I know, there is no way to sync bookmarks without MobileMe. A: Actually, I just answered the question to how to keep your device's music library synchronized with 2 machines as well: Sync iTunes U between 2 Macs via an iPod A: One way to partly solve this (without paying for MobileMe) is by syncing certain data between different computers using Dropbox. (This approach was suggested in a Super User question about syncing home folders that I asked a year ago.) To sync contacts, for example, share AddressBook's application data between your Macs like this: * *Move the folder ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook (on the computer where you have the data) to your Dropbox. *On each computer you wish to sync, create a symlink from ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook to that folder in your Dropbox. These screenshots show what the setup looks like on one of my computers: (If you need more detailed instructions, please let me know!) For bookmarks, you'd need to share some Safari application data (I don't know which files/folders exactly as I haven't done that myself). Obviously this isn't optimal, but once you set it up, it works pretty well. I think Apple is sooner or later going to provide better (cloud-based, even wireless) sync across multiple devices (also to those who're not paying extra for the service). Well, at any rate they should, as they are lagging behind Google quite badly in this respect. A: You can have your music synced to one computer and contacts synced to another - no problem.

Q: Creating a new file blocks Textmate When I want to create a new file through the button (left-bottom one) in the project drawer or in the file menu it takes a long time and blocks TextMate and even blocks TextMate totally in some cases. I've installed the latest version of TextMate and installed all updates available for Mac OS X. Anyone any idea what the problem is? A: I just tested it with a couple of different massive projects on my MBP and it created a new file right away. First guess would be perhaps a bundle or other plugin you've added is interfering with the program operation somehow. You could also try trashing your Textmate preferences file and restart the program to see if that helps (~/Library/Preferences/com.macromates.textmate.plist). A: Do you have any external drives connected? Certain external hard drives will go into some sort of dormant mode when they haven't been used in a while, and will block things until they spin back up. This is triggered by anything requiring filesystem access, whether you're trying to access those drives or not. If this is your issue, it'll be very intermittent, and caused by other attempts to access the file system (Open File and Save File dialogs being common). Furthermore, it won't be limited to just Textmate, but your usage patterns may mean it mostly shows up there. The solution, in this case, would be to unplug the external drives when not in use. Of course, this isn't to say this /is/ your issue, but it would more or less fix your symptoms.

Q: Dot-files and other meta data on non-Mac network shares Is there a way to tell Finder to not use (or worry about) the ._* files and other meta-data files it normally tries to use when it's on a network share? Currently when I'm in Finder and I try to copy a file to a network share it results in an error: The Finder can’t complete the operation because some data in “file_name” can’t be read or written. (Error code -36) But I can copy the file from the terminal command line to the network share and use it from Finder afterward just fine. It seems that the meta-data isn't really needed on the network share. Is there a way to tell Finder this? For reference, I'm using Snow Leopard and the share is a Samba share on a Linux server. A: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true Will get rid of the DS files. Anything else you might have to do by hand. A: Adapted from https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/57832/8546 Finder Finder does much to ensure integrity of data, and to make its results compatible with a broad range of Apple operating systems. For some types of copy/move routines, ._ (dot underscore) files are required. File system If creation of ._ files is prevented at the file system level, then that file system is partially incompatible with at least: * *Apple Finder *Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint and Word 2011. (For any use case that involves Office 2011 saving to a file system, you must allow ._ on that file system … and so on.) Error code -36 -36 (ioErr) (I/O error) is a file system error, it indicates that data cannot be sent or received by the operating system. Historically, errors of this type were bummers. Without knowing the detail of your Samba configuration: * *I guess that in your case, error -36 is the result of a file system restriction. For more detail please see my answer to an older question, Why are dot underscore ._ files created, and how can I avoid them?: * *Purposes of .DS_Store and ._ files A: Is the file you're trying to copy using a resource fork? If you're dealing with .DS_Store file issues run the following command in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true If you're having issues with resource forks on Snow Leopard you may need to change your settings for the streams setting in smb.conf on the Linux machine or nsmb.conf on your local Mac. (._FILENAME files are the resource forks of the file). Check out Super User for more details on this. A: This is not working for me anymore. So i have added ._* to the veto files I think it's works but i don't know if it has other complications? vi /etc/samba/smb.conf [global] veto files = /._*/.AppleDB/.AppleDouble/.AppleDesktop/:2eDS_Store/Network Trash Folder/Temporary Items/TheVolumeSettingsFolder/.@_thumb/.@_desc/:2e*/ (esc-shift-ZZ) service smb restart service nmb restart

