iPhoto stores the photo files in bundles. This makes it difficult and time-consuming to access your saved photos manually in Finder, and makes it impossible to open your iPhotos via an Open dialog. It's also impossible to use Time Machine for individ...

I was having a problem with the RSS feed for a bookmark in Safari. It was in a folder in my Bookmarks Bar. Whenever the feed was updated, the folder got a number, but the feed's bookmark in the pop down did not, making me wonder just which feed the u...

I love Disk Utility, however, it does not directly support the creation of ISO 9660 images. It can create CDR images or CD/DVD master images. Those can be renamed to .iso files and are supported by most software. But that's inconvenient to say the le...

Accessing iDisk through Finder is, in the best case, slow and unreliable. I've found that Transmit (Panic Inc.) is a fast, reliable and easy substitute to Finder. Everywhere you can find opinions against using iDisk to synchronize data or to hold wor...

In 10.5 and previous versions of the system, Terminal's remote connection dialog (go to the menu item Shell » New Remote Connection...) had a selection for Secure Shell (ssh) that defaulted to 'SSH (Automatic).' In 10.6, this has been changed t...

Most applications have Undo and Redo commands, and iTunes has long had them available when editing song tags. Beginning with iTunes 9.2 (the latest version is 9.2.1), offers Undo and Redo commands which can be applied to songs which have been removed...

While there are numerous well-documented ways to prevent a hard disk or USB drive from mounting at boot-time, I found only one way (working in 10.6) to prevent newly-connected disks from auto-mounting while logged in. It is possible to turn off the r...

Copying and pasting from Safari when using the Reader function has two modes, depending on where you are pasting. If you select, copy, and paste the text into a text editor, you get something that looks like this: Britain Plans to Decentralize...

You all probably know about Exposé's Application Mode (introduced in 10.6 I think). What's interesting is that while you're in it, you can Command+click on other running applications and bring their windows into Exposé as well. Steps to reproduce:...

I'm using a MacBook Air with Snow Leopard (10.6.2) as my development platform. And I'm using Python 2.6.4 with Unicode strings. I received the following error when trying to run a script: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'xe...

Evernote is a combination of an application and a cloud based service to save notes, reminders, images and other data that can be accessed from a Mac, PC, iPhone or other mobile devices. This hint is about encrypting the local data store from the Mac...

The keyboards on Mac notebooks, and now desktops, too, have no number pad. It used to be that notebook keyboards had a numlock key, and you could use the letter keys on the right hand side of the keyboard as a number pad, but that feature seems to ha...

To refresh a widget in the Dashboard, open the Dashboard, select a widget, and press Command-R. There is a slick little animation, and the widget will refresh. [crarko adds: I've seen this before, but on searching didn't find it here as a hint. Here...

It is both inconvenient and less safe to keep backup volumes mounted when not in use. A mounted volume is more prone to corruption, and open file dialogs needlessly spin up mounted volumes, contributing to a user experience latency that is most appar...

I was having problems with my HP PSC 2110 all-in-one printer and in the process of troubleshooting was tinkering with the System Preferences for it. I just randomly clicked on the Scan button and the clicked Open Scanner. Up popped a scan window with...

There are many ways to show and hide the various hidden files and folders in Mac OS X. This one is an update to an older Automator workflow method. The previous method was to create a plug-in in Automator; now a pair of Services are used, so this hin...

Measuring elements on the screen quickly and easily can be really important for all sorts of tasks. I often use the excellent Free Ruler app for this but don't always want to waste time opening it up. For super-quick measurements just use the built-...

In Terminal, under the Keyboard tab of a theme, you can add custom keyboard shortcuts. However, if you try to add a custom shortcut that types a modifier key, you will have some difficulty. This is because the entry form seemingly makes it impossible...

If you're using Quick Look on an image, you'll appreciate the following trick for zooming. Once you've opened the QL window on a JPEG or other image file, simply press Option and the pointer will change to a magnifying glass with a plus sign in the...

I recently downgraded from Google Chrome 6.x (a developmental version) back to the officially released 5.x version. In the process all of my Firefox style keywords (aka searches) were lost. You can use the following process to transfer your old keywo...