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.

Google just released a stellar screensaver for your Mac

Got tired of the new Apple TV's gorgeous Aerial screen saver on your Mac? How about Google's own screen saver that ships on Chromecast, Fiber and Pixel devices? Your wish is Google's command: yesterday, the search giant released the stunning Featured Photos screen saver for macOS.

As its name suggests, the app adorns your Mac's built-in display and any external screens with a striking plethora of highest-rated photographs that users publicly posted on Google+. Download the app straight from Google at no charge and let us know what you think in the comments.

How to extend Quick Look preview functionality on your Mac

If you're not familiar with the Quick Look feature on macOS, try selecting a picture, folder, or text document on your computer and pressing the space bar. The rich preview that pops up is Quick Look working its magic. Apple introduced Quick Look in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and it has since gained support for many more file types natively, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite documents.

I use it daily and it has become an automatic part of my workflow, a natural response to wanting to inspect a file without waiting for a program to launch and without leaving off what I'm doing.

However, the problem that Quick Look faces is support. It requires a plugin for each file type it can preview, and out-of-the-box only a handful are supplied. More obscure file types are neglected, and display only a blank pane with the file icon, name, size, and date modified. In this guide, I will detail how to add plugins to Quick Look for a richer and more useful preview experience.

Apple releases beta 4 of iOS 10.2, watchOS 3.1.1 & macOS Sierra 10.12.2 to developers

Apple on Cyber Monday seeded new beta downloads to its registered developers who are enrolled in the Apple Developer Program. If you're a developer, iOS 10.2 beta 4 (build 14C82), watchOS 3.1.1 beta 4 (build 14S879) and macOS Sierra 10.12.2 beta 4 (build 16C53a) are now readily available as standalone downloads through the company's portal for developers or as over-the-air downloads on devices with a prior beta and an appropriate configuration profile.

How to set up automatic account login on Mac

Login screen on MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just turn on your Mac and start using it without having to log in to it all the time? If you’re someone who doesn’t need Fort Knox-like security to keep people from getting into your computer, then you can set up your Mac to log in to your account automatically when you turn it on, and we’ll show you how to do that.

Here’s a special tool Apple uses to recover data from MacBook Pro’s non-removable SSD

iFixit's teardown analysis of both the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar has found a non-removable SSD inside soldered to the logic board. In contrast, non-Touch Bar Pros use a removable PCIe-based SSD, simplifying upgrades.

iFixit discovered that Touch Bar Pros include a hidden connector on the logic board that leads nowhere which, as reported by 9to5Mac, works in conjunction with a special tool to let service technicians rescue data in case of a hardware failure.

Open source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra now available

Apple today released open-source Darwin code for macOS 10.12 Sierra, 9to5Mac reports. Darwin, for those unfamiliar with it, forms the core set of Unix components upon which macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS are based, including drivers and the unencrypted kernel along with its BSD portions.

Apple typically releases Darwin code shortly after major macOS releases, and Sierra is no exception. Anyone interested in the intricacies of Sierra's inner workings can now grab a copy of Darwin via this direct download link.

How to prevent partitions from mounting when you boot up, log in, or connect drives to your Mac

With the exception of partitions in unreadable formats and certain hidden partitions such as EFI and Recovery HD, the default behaviour of macOS is to mount all partitions of a drive on boot-up, login, or on connecting an external drive.

Whilst this behaviour is useful for the novice or for those connecting a single USB stick to copy some files, it can become unwieldy and even annoying if you have many multi-partitioned drives attached to your Mac.

For example, my desktop Hackintosh has three internal drives, each with at least two partitions, and one of these drives is not even needed when booted under macOS – it is for Windows 10 and Linux. Add to this a couple of external hard drives with partitions for storage, OS installers and Time Machine backups for other computers, and your desktop and Finder sidebar can begin to look a real mess. It also takes time for the drives to mount on every boot and unmount on sleep or shutdown.

This guide will detail how to ensure only the drives of your choosing mount automatically, leaving the rest unmounted within macOS.

This Mac app lets you switch between recently used apps via Touch Bar

With all of the time-saving shortcuts available for Apple's stock apps on the Touch Bar, you'd think Apple would have brought the macOS app switcher to the the new MacBook Pro's OLED strip. That's why developer Maxim Ananov set out to create an app, called TouchSwitcher, which does just that. With TouchSwitcher, you can switch between your recently-used apps on the new MacBook Pro right from the Touch Bar.