Along with the announcement of OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan,’ Apple announced the next version of iOS for its mobile devices. As with El Capitan, iOS 9 promises to bring greatly improved battery life and speed to systems, along with a number of service enhancements; however, you may be wondering whether or not your iOS device can handle it. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: June 2015
How to batch-rename and manage multiple files in OS X
When organizing files and folders in the Finder, you will often need to manage multiple files at once. Not only might you select groups of them to move around, but also need to create new folders containing them, tag them, lock them, and even rename them. While for the most part the approaches for managing individual files scales up to multiple files, there are some relatively hidden features of OS X that can make managing multiple files a bit easier. Continue reading
OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’ system requirements revealed
The upcoming OS X El Capitan contains a number of performance enhancements that greatly improve the efficiency of the system and programs running on it, but along with such features you may be concerned about whether or not your Mac will support them. This may be especially true if you have an older Mac that just barely met the system requirements for OS X Yosemite. Continue reading
Eight useful hidden improvements in OS X 10.11 ‘El Capitan’
During Yesterday’s keynote presentation on the upcoming OS X El Capitan, Apple’s Craig Federighi outlined a number of the new features of the upcoming release of OS X. In particular he focused on new window management approaches, and Spotlight searches, as well as some performance improvements with the optimized “Metal” API. However, there are a few additional improvements in OS X 10.11 noted that Federighi did not discuss, but which might be quite beneficial. Continue reading
How to customize print margins in any OS X program
When you use various word processing programs and other document handling tools, you will likely have options right at your fingertips for setting the page margins. These among other document layout settings can be used to customize where your content will be displayed and ultimately printed. However, you may find yourself using programs like Preview where even though printing is supported, there are no readily available tools for setting with width and height of print jobs. Continue reading
Spacebars malfunctioning on new 12-inch MacBooks
If you have purchased one of Apple’s new 12-inch MacBooks (Early 2015), then be aware of a potential keyboard issue where the space bar may not respond, especially when pressed on the left or right edges. When this happens, the bar will feel as if it has hit the bottom of its range without sending the keypress to the system. Additional force may ultimately activate the key, but with standard typing this problem may make it difficult for affected users to enter spaces. Continue reading
How to quickly deselect files and folders in OS X
Selecting items in OS X is easy––you click an item you want, and it highlights. You can also expand your selection by holding the Shift or Command keys when clicking additional items, or you can press Command-A to select all items. However, at times deselecting items may be a bit more of a challenge. When in list-view modes, for instance, you might find no matter where you can click in the window, OS X will either maintain the current selection or switch to another selected file. Continue reading
Fix your Mac’s accent menu not working
The accent menu in OS X is a small contextual menu reminiscent of that for iOS, where when you type a character that has optional accent characters you can access them quickly without needing to use separate character panels, key combinations, or keyboard layouts. To do this, Apple removed the classic rapid sequential character entry for alphanumeric keys, so pressing and holding these will bring up the contextual menu, if applicable. However, there are a couple of situations where this menu will not display, and the fix is relatively simple. Continue reading
How to force-reboot your Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Watch
Do you know how to force-reboot your Apple device if it is not responding to your input? Every now and then you may run into an issue with your Mac, iPhone, or Apple Watch where the device will hard-freeze otherwise become unresponsive. In these cases, its often a good idea to give your system some time to recover from its hangup, but if after waiting for a while you still cannot use it, then a quick forced-restart may be your only option. Continue reading
How to protect your Mac from the ‘Dark Jedi’ firmware hack
A new exploit dubbed ‘Dark Jedi’ exists for MacBook systems created before mid-2014, where a hacker can issue a malicious program to overtake the system’s firmware by simply having the system be put in sleep mode. Upon waking from sleep, the firmware on these older Macs is unlocked, which leaves them open to access and modification from applications running in OS X. This contrasts with the recent Thunderstrike firmware vulnerability that allowed hackers to overtake firmware, but required physical access to the system. Since this current vulnerability is run by way of malicious software, systems can be attacked remotely by uses of trojan horse and other social engineering approaches, but this also provides an avenue for protection. Continue reading