How to

How to enable battery charging chime on MacBook

Illustration for battery charging chime on MacBook

Learn how to use this simple Terminal command to make your MacBook play a confirmation sound when you plug it into a charger.

Note: Owners of recent MacBook models need not even finish reading this article because their machines come with the power-charging chime enabled by default.

How to remove date and time from screenshot file names on Mac

By default, every time you take a screenshot on macOS, the file generated will be named "Screen Shot date time" where "date" and "time" are replaced with the actual date and time the screenshot was taken. For most people, this is a useful feature as it allows to quickly sort screenshots depending on when they were taken. But for other people, it might be an annoyance.

In this post, we will show you how to remove the date and time from screenshots that were taken on Mac.

How to create a new library in the Photos app

Creating separate libraries. It's one of the best ways to go about organizing photos with the new Photos app in macOS. I find that using multiple libraries to separate things like work and personal life is a good strategy. Fortunately, it's extremely simple to create new libraries and to switch between those libraries on the fly.

How to pair Android Wear without an Android Phone using a virtual machine on Mac

I know, it may sound fairly niche, but hear me out. Recently, there's been a lot of buzz about using Android Wear devices with the iPhone, and that's the reason why I started exploring this topic to begin with.

As it turns out, when you buy an Android Wear device, you need an Android device to "activate" the smartwatch (go figure). Since I don't currently own an Android phone, my LG G Watch was stuck at the pairing screen.

Yes, there are more "in-depth" ways to go about getting passed this screen, but not everyone is up to that task. With this in mind, I've created a video tutorial that shows you how to run an Android virtual machine on your Mac with Parallels, and how to then pair an Android Wear device with the virtual machine.

How to get a 3D dock on OS X Yosemite

Do you miss OS X's 3D dock? OS X Yosemite finally did away with the 3D dock that's been present since the release of OS X Leopard, but you can get it back by using a simple application called cDock.

cDock includes, among a host of other features, the ability to theme the dock with over a dozen built-in themes. There are night themes, fullscreen themes, pink themes, and, of course, 3D themes. If you've been reminiscing about the "good ol' days", then you can easily relive the past with this handy little application.

How to create folder shortcuts on Mac

On Windows, you create shortcuts. On Mac? There's this little thing called aliases. Aliases are shortcuts that make it easier to find a file, folder, disk, or application. You can place aliases on your desktop, in the Dock, or anywhere else that's easy to find. In this tutorial, I'll show you two easy ways to create aliases on your Mac.

How to extract images from apps with the Preview app on Mac

Applications on the Mac are really just directory structures containing files, images, assets, executables, and the like. If you've ever right-clicked on an application and selected Show Package Contents, then you know exactly what I mean.

While right-clicking is a reasonable solution for extracting image, font, and other visible assets from an application, the Preview app makes doing so even easier. By simply dragging and dropping an app on the Preview app icon in the dock, you're presented with a easy navigable thumbnail view of all of the app's various assets.

How to tab between dialogue box buttons on Mac

Tab key on Mac's keyboard

The tabbing experience on Mac might feel a little gimped if you're coming from a Windows machine. That's because, by default, macOS makes it so that the option to move keyboard focus between all controls with the Tab key is disabled. Instead, tabbing is only possible between text boxes and lists using the default setting. In this tutorial, I'll show you two quick and easy ways to change this setting and enable a much-improved tabbing experience on your Mac.