Tutorial

Learn how to master your Apple devices with our comprehensive tutorials. From iPhone and iPad to Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, and more, our expert guides will help you unlock the full potential of your Apple products. Discover new features, tips, and tricks each day to enhance your user experience.

How to hide specific mounted volumes from your Mac’s desktop

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated December 8, 2022

We've already covered how to completely prevent partitions from mounting under macOS, but sometimes you want a partition mounted and ready to use but still want the benefit of it not cluttering up your desktop. For example, many people want their Time Machine partition constantly mounted and backing up throughout the day but don't need it to be visible at all.

Finder's preferences allow for hiding all volumes from the desktop but offer no control on a volume-by-volume basis. Therefore, we'll show you how to use the Terminal to hide mounted volumes on a case-by-case basis.

Read More

How to extend Quick Look preview functionality on your Mac

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ November 29, 2016

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.

Read More

25 tips & tricks for the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

Andrew O'Hara ∙ Updated December 27, 2023

Touch Bar is a versatile OLED bar at the top of your keyboard that replaces the function keys with software-based buttons that change based on what app you're in and what you're doing. In this post, we'll mention twenty-five awesome things you can do with the Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro.

Read More

How to set up automatic account login on Mac

Anthony Bouchard ∙ Updated December 2, 2025
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.

Read More

Five ways to make the most of a file manager on jailbroken iOS

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated December 5, 2016

The vast majority of non-developers who jailbreak do it for the tweaks, and use Cydia almost exclusively to find, maintain, and update them.

However, jailbreaking your device brings much more than the ability to install tweaks; its real power lies in granting unfettered access to the filesystem, which allows you to make almost any change you like.

In this article, I’ll go through five of the most interesting and ubiquitous uses for file managers on iOS.

Read More

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

Joaquim Barbosa ∙ Updated October 17, 2018

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.

Read More