Q: What's the difference between Real, Virtual, Shared, and Private Memory? The different columns in Activity Monitor are a little confusing A: Real mem relates to physical memory (actual RAM modules in your computer). Virtual Mem is how much "fake" memory is allocated to the process, meaning memory that is allocated on the permanent storage medium (hard drive, solid state drive, etc) for that process. Shared memory is physical (Real) memory that can be shared with other processes. Private memory is "real" memory that can only be used by the process it is allocated to. These explanations may help as well... directly from activity monitor --> help --> viewing system memory usage: Here is an explanation of some of the information displayed at the bottom of the memory pane: * *Wired: Wired memory contains information that must always stay in RAM *Active: Active memory that contains information that is actively being used. *Inactive: Inactive memory contains information that is not actively being used. Leaving this information in RAM is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back to it later. *Used: Used memory is being used by a process or by the system. Used memory is the sum of wired, active, and inactive memory. If the system requires memory it takes free memory before used memory. *Free: Free memory is not being used and is immediately available. *VM size: Virtual memory, or VM, is hard disk space that can be used as memory. VM size is the amount of disk space being used as memory. Mac OS X can use more memory than the amount of physical RAM you have. A hard disk is much slower than RAM, so the virtual memory system automatically distributes information between disk space and RAM for efficient performance. Page ins/outs: The number of gigabytes of information Mac OS X has moved between RAM and disk space A: Apple updated the Activity Monitor in OSX 10.9 (Mavericks). They have a good article about what everything means here http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5890. In summary... * *Physical Memory: The amount of RAM installed. *Memory Used: The amount of RAM being used and not immediately available for other apps. *Virtual Memory: The amount of memory mapping that apps have asked for. This is not an actual consumption of RAM resources and it size is determined by the author of the app. *Swap Used: The space on your drive being used to swap unused files to and from RAM. It is normal to see some activity and it is not a indication that you have depleted RAM resources. Seeing memory pressure in the Red state will indicate that RAM resources are depleted. *App Memory: The amount of space being used by apps. *Wired Memory: Memory that can’t be cached to disk, so it must stay in RAM. This memory can’t be borrowed by other apps. *Compressed: The amount of memory in RAM that is compressed, making more RAM resources available for other apps. *File Cache: The space in RAM marked as available for apps to use that contains recently used files. Memory Pressure graph The combination of Free, Wired, Active, Inactive & Used memory statistics in previous versions of Activity Monitor have been replaced in Mavericks with an easy to read "Memory Pressure" graph. Memory pressure is indicated by color: * *Green – RAM memory resources are available. *Amber – RAM memory resources are being tasked. *Red – RAM memory resources are depleted and OS X is using the drive for memory. A: Taken from my answer at Server Fault: Mac OS X Memory Jargon: Wired : This refers to kernel code and such. Memory that should not ever be moved out of the RAM. Also know as resident memory. Shared : Memory that is shared between two or more processes. Both processes would show this amount of memory so it can be a bit misleading as to how much memory is actually in use. Real : This is the "real" memory usage for an application as reported by task_info() - a rough count of the number of physical pages that the current process has. (RSIZE) Private : This is memory that a process is using solely on its own that is used in Resident memory. (RPRVT) Virtual : The total amount of address space in the process that's mapped to anything - whether that's an arbitrarily large space for variables or anything - it does not equate to actual VM use. (VSIZE) Active : Memory currently labelled as active and is used RAM. Inactive : "Inactive memory is no longer being used and has been cached to disk. It will remain in RAM until another application needs the space. Leaving this information in RAM is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back to it later." - Mac OS X Help Free : The amount of RAM actually available without any data. The best documentation I know of (and have been able to find in followup research) is Apple's own Managing Memory article on their developer website. Other worthwhile sources: Darwin-dev mailing list: [1], [2] and an old article on MacOSXHints. Additionally Mike Ash has posted a good layman's introduction on his blog

