Category: Mac Treat

I love Spotlight, the search technology built into Mac OS 10.4 and 10.5. I find it easy to use and speedy (especially on 10.5 Leopard). The Spotlight search field in the menu bar usually provides almost instant results for finding files, folders, and documents, along with emails, contacts, iCal calendars, items in System Preferences, applications,…

The iPhone and iPod touch are amazing devices with many useful but hidden or undocumented features. Discovering these hidden features and having “ah ha” moments is part of the fun of owning an iPod touch or iPhone. It’s equally fun to share your iPhone tips and tricks with other iPhone owners, because you get to…

In last week’s edition of Kibbles and Bytes, Kali suggested uninstalling and reinstalling Flash player for Safari to improve its performance. She wrote “I use Safari daily, and have found recently that some Flash video was reallllly dragging.” I have had similar issues, and followed her advice about uninstalling and re-installing Flash. However, I still…

You’ve probably noticed that when you adjust the audio volume on your Mac, there is a quacking or clicking sound accompanying the action. This sound is intended to confirm that you are indeed changing the volume on your Mac. However, this sound can be annoying, especially when you’re wearing headphones. Fortunately, on most Macs it’s…

As mentioned above, many Mac users don’t know that Macs are as right-click savvy as Windows computers. This misunderstanding is partly Apple’s fault. While Macs have been long able to right click, they shipped with a single-button mouse until 2005. Before that, it was necessary to purchase a third-party mouse with two buttons (or use…

In iWork ’09, I use Pages most often, then Keynote, and finally, Numbers. All of these applications, in this blogger’s opinion, are far superior to the Microsoft Office competitors. But I won’t talk about that in this Mac Treat… I was recently reminded of the benefits of password protection when Ed and I presented our…

Time Machine is Apple’s easy to use automatic backup program built into OS 10.5 Leopard. The concept behind Time Machine is that it’s so easy to use, you just can’t help but use it. Time Machine is well-reviewed and is one of Leopard’s most popular features. It has saved my bacon on several occasions. To…

iTunes makes it fairly straightforward to maintain a large library of music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, album art, and other media. It’s easy to keep your iTunes library on an external hard drive (click here to read how to do this). It’s also easy to create multiple, seperate iTunes libraries by holding down the Option…

If you use OS X’s built-in spellchecker, chances are that you’ve added custom words to your dictionary. For example, here at Small Dog, we frequently write “Smalldog.com”. By default, OS X’s spellchecker doesn’t recognize that word because it’s not in its dictionary. To save a couple of seconds a day, I’ve added it to my…

Several readers have recently inquired about how they can change their Mac’s default icons (such as the hard drive icon). It’s very easy to change a Mac’s folder icons (and revert them back to original settings). The following is what Apple calls a Pro Tip. I think it’s more of a fun Mac Treat than…