I absolutely love Leopard’s new Spaces feature, however, the Finder’s default behavior in Spaces drove me slightly crazy. For example, if I wanted to quickly add an attachment to an Email and Finder was open in a different space I would have to either close that Finder window or drag the Finder window to [...]

The ScanSnap S510M is a great Document scanner designed for the Mac. Its Auto Document Feeder (ADF) is extremely reliable and can scan 18 double sided pages per minute. The software is simple to use and the one-click scan button makes the scanner super easy to use. If you [...]

This just a quick tip explaining how you can avoid iChat’s ‘accept chat’ dialog without using the popular Chax extension. Chax is great, however, it is currently only compatible with Leopard’s iChat via an alpha build. Furthermore, many of Chax’s most compelling features have been added to iChat by Apple so I’m not [...]

Do you hate Leopard’s new 3D Dock? If so, you can quickly remove the 3D effect via the command line. Personally I’m slowly getting used to the new Dock but it is a definite example of unnecessary ‘Eye Candy’, so I can understand why some people want to disable the 3D Dock. [...]

This just a quick tip to explain how to sync your Mac Address Book (Leopard only) via Yahoo without needing a .Mac account. If you don’t have a Yahoo account you’ll need to go here and sign up for one. After you have your Yahoo account ready, proceed to step 1.

One of the great things about running OS X is having the Dashboard at your fingertips. I admit that I don’t use the Dashboard that frequently but it is great when I need to quickly check the radar for rain, convert some units, or even quickly print an envelope.

For ages scientific notebooks have been the mainstay of scientific research and have always had one thing in common: paper. Until now that was mostly due to a lack of options. Today as science and computers have become more and more inseparable the appeal of digital notebooks is quite clear. Digital notebooks [...]

Fink is a package manager that makes it easy to install Unix Open Source software on your Mac. Anyone who has tried to install/compile Open Source software on a system based on Unix or Linux will understand how heavenly these package managers can be. Keep reading to learn how to easily and quickly [...]

Here are a few commands that can be used to activate hidden features of Mac OS X. There are quite a few of these commands floating around the internet, but I have chosen to highlight the ones that I find the most useful. The commands will require use of the terminal, but don’t [...]

Visit Zaphu’s new Picasa Wallpaper Gallery to download some very creative (if I do say so myself) wallpaper images I’ve produced. Each image is available in a widescreen Mac friendly 16:10 aspect ratio that is appropriate for all new MacBook, MacBook Pro, and iMac models. For your convenience, images are also available in 4:3 and [...]

Most of the time you can find a free Mac application that will accomplish almost any task you can imagine. See the Zaphu Great Mac Freeware list for a few freeware apps to get you started. Sometimes, however, a Mac application comes along that is worth your hard earned cash. As [...]

After a while those standard Mac OS X icons can get boring. There are a few programs out there that allow you to change your icons such as CandyBar, ShapeShifter, and LiteIcon. CandyBar and ShapeShifter may be out of your price range costing about $13 and $20, respectively. Today I will show you how to [...]

One of the first things recent Mac switchers complain to me about is the lack of a ‘Start’ menu. Well, Zaphu to the rescue! Today we’re going to customize the Apple Dock. The first few changes I recommend for all users is to turn off that pesky zoom feature and move the [...]