As many of you guys know, I'm a huge HyperDock ($9.99 on the Mac App Store) proponent. I use it primarily to have access to window previews of running apps in the OS X dock, but the tweak has additional features as well.
The biggest side benefit to using HyperDock is its window snapping capabilities. It's not the deepest window snapping feature-set out there, but if you need basic Windows-like functionality, it's should have more than enough to win you over.
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.
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.
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.
By default, the cursor on your Mac is omitted when you take a screenshot, but there is an easy way to include it when needed.
Learn how to temporarily reveal the hidden Library folder on your Mac or make it visible permanently if you want to access it regularly.
This article goes over the differences between minimizing and hiding apps on Mac. By understanding the unique capabilities of each action, you’ll learn how to optimize your app management and streamline your productivity.
Have you ever wanted to change the menu bar icon for Notification Center on your Mac? As you can see from the screenshot above, I changed my icon to a moon icon. In this step-by-step video tutorial, I'll show you what it takes for you to do the same.
I have to admit that I'm not a huge user of Notification Center, and this applies to both iOS and the Mac. One of the reasons that I'm turned off by Notification Center is the disarray that I see when viewing it.
By default, Notification Center is set to sort manually, which means that you can go into its preferences, and sort each app by hand. That's fine and all, but it makes for a less than ideal experience when trying to find the most relevant notifications based on time of arrival.
For me, this results in a less than ideal experience when opening Notification Center. If you have a lot of apps enabled for Notifications, it can be overwhelming, because there's no real logical order to the way they're sorted. To remedy this issue, try this simple tip, and sort your notifications by time of arrival instead.
Earlier this week, I showed you how to mate Notification Center to a keyboard shortcut. But wouldn't it be cool if you could designate which View you'd like to see when invoking Notification Center from a keyboard shortcut? In this tutorial, I'll show you how to open directly to the Today View or the Notifications View using keyboard shortcuts.
You may have noticed how I like to use keyboard symbols in my posts. You know, things like ⇧, or ⌃, or ⌘, or even ⌥. I use → a lot too, which is helpful when laying out a certain order of steps in my tutorials.
Some of you may think that I've memorized the code for these symbols (I haven't), or that I copy and paste them from a document or keep them on my clipboard somehow (I don't). Instead, I use the venerable TextExpander utility to make inserting these symbols a totally effortless affair.
It might seem fairly obvious, but it might be a good idea to assign a keyboard shortcut to Notification Center on the Mac. Perhaps you already have, or maybe you still haven't. I hadn't, at least not up until a few days ago when a reader suggested that I do so, and I honestly can't come up with a reason as to why I waited so long. I think it's because I just never thought about doing it.
Assigning Notification Center to a keyboard shortcut just makes sense. It especially makes sense if you use a keyboard and mouse combination on your Mac, instead of a trackpad. Granted, MacBook users might not be so easily convinced, because invoking Notification Center can be accomplished via an effortless two-finger swipe on the trackpad.
But if you're working on an iMac, or if you're using a traditional mouse and keyboard combination with your MacBook, as I am, then I definitely recommend that you follow this uber-simple tip.