Archive for the ‘Macintosh Tips & Help’ Category

How to Clear the Google Search Box History in Safari

Posted on July 8th, 2010 in Macintosh Tips & Help | View Comments

I wrote this post on how to clear the Google search box to bring “clean solutions” (without having to add any third party application to your system).

Because I’m against third party applications that modify the system, and because there are easy todo “hand made” solutions.

Indeed, two easy solutions coexist to this problem.

Reset Safari
This just doesn’t erase your google data, it erases your cookies, autofills, cache, history list, usernames, and passwords.

1. Goto the Safari menu
2. Click Safari
3. Select Reset Safari

Clearing Just Your Google History

1. Goto the Safari Menu
2. Select Preferences
3. Select Autofill tab
4. Select the Edit button from the Other Forms Line
5. From the AutoFill list of sites select Google.com
6. Select Remove
7. Select Done

Open UIF files on your Mac (by converting them first to ISO)

Posted on June 7th, 2010 in 3rd Party Software, Mac OS X, Macintosh Tips & Help | View Comments


Here is the only way I found to open .UIF disc images (without having to start my bootcamp partition and mount them with MagicISO).
The little tool I’m blogging about is free and is called: “UIF 2 ISO 4 Mac” and can be downloaded here.

How to use it: start UIF2ISO4Mac, drag the .UIF file on the application icon right on the dock, the conversion process starts and you’ll find the output file in the same path than the input file.


Growl Animated Styles

Posted on December 19th, 2009 in 3rd Party Software, Macintosh Tips & Help, Mods and Hacks | View Comments

Superb, I didn’t even know there were such a thing….
Growl animated styles to add to Growl as fast as a double click.
Made by Christopher Lobay, Christopher Lobay is a designer and developer.
He is the co-founder and Creative Director of Handcraft, a boutique creative agency.
Previously, he co-founded Infinite Ammo, an indie game company.

These styles: Mono and Basic, can be downloaded from here.

Send SMS via Bluetooth phone from Address Book

Posted on November 15th, 2009 in Address Book, iSync & iCal, Macintosh Tips & Help | View Comments

bluetooth

For anybody missing the ability of Address Book.app to send SMS messages (Apple Kbase article), which was present in 10.4 but removed in 10.5 and has been missing ever since, there is now a free plugin I’ve written to provide some of the missing functionality.

It adapts the SMS sending code from the emitSMS Dashboard widget into an Address Book action plug-in, which should be compatible with 10.5 and 10.6. Unfortunately, SMS receiving and dialing numbers via Bluetooth aren’t supported, so it doesn’t replace everything Apple removed in the Leopard version of Address Book, but it should provide a little more ease of use.

Just download the plug-in (96KB), expand the zip file, and then drop it in /Library/Address Book Plug-Ins. You can find more instructions and usage notes on my site.

Quick Tip: Fast Exposé Shortcut

Posted on November 15th, 2009 in Macintosh Tips & Help, Snow Leopard | View Comments

Whenever you want to open the Exposé view of an application, usually mac users will advice you on using Hot Corner. However, we have a new trick here for you.

Open ‘Application Switcher’ with Cmd-Tab
Press Tabs until the app you want to perform Exposé to is selected
Hit the arrow key < or > and the Exposé for that app will appear
It’s fast, quick, and totally free of mouse actions.
But unfortunately, this trick only works in Snow Leopard.

QuickTip: Disable Spotlight and remove Spotlight icon from menu

Posted on November 4th, 2009 in Macintosh Tips & Help | View Comments

To turn Spotlight Indexing off and on in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and to remove the Menu Bar Icon, follow these steps…

To turn Spotlight Indexing off in open Terminal and run this command:
sudo mdutil -a -i off
To turn Spotlight Indexing back on, repeat the above command, but change off to on. To remove the menu bar icon, run this Terminal command:
sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
You’ll then to restart the menu bar with killall SystemUIServer to see the icon vanish.

Switch to Snow Leopard 2D Dock in a single Terminal command

Posted on October 25th, 2009 in Macintosh Tips & Help, Snow Leopard | View Comments

Want to have a 2D dock instead of the 3D one without installing any third party application.

  • Start OS X Terminal,
  • copy/paste this command:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

A fix for failure to connect to new wireless networks

Posted on October 22nd, 2009 in Macintosh Tips & Help | View Comments

For those experiencing problems connecting to wireless networks after upgrading from 10.5 to 10.6.
Here’s the trick to solve this issue:

  1. open Library » Preferences » SystemConfiguration,
  2. trash the entire contents of that folder,
  3. also delete all locations in System Preferences » Network
  4. recreate the location Automatic,
  5. Reboot