How To

Chromebooks are becoming increasingly popular. The affordable computers currently account for four of the top five best-selling laptops on Amazon, ranking higher than Apple's MacBooks and various Windows 8 laptops. With price tags under $300 and a strong advertising budget provided by Google, the Chromebook's success shouldn't come as a complete surprise.

The question remains, however, who's buying these computers? I rarely see a Chromebook out in public, and chances are you've never seen one. In fact, the only time I run into a Chromebook is at an industry event, usually being tested by another … Read more

The huge wave image used as the default wallpaper for OS X Mavericks is certainly striking, but if you don't harbor any particular affinity toward surfing, or the ocean in general, you have other options. OS X has some options readily available on the Desktop wallpaper screen in System Preferences, but you'll notice there are different images available on its Screen Saver page, where it lists four Default Collections: National Geographic, aerial, cosmos, and nature patterns.

Count the images and you'll see there are 43 images across those four screensaver collections. You can use these images as … Read more

When Apple introduced OS X Lion, it changed the default view of the user's home folder to no longer show the Library folder. This change arguably offered less clutter; however, this resulted in a number of people frustrated when needing to access contents of this folder.

Apple did include a link to the Library folder in the Go menu of the Finder; however, even this was relatively hidden, and required you hold the Option button when clicking the menu to reveal it.

For those who needed to access their Library, workarounds included using the Terminal to run commands … Read more

I used to be more vigilant about keeping my Gmail inbox clean and organized, but the inbox tabs that Gmail rolled out earlier this year have made me lazy. The tabs help filter promotional e-mails, social media notifications, and other such messages that aren't of primary importance. While these e-mails are effectively hidden with Gmail's Web client, they are still marked as unread on my iPhone. That is, my Mail app icon constantly has a badge alert with a large number because of the voluminous number of unread messages I have hiding in my Social and Promotional tabs. … Read more

The idea of having lock screen notifications from apps you use on your Mac sounds good in theory. Then, the first time you come back to your Mac and find a long list of notifications on your lock screen, notifications you either don't want others to see or have already viewed on another device, it can be a bit annoying.

You can change the default setting of pushing alerts to your lock screen on an app-by-app basis.

In order to disable the intrusive notifications, you'll need to launch System Preferences and select the Notifications option. Alternatively, you can … Read more

When Apple first introduced the native emoji keyboard in iOS 5, it had neglected to bring the same user-friendly shortcut to OS X. Sure, there were ways to get to the emoji keyboard and enter special characters, but it wasn't a button (or in this case, a keyboard shortcut away).

With OS X Mavericks, Apple has accounted for this oversight and given Mac users running the latest operating system a shortcut to bring up an emoji board, primed for picking.

The tip comes from Steve Streza via a tweet:

Mavericks pro tip: Press Command-Control-Space to bring up the new ( … Read more

On Tuesday, Apple released the latest version of their desktop operating system, OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Available as a free download via the App Store, OS X Mavericks is supposed to bring power and performance improvements, as well as some new features, including the new Maps app.

Creating an OS X USB installer from the App Store download hasn't been very straightforward in the past, and the old methods no longer work for OS X 10.9. However, there's a new Apple utility with Mavericks that makes it relatively simple, and thanks to MacForums member, tywebb13, we … Read more

Apple has always supported a rudimentary file flagging system in OS X called Labels, in which you could apply a colored label to items to group them. For instance, important files could all be labeled with the color and the word "Green," so you could easily identify them when perusing your folder hierarchies.

In addition to the color label, you could customize the label name to something like "Important Files" instead of simply "Green," and then use the system's searching and scripting capabilities to distinguish these files from others.

In the latest version … Read more

OS X Mavericks offers a number of new features and enhancements to OS X, both in features you might use as well as under-the-hood optimizations; however, in order to take advantage of these you must first successfully install the OS, and this is where a few users have run into issues.

In some cases, people attempting to install the OS are running into a problem where the Mavericks installer claims the hard disk is damaged and needs to be repaired. Other times Mavericks might be hung up downloading from the Mac App Store, or never complete its final installation steps.… Read more