Q: How can I get Snow Leopard to properly reconnect to my Windows network drives after it goes to sleep? My mac goes to sleep. It wakes up. The volumes mounted to a Windows server in my house all work. I can see pictures and listen to music. Until I can't. After two or three sleep/wake cycles, I can't connect to the Windows server at all, with Finder hanging infinitely on trying to connect. I have to reboot the entire machine to reconnect properly. With OS X 10.5, I never could get the volumes to reconnect after sleep, but at least they didn't sabotage Finder. Anyone have any ideas? I hate leaving the mac running all the time. (27" 2010 iMac, OS X 10.6.4) A: This is a known issue, and has no current hotfix or resolution. The problem is in the samba implementation. The only thing I can think of doing is writing a script to umount your samba just before sleep, and mounting right after sleep. (Nobody has done this yet) Most educated source on the problem I could find: https://superuser.com/questions/144327/mac-os-cant-connect-to-smb-shares-after-sleep A: I had this issue as well and found sleepwatcher to do what I need. I found this article http://imclumzy.wordpress.com/2009/12/28/mac-osx-automatic-smb-mount-script-using-sleepwatcher/ I used created the main script as he has it and then another to calls this one with one line for each volume I need to mount, for example: sh ~/Scripts/mountShare.sh /Volumes/Music bundywhs/Music. I don't have the username and password in it since i store it in my keychain. One other note, his article has the sleep time set to 10 seconds in his wakeup script. That seems to work fine when I am on wireless but for me my wired network takes longer to come back so I changed it to 30 seconds.

Q: Can the keys on the MacBook Pro be removed for cleaning? The MacBook Pro does a really good job keeping dirt and stuff from getting under the keys, but none-the-less there is some dirt under a few keys. Can I pop these keys off and then easily replace them? In the past when I've done this, the key never really went back on correctly. This is the newer Unibody MBP with the black backlite chiclet keys. A: If they keys are square without beveled edges then no. Removing it would require major surgery to remove. I recommend a can of air duster, some q-tips, and alcohol to clean the keyboard. A: Without knowing which specific model you are referring to it would be hard to tell. The keyboards on the newer unibody macbook pros are one assembly and it would not be advised to try to take off the keys. A: Yes - all keys on all mac portables in the past 10 years or so are individually removable. There are very delicate plastic scissors hidden under the key caps. Also - the scissors are not necessarily all oriented the same way. The return key may have two vertical scissors where an H key may have one horizontal scissors mechanism underneath. Also - the size of say a small arrow key may not be the same size as a function key at the top. Large keys such as the space bar and the option keys have added metal supports and you may need a large amount of patience to get them back. If you damage the very small delicate nubs - you will have broken that key and have to press the little rubber nubbin by hand until you can get a replacement. If you bend the metal rings that hold the scissors (or the actual switch) - the repair cost is much higher. Most lighted whole keyboards go for $65 to $300 plus labor. Do your research before starting so you won't be that person with a plastic baggie of parts that are close but not identical waiting in line at the genius bar for help with a tedious repair. :-) If you know the cost to replace and have a steady hand - dive in and go get those crumbs :-) A: A bit offtopic answer, but sometimes get handy: http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/23536/keyboard-cleaner :)

Q: Is there any way to print directly from my iPad to my wifi-connected printer? I am happy to purchase an app, but the only printing app I'm aware of seems to just let your ipad connect to a computer that is connected to the printer and effectively print through it. I'm looking to print from my ipad without the use of another computer. Both the ipad and the printer are on the same wifi network (which is how I print from our laptops). EDIT: In my specific case, the printer is a Canon MP990. A: iOS 4.3 now offer AirPrint. A: If you want to print pictures and photos, you can use Epson iPrint (there are similar apps from other printer manufacturers, e.g. Canon iEPP, HP iPrint Photo 2.0, Kodak Pic Flick or Lexmark LexPrint). For printing PDFs or other documents, the already mentioned "print n share", "Print Bureau" (both from eurosmartz) or Air Sharing Pro from Avatron could be useful. Via piquadrat answering my similar question on gadgets.stackexchange.com. A: Canon made a utility for their printers called Easy-PhotoPrint. Otherwise, they are more generic utility like ePrint (but it's far more perfect or convenient). A: I have used the iPad part of PrintCentral with mixed results - I have a HP Color LaserJet 2605dn connected to an Apple Airport router. The printer is configured as 'A4' (I'm in the UK) and while some things print just fine from the iPad, other things seem to have pagination issues. Printing from emails and Safari generally seems okay. To be fair I think that the only way you're going to get this to work seamlessly is if you can find a wifi printer with drivers for the iPad (do they even exist) - everything else is likely to be some kind of compromise. EDIT: Just to be clear, PrintCentral can either print directly to the 'network' printer, or can send data to an app on your Mac/PC. I haven't tried the latter approach (and your question says you don't want to do it that way anyway) - but I have used it to connect and directly print to my HP from the iPad. A: Have you tried Google Cloud Print? https://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/apps.html A: The answer depends on what kind of printer you have. The fundamental problem is printer drivers. That is why all of the apps use a server/proxy on a desktop computer, that way the can piggyback the desktops existing printer drivers. Otherwise they would need to include drivers for all supported printers. A few of the printer vendors have iPhone/iPad apps that can take to their network printers, but obviously those only support their printers (an usually only recent ones). I expect this to change at some point in the future (when Apple builds printing support into iOS), but this how things stand with iOS 3.2/4.0.

