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.

This prank webpage will crash your iPhone, iPad and Mac

Christian Zibreg ∙ January 25, 2016

Jokers on Twitter are tweeting out links to a new prank webpage that, when clicked, will crash your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad or Mac, or cause the device to become unresponsive.

As Gizmodo explains, the aptly named website CrashSafari.com uses just four lines of code to crash Safari for iOS and OS X by running a script which adds thousands of characters per second into the address bar, causing Safari to overload its memory.

In the case of the Mac, you'll see the beach ball spinning and your computer will become unresponsive. On the iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, Safari will hang and start heating up your phone until it reboots itself.

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Safari for Mac not resolving Twitter’s shortened “t.co” links? Apple’s identified a fix.

Christian Zibreg ∙ January 23, 2016

If you prefer to browse your Twitter timeline in Safari for Mac, you must have noticed the irritating issue where the browser won't resolve shortened “t.co” links, resulting in an error message informing you that “Safari can't open the page because the server where this page is located is not responding”.

What's really surprising is that this persistent Safari bug, which basically renders most Twitter links unreadable, has been around since last November, as evidenced by the Apple Support Communities.

According to an Apple engineer, a fix has been identified but it's unclear when an OS X software update, or a Safari patch, that would squash the bug might be issued.

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Remote Buddy review: control your Mac from Apple TV via Siri Remote

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated October 16, 2018

Don't you wish there was a hassle-free way to bring your Mac apps, documents, media, games and more to the big screen—and control them? Enter Remote Buddy, a sweet little app by Roth, Germany based developer Felix Schwarz.

This high-performance screen sharing software—along with its tvOS, watchOS and iOS apps—streams your Mac's screen to the new Apple TV and turns the Siri Remote into a trackpad, a full virtual keyboard and an advanced remote so you can control Mac apps with gestures and shortcuts, without getting off that couch of yours.

Building on the latest GPU and CPU technologies, Remote Buddy uses a proprietary engine to deliver up to 60 frames per second with a latency of around 0.1 seconds so you really get a smooth, high-speed screen sharing experience.

Having taken Remote Buddy for a quick spin, I'm happy to report that it works incredibly well and really comes in handy when you want to do simple tasks on your desktop-bound Mac without actually sitting in front of your computer.

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Duet Display, Things and other great productivity apps are 50% off right now

Cody Lee ∙ Updated October 16, 2018

Folks in the market for a good productivity app will want to head over to the App Store as soon as possible. Apple kicked off a new "Get Productive" promotion on Thursday that takes 50% off some of the most popular titles in the category.

Among the apps included in the sale are Duet Display, which allows you to use an iPhone or iPad as an extra display, the highly respected PCalc calculator, Readdle's PDF Expert 5, and the celebrated task, reminder and to-do list app Clear.

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Bring iOS 9.3’s new Night Shift mode to your computer with f.lux for Mac

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated November 10, 2023

Yesterday, Anthony blogged about a cool app that lets you dim your Mac's display brightness even further and beyond the minimum allowed by OS X.

Today, we discuss an app for adjusting the brightness and colors of your Mac's display, called f.lux, which essentially replicates functionality provided by Apple's new Night Shift mode on iOS 9.3.

Like Night Shift mode, f.lux helps prevent eyestrain when using your Mac at night (it's also available on jailbroken and non-jailbroken iOS devices)

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How to dim your Mac screen brightness even lower than what’s allowed by macOS

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated December 2, 2022
Reduce Mac brightness even further using the QuickShade app

When you've pressed your display brightness down key on your Mac's keyboard as many times as you can without the screen going completely black, and it's still too bright for you, then you're probably like me and need a way to further dim the display's dimness level beyond the OEM minimum.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to further decrease your display's brightness than what's allowed by the standard brightness settings of macOS.

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Tip: send app crash reports to your Mac’s Notification Center

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated April 2, 2019

I don't know about you, but I'm annoyed every time an app crashes on my Mac and the macOS Crash Reporter interrupts my work with a pop up warning in the middle of the screen. Wouldn't it be great if those crash reports were displayed as banner notifications?

As explained by LifeHacker, a simple Terminal command will override the default system behavior and send those app crash reports straight to the macOS Notification Center, so they don't interrupt your workflow.

In this tutorial you will learn about a Terminal command which will route crash reports through your Mac's Notification Center rather than display them windowed in the middle of your screen.

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Tip: use half-star ratings in iTunes

Christian Zibreg ∙ Updated May 12, 2017

If you like to rate songs on Apple Music, including those you have purchased on the iTunes Store, chances are you will at some point want to submit your star-based ratings. Now, iTunes for Mac and Windows PCs used to support half-star ratings out of the box, but recent updates have changed this behavior to using full stars only.

Fortunately, as noted by The Loop's Dave Mark, this can be quite easily reverted back to half-star ratings with a quick Terminal command.

In this post, you will learn how to enable half-star ratings in desktop iTunes and rate music more accurately than before.

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How to open a new private window in Safari for Mac

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated August 5, 2019

One of the features of the Safari web browser built into your Mac that will come in handy time and time again are the private browsing windows that you can open to browse the web privately without having your browsing history stored in your computer for the next user to see.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to open a private browsing window in Safari on your Mac so that you're ready the next time you need to perform a web search incognito.

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