Category: Mac Treat

A friend recently asked if it was possible to change the default color of highlighted text in OS X. He is working on a research project, and frequently needs to highlight text, especially in Safari. The standard basic grey color of highlighted text in OS X made it difficult to find highlighted text on the…

There are several easy-to-use solutions for emailing very large files (files that are larger than 20MB.) Dropbox and YouSendIt are among the most popular solutions. However Apple’s MobileMe service has an excellent, easy-to-use service for uploading and emailing large files. If you already use MobileMe (or are considering using it) I recommend giving this a…

In the spirit of all addicts in recovery, “My name is Ed and I am a serial demo software downloader.” I can’t help it. When I hear of a promising or interesting new application for my Mac, I rush online and download it. In the past week alone, I have downloaded demo versions of iStopMotion,…

This is our 100th Mac Treat. It took us slightly over two years to reach this milestone. Mac OS X has thousands of features—many that aren’t obvious to new and even experienced Mac users. We started posting short Mac Treats to reveal and explain these features, as well as to promote best Mac practices. We…

Did you know that it’s possible to burn to one CD or DVD multiple times? The trick is to use the “Leave Disk Appendable” option in Disk Utility, located in the Utilities folder on every Mac. First step is to create a folder and fill it with the stuff you want to burn. From there,…

True story: a few years ago, a school had purchased fifty brand-new iMacs with the LCD display on the swivel neck. Soon after they were set up in the computer lab, a well-intentioned but misinformed maintenance person used a strong ammonia-based cleaning product on them. Unfortunately, this permanently marred the displays with an opaque, cloudy…

When iPhoto ’09 was introduced as part of iLife ’09 back in January, its facial recognition feature “Faces” received a lot of attention. With Faces, you simply put a name to a face in just a few photos, and iPhoto will then suggest a set of possible matches you can confirm with a click. iPhoto…

Recently, I created a Pages document that grew to be unusually large in file size due to the images that I was using. The Pages file was roughly 140MB, so even exported to a PDF, it only shrunk to about 50MB—still too big for an email. Rather than resize the images that I put in…

I’ve written about how to get more from OS X’s built-in spellchecker and Dictionary and Thesaurus in the past. We continute to recive requests to cover this subject, so here goes! Both OS 10.4 and OS 10.5 have a decent built-in Dictionary and Thesarus, based on the Oxford American Dictionary. There are several ways to…

Google has many excellent, free applications and services for Mac. I rely on many of them literally almost every single day I use my Mac, both at home and at work. Some of the apps are desktop-based (you download and install them on your Mac’s hard drive), while others are browser based (you run them…