Q: Is there any way to get a pop-up notification on my iPhone or iPad when mail arrives? I have gmail set up to send me "true" push notifications (using the exchange server setup). So my mail arrives in realtime, and I instantly get badges on my springboard screen to indicate new messages. But I want to be able to get a pop-up with the sender and subject, like I would with an SMS, or an IM using Beejive. Is there really no way to do this? It would be especially helpful when I'm in another app, and don't mind the pop-up's interruption, but would like to know who the message is from before deciding to leave the app to check mail. A: With the release of iOS 5 mail can now appera as a pop up box style notifacation. Goto Settings>Notifications>Mail> the choose "Alerts" in the alert style menu. you will then have something that looks like a message notification when an email arrives A: Give BoxCar a go. I use it in a similar way for Twitter Direct Message notifications. A: I use a combination of Notify and Prowl, running on a spare Mac. I found so many other uses for Prowl, such as sending push notifications from a script. A: Don't use the standard Gmail configuration from iPhone, use Google Sync. Here: Google Sync: Set Up Your Apple Device for Google SyncShare Comment A: This isn't a way to fix your issue now, but I believe iOS 5 will be able to do what you want when it's released this fall according to: http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/features.html#notification I see screenshots with mail notifications on the top of the screen and I believe these can be configured to be current-style pop-ups per app. A: I use a combo of Apple Mail rules, an AppleScript, and Howl (another growl app similar to Prowl mentioned above). Name the Mail rule like so: "growl-TestPost" as indicated in the AppleScript, then set up the considitons and trigger this AppleScript to run. Then set up your Growl display style to use that of Howl (or Prowl). Here is the AppleScript, unfortunately I do not have info on the original author's script which I modified: on run -- at current, the registration is done whenever you launch the script, -- and also below whenever the the script itself is run by Mail -- (that let's users make new notification on the fly, sort of...) -- could probably find a more graceful semaphor, but... register() end run using terms from application "Mail" on perform mail action with messages messageList for rule theRule set theRuleName to name of theRule if theRuleName does not start with "growl-" then return register() -- extract notification type from rule name set noteType to characters 7 thru (length of theRuleName) of theRuleName as text repeat with thisMessage in messageList -- basic information for notification set theSender to sender of thisMessage set theSubject to subject of thisMessage set theText to (content of thisMessage) set tid to AppleScript's text item delimiters set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " " try set theSummary to (text items 1 through 20 of theText) as text on error set theSummary to theText end try set AppleScript's text item delimiters to tid -- notify tell application "GrowlHelperApp" to notify with name noteType ¬ title noteType description ¬ "From: " & theSender & return & "Subject: " & theSubject ¬ application name "MailGrowl" end repeat -- if we want to coalesce or order the notifications, then we'd put the -- notifications into an array above and notify GHA here. I'm not completely -- on the structures that are required for grouped messages, though.. end perform mail action with messages end using terms from to register() tell application "Mail" set ruleList to name of every rule whose name begins with "growl" end tell set noteTypes to {} repeat with theRuleName in ruleList set end of noteTypes to (characters 7 thru (length of theRuleName) of theRuleName as text) end repeat tell application "GrowlHelperApp" register as application "MailGrowl" all notifications noteTypes ¬ default notifications noteTypes ¬ icon of application "Mail" end tell end register

