Mac Lab: An Apple Macintosh OS X, Mac & PC Blog

Portable Applications for your USB Stick

What is a portable program ? : A portable program is a piece of software that you can carry around with you on a portable device and use on any other computer. It can be your email program, your browser, system recovery tools or even an operating system. The coolest part about it is that [...]

Continue reading...

How to Force Quit an Application

If your Mac has an application that is frozen, or you have the dreaded spinning beach ball, you probably have an app that will not quit gracefully. Normally the protected memory feature of OS X allows an application to crash and you can keep working — no restart required. Hit the keystroke combination of Option-Apple-Esc [...]

Continue reading...

Tips & Tricks: open applications

Number One tip:  stop quitting your most-used applications! I see scores of people use their PCs. Almost everyone will do the following: Open their browser. Quit (close) their browser. Open their email program. Quit their email program. Open Word. Quit Word. Then they repeat this process. Over and over. STOP. Here’s the tip: keep your [...]

Continue reading...

Mac running slow? Check your Memory

I find myself sharing this tip every week. When your Mac has been used for several days/weeks, the consistent opening and closing of applications chip away at your available memory (RAM). Soon you will be out of what is referred to as “contiguous memory”, and the machine will start using the much slower virtual memory [...]

Continue reading...

Photoshop history options

We’re not sure why this isn’t on by default. In Photoshop, go to the History palette, select the indicated area, and choose “History Options”. Then in the next screen, check “Allow Non-Linear History”. Deleting a “state” deletes that state and those that came after it. If you choose the Allow Non-Linear History option, deleting a [...]

Continue reading...

iTunes 8 hidden import settings

Apple has changed the preferences in iTunes 8. Several readers have complained that they cannot find the import settings anymore. To make sure you import higher-quality MP3s (or AAC, Lossless, etc.), go to iTunes: Preferences: General Tab: Import Settings. The default is the old-fashioned and lower-quality 128 kbps MP3. We recommend changing it to the [...]

Continue reading...

Our top pick for FTP program: Transmit

Our number one pick for FTP application is Transmit. It is solid, and quite full-featured: Column view. iDisk. sidebar. ftp/ssl. search. zooming. it even has tabs. What is FTP? FTP, or File Transfer Protocol, is the universal way to send, receive, and manage your files and folders using the internet. If you manage a web [...]

Continue reading...