Mac

Stay up-to-date on the latest Mac news, and tutorials. Get expert tips and tricks to optimize your Mac’s performance and learn about the latest Apple products and software updates. Discover the best Mac apps and accessories to enhance your user experience.

How to rotate a video on your Mac

Every so often, you may come across the need to rotate a video after you've recorded it with your camera or iOS device because it didn't quite come out how you expected it to.

Fortunately, Apple's QuickTime app, which is built into the macOS operating system on your Mac, is powerful enough to do just that; and it's very easy to do.

In this tutorial, we'll be showing you how to rotate a video in any direction on your Mac using the QuickTime app.

How to move Photos library to an external drive

In addition to moving your multi-gigabyte iTunes library to an external drive, a significant amount of Mac storage space can be freed up by moving your photo libraries onto a separate drive.

If you take a lot of pictures with a DSLR camera or your iOS devices and import them in Photos, you'll fairly quickly run out of free space on most Macs.

This tutorial will guide you through the process of moving an entire library of photos to an external drive, preferably to a much larger external hard drive, in a way that won't disrupt your photography workflow.

Apple seeds OS X 10.11.4 beta 3 to developers

In addition to several other releases, Apple on Monday pushed out the third developer beta of OS X 10.11.4. The update is available either via the Updates tab of the Mac App Store for current 10.11.4 testers, or on Apple's developer website as a standalone download.

Today's beta 3 comes two weeks after beta 2 and nearly a month after the original version of 10.11.4 was released. The update is mostly under-the-hood improvements, but it does include a few new features such as support for Live Photos and password-protected Notes.

How to view your download history in the Mac App Store

Heavy Mac App Store users will download, install, and delete apps from their Mac all the time. It may be because you're interested in experimenting with new utility releases, downloading games to get a thrill, or checking out the productivity apps that developers claim to be the "best" out there.

Through all this downloading, installing, and deleting, you may want to check out one of the apps you remember using from a long time ago to see if it got any cool new updates, and sometimes you don't particularly remember what the name of said app might be.

Fortunately, the Mac App Store comes with a way to see your purchase history, allowing you to see all of the apps you've ever downloaded from the Mac App Store whether they were free or paid ones. In this tutorial, we'll show you how to see your Mac App Store's download history.

How to move your iTunes library to an external drive

You'd be amazed how much of your Mac's storage is wasted on the iTunes library. All those apps and media you have purchased and downloaded over the years pile and clog up your Mac's precious storage.

But with one-terabyte external hard drives retailing for less than $60 on Amazon, there are no excuses not to spring for external storage to move that humongous iTunes library of yours on.

This post takes you step-by-step through the process of consolidating your iTunes library and moving it to an external drive in a way that will preserve your playlists, ratings and other interactions, so you won't miss a beat.

How to use bookmark folders in Safari

In Safari, you can save websites you visit frequently so you can quickly revisit them later without having to remember their URLs. Saved webpages are accessible in Safari's Bookmarks menu on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac.

If you save a lot of bookmarks, they will clutter the Bookmarks menu over time so locating that favorite website of yours will begin to feel like finding a needle in the haystack. You can avoid this by creating themed folders for organizing your bookmarks.

This tutorial provides step by step instructions for creating new Safari bookmark folders for iOS and macOS. You will also learn how to rename, reposition and delete these folders and file websites into them, all of which will help you organize your favorite websites to your liking.

Apple boosts Maps with new Flyover cities, Traffic and Nearby data

Apple has updated its Maps backend with nearly two-dozen new cities now supporting the Flyover feature. In addition, the company has activated live Traffic data for Taiwan and added Finland to the list of countries that support iOS 9's Nearby feature. Three-dimensional Flyover data has been added to five new cities in the United States, with additional Flyover views now available in various cities across Europe, Africa and Japan.

How to reset NVRAM on your Mac

Macs are nice computers, but they're not without their issues that can spur up at random times. Fortunately, troubleshooting problems on a Mac isn't incredibly difficult and there are tons of simple steps you can take as a Mac user before calling AppleCare for support.

One of the easiest troubleshooting steps is resetting your Mac's NVRAM, a step which can solve an array of problems. In this tutorial, we'll explain what the NVRAM is responsible for and how to reset it to fix common problems.

How to measure Mac frame rates and enable HiDPI display modes on older models with Quartz Debug

Have you ever wanted to benchmark the graphics performance of your favorite Mac apps and games, or measure the refresh rates of macOS's user interface?

If so, you'll be delighted to learn that Apple provides a free application, called Quartz Debug, which has a built-in live frame rate monitoring tool that can measure the refresh rate of the graphics subsystem in frames per second (FPS).

Here's how you can download Quartz Debug to your Mac and use it to display the number of screen updates per second, see the FPS and CPU gauges changing as you perform different actions on your Mac, enable HiDPI display modes on non-Retina Macs and adjust other settings related to the computer's GPU.

How to watch Super Bowl 50 on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and other devices

On Sunday evening, millions of people will gather around their TV sets to watch Super Bowl 50. The game features the Denver Broncos taking on the Carolina Panthers, and kickoff is scheduled for 6:30 (ET).

For those of you who aren't going to be around a television Sunday night, but still want to follow along with the action, we've put together a list of ways you'll be able to do so using an iPhone, iPad, Mac and other devices.

How to disable transparency effects on your Mac

The release of OS X Yosemite in 2014 gave the Mac's user interface a fresh coat of paint in part through adopting much of the transparency effects that Apple added to iOS 7 in prior year.

Transparency is used throughout macOS and can be observed on the desktop and seen in drop-down menus, title bars, sidebars and toolbars.

This post will teach you how to disable transparency for all user interface elements that have a translucent appearance on your Mac.

Back to School promo goes live in New Zealand and Australia with free Beats Solo2 headphones

Apple’s annual Back to School promotion is back with a new deal launching today in Australia and New Zealand. University students, students accepted to a university and parents buying for a university student are being tempted with a free Beats Solo2 on-ear headphones, a $199.95 value, with an eligible Mac purchase.

When purchasing a new MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac or iMac with Retina 5K display, customers shall receive an instant credit for the purchase of a pair of Beats Solo2 wired headphones in Gloss Black, Gloss White, Gloss Red or Gloss Blue or wired Beats Solo2 headphones in Space Gray, Silver, Gold or Rose Gold.