Q: Why didn't my Windows partition show up in the Startup Disk preference pane? I install Windows(XP after that 7) on my MBP with Boot Camp and every thing was fine but after a while in System Prefences -> Startup Disk my windows partition was lost and when I want to switch to my windows must restart my Laptop and Press Down option during startup. I can't switch directly from my OS X. anyone know how can I solve this. or why this is happened? A: Did you by any chance install the NTFS-3G driver? It's a known bug (for quite some time, now). When installed, you can no longer have the Windows partition in the Startup Disk prefpane. A: You shouldn't have to eject your Bootcamp disk from your Desktop. As soon as you do that, it's unavailable to the system until you reboot. A quick tip: if you don't want your Bootcamp drive to display on your OS X Desktop, boot into windows and then rename your C: drive to a name that starts with a period. OS X will treat it as a "hidden" file and not display the icon. Been using that trick since Bootcamp was in beta and have never had a problem with it. A: I found a solution, if you haven't already. I'm assuming here that you have already uninstalled the NTFS-3G Driver Browse to /yourhdd/Library/ and search that folder for a file called com.tuxera.NTFS.plist - I found mine in .../Library/Filesystems/NetFSPlugins Open that file with a property list editor. I used Open with Property List Editor 2.1 Look for a Property, Disable Driver, change it's value to 1, and restart, should be fixed. A: I had this issue with the latest version of Tuxera NTFS and El Capitan. I reinstalled Tuxera, restarted and all game good again. My bootcamp drive was accessible again via the desktop. A: In the NTFS control panel, there is an option to uninstall. I did that, and, without restarting, I have the option again!

Q: Are there sites that support editing and ordering photo prints, cards, and books on an iPad? I'm reposting this question (unchanged) from webapps.stackexchange.com, because I've received no answers there and this seems like an appropriate question for the Apple Stack Exchange site. I've tried the Shutterfly iPad app, which allows uploading photos, but doesn't support any other functionality available on the website. And I can't edit photos or design cards and books from the Mobile Safari browswer on the iPad, presumably because those features use Flash. Are there any other photo websites that provide either a full-featured iPad app (that includes creating cards and books and ordering prints) or an iPad or iPhone app that allows uploading photos and a website that allows one to create cards and books and order prints in Mobile Safari? Note, I download photos directly from my camera to the iPad, so I'm trying to figure out how to avoid any need for a PC. Someone (on vark.com) recommended Apple's MobileMe (http://me.com). But http://www.apple.com/mobileme/features/gallery.html doesn't show that it supports editing photos and ordering prints, cards, and books. Does anyone have experience with MobileMe? A: I don't really have a direct answer for you, but I would like to help by sharing what I know. I have a Mobile Me account, and there are no tools for editing your photos online. It's an image gallery. A gallery is meant just for viewing and not for editing. Mobile Me was designed to work in conjunction with the iLife software on a desktop mac. You edit the photos, order the prints, make the cards, and the books in the iPhoto app on the Mac. Photo editing on the iPad is the easy part, but I think you are approaching it from the wrong angle. There are tons of free (and cheap) apps that allow you to edit photos. (Photoshop Mobile for instance. Just check the Photography category in the App Store). Once you edit them in an app, then I would upload them to a service that supports printing services. The hard part is going to be the ordering of prints, cards and books from the iPad. We can only hope that sometime in the near future, Apple creates a mobile version of iPhoto just as they did with iMovie. That would be ideal. EDIT * *You can order prints from this app as well: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=323705153&mt=8%3FpartnerId%3D30&siteID=KEmRFwU0WKY-yY5rDqaKJMaSUWCfbLPC3w *You can also order prints from the Walgreens app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/walgreens/id335364882?mt=8 *This might solve your issue as well! http://www.ritzpix.com/net/OrderPrints/ *You might want to check out this app and service: http://www.ecce-terram.com/order-solutions/mobile-client.html ECCE TERRAM announced a new service this week that will allow people to order prints of photos stored on their iPhones from the phones themselves. With their Photo2lab Client, users may select a photo (both those taken with the iPhone and those transfered from iPhoto), add text and create prints, post cards and even mini photo books. You'll even be able to add an address to a post card from the iPhone's built-in contacts list. A: I downloaded the Walgreens app and emailed pics to my local store. The only problem is if you edit your photos on the iPad, it doesn't transfer to the store. So just use their browse and edit button, fix the pics there and create an album, send and pick up in hours. So far this has worked. A: Only answer I can think of would be something like Phanfare loading up to flikr/Phanfare or via SmugMug and the smugshot app combined with the smugmug webpage (which is not mobile friendly, but isn't flash infested either). A: Just released. I hope this helps: http://itunes.apple.com/app/roes/id533327862?mt=8

