This is just a quick tip to explain how to sync your Mac Address Book (Leopard 10.5.3 only) with Google’s Gmail without needing an iPhone or a .Mac account. If you have an iPhone then you don’t need this tip and can follow these instructions. If you don’t have a Gmail account you’ll [...]

This is just a quick tip for anyone having trouble with Leopard’s Dictionary.app behaving slowly when accessing it from the contextual menu. One feature of Apple’s Dictionary I love is being able to right click on any word and select ‘Look Up in Dictionary’ from the menu. However, in Leopard this [...]

I recently gave up on Firefox 2 in lieu of Leopard because of stability and memory issues. Safari 3 was a huge leap forward from Safari 2 so I decided to give it a try. Overall, I’ve found that I’m enjoying using Safari as my main browser. The only part of Firefox that [...]

USB memory sticks are getting cheaper and cheaper while continuing to increase in capacity. This is great but also risky since now you have that much more information that can be lost or stolen. You can protect against your data falling into the wrong hands by creating an encrypted volume on the memory stick. [...]

One of Leopard’s 300 new features was QuickLook (QL), a utility that allows the user to view the contents of a file without even opening it. This ability to quickly preview files is one of my favorite new features in Leopard. QuickLook is activated by pressing the spacebar on any highlighted file or [...]

Keyboard shortcuts are combinations of simultaneous key strokes that perform a particular task. Using these shortcuts (which often involve modifier keys such as command, option, control and shift) typically saves time because you don’t need to move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse. I use the following 23 shortcuts almost everyday [...]

I am enjoying Leopard’s Spaces.app quite a bit, especially now that I’ve fixed the Finder issue that was bugging me. However, one other issue which was of minor irritation was X11 and Spaces not getting along. As you might know you can easily assign /Applications/Utilities/X11.app to a space from within the Spaces’ [...]

When I think of time machines, images of Marty McFly, Doc Brown and Flux Capacitors come to mind. I suppose these associations were hardwired into my young brain sometime in the vicinity of 1985. So, it was quite natural that I wanted to change the icon for Mac OS X Leopard’s Time Machine application to [...]

This is just a quick tip to get Leopard’s Finder window to display the full path to the current directory in the title bar. Essentially this is just the results from a pwd command being constantly displayed in the finder window. While power users will immediately find this very useful even normal users [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]