Q: What is the best media player for the mac (besides .mov - e.g., .mp3, .wmv, .avi, .mpg, etc) I've recently switched from PC to Mac, so I'm slowly building a library of useful utilities. So, any recommendations for the best generic media player? On the PC - I've found the VLC player to be pretty useful - there's a Mac version, but I don't know how it compares to other alternatives. Many of the alternatives on the PC are full of crap - e.g., constantly pushing toolbars, add-ins, anti-virus junk, etc. So, I'd like something lightweight and crapware free. I'd be happy to pay $20-$30 for something that was worth it. A: I like Movist. It has the format flexibility of VLC, but with a nicer Mac-like interface. A: I vastly prefer the experience of using Quicktime with a little help from Perian and Flip4Mac to give it compatability with 90% of the video I need to play. For the rare stubborn video that does not want to cooperate with that setup, I break out VLC, because of VLC can't play it, it's just not going to play. A: VLC is a nice player, but if you want something more Mac OS-like, try Lunettes (download link beta 8 is the last one at the time of writing). Basically, it's VLC rewritten fully in 64 bits and Obj-C. You do not have to build it yourself ! Just extract the .app from the zip file, that's all. A: VLC is by far the best. Fast, extensible, and versatile. You can play just about any format video, Video_TS file, remote disks, remote streams, even pipe the output of a command into it to play. Can you say on the fly video manipulation? That's VLC. Not to mention the main selling point, it's free. Quicktime? Slow. Plugins? Hokey. Alternatives? Either not very "native" or buggy, slow, and prone to crashing. There is not one thing I have been unable to play with VLC that I had to use something else. Okay, one thing. The MKV support on it is a bit of a pain. Try seeking with a 4GB MKV file. A: VLC is best media player in OS X too. and it's free also. but if you install perian in your mac (it's free too) I suggest use QuickTime. peran it's component for Quicktime to support many extension for media on mac. A: I can only agree regarding VLC. It's best. I've tried quite a few (MplayerX, MplayerOSX, QuickTime and some others), since the UI is, just like on Windows, ugly and non-slick, but it still win by far. What I like the most are all the keyboard shortcuts for everything. Currently my standard setup is to use VLC together with AirFoil. The problem then is of course the 2 second delay for sound to the AirPort Express, this is however easy to solve with the f key, delay sound 2000 ms (g reduces the delay). Or if you get hold of some subtitle that totally out of sync, use h and j to delay the text. I use this all the time. None of the others I tried have easy (if any) access to these features, and thus make the unusable for me and my lovely AirPort Express setup at home. A: I like VLC, but I end up using Mplayer OSX Extended more often. I find the default shortcut key mappings to be more intuitive. And it's as versatile as VLC in terms of file format compatibility. A: VLC really do a good job, but sometimes it fails me when dealing with some Blu-ray issue. I do a lot of homework on this, finally I got Macgo Blu-ray player. I won't say it's the best or perfect, while it meets my needs currently. There is a little friction in the playing of one disc but no big deal.

Q: Adding a new processor I've got a Mac Pro (Jan-2008) 2.8GHz Quad-core Xeon with one processor. Do all the Mac Pro's have the two sockets motherboards even if it's purchased with one processor? If so can I purchase an equivalent Intel Xeon proc and install it to have the 8-core? A: No, single processor Mac Pros ship with a single socket motherboard, and use Xeon 3000 series processors, not the more expensive Xeon 5000 series needed for dual socket support.

Q: What are some good sources for Pages and Keynote templates? It doesn't matter whether they are for free or for purchase as long as they are compatible. A: The best commercial packages of themes for the iWork apps, in my experience, are those from Jumsoft.(under Design) They produce themes for both Pages and Keynote, as well as animation and art packs. For free templates, iWorkCommunity has a ton of Pages templates, and some decent Numbers templates as well for basic use. KeynoteUser also produces commercial themes, in addition to having some freebies, and an excellent blog and collection of links for other sources of high quality stuff. A: Interesting. You can find some nice examples on Themeforest, they should have a big list of such items. http://wisset.com/premium-keynote-templates/ A: Klariti has SDLC and business templates over but these are for professionals. http://klariti.com/apple-iwork-templates/