Tips

Mac Tip: Using the Fonts window

A great resource in many Mac OS X applications, the Font window provides an excellent way to up the quality and efficiency of your projects. The Fonts window provides a lot of useful information about your text as well as some great (and powerful) tools.… Read more

Create custom keyboard layouts with Ukelele

Apple provides a number of layouts for various purposes in Mac OS X--mainly for international layout differences, but also for variations such as Dvorak. Besides localization purposes, there are also times when specialized layouts may be useful for certain technical applications, to just disable a key, or to swap two modifier keys' functions on a standard keyboard layout. Regardless of the reason, people have wanted to easily edit or create new keyboard layouts in OS X, but have not been able to do so with any utilities Apple provides.… Read more

iTunes 9 Tip: Start in Safe Mode

Starting applications (or your OS) in Safe Mode prevents additional applications and add-ons from loading. In the case of starting iTunes in Safe Mode, all those extra visualizers and device plug-ins will be disabled, allowing for a more thorough troubleshooting session.… Read more

Fix for iTunes 9.0.1 refusing to save your store password

iPhone Atlas reader golf11, participants in Apple's discussion boards, and I are all complaining that iTunes 9.0.1 refuses to remember our Apple ID passwords.

The Apple ID password is part of the user ID/password combination that you use to access and authorize activities and purchases in the iTunes Store. After iTunes 9.0.1 was released, a number of users were annoyed that the check mark button for saving their password no longer worked. As a result, each purchase or app-upgrade triggers iTunes to prompt for a password.

Fortunately, there are two fixes and a few … Read more

iTunes 9 Tip: Use Home Sharing to sort new music

If you are like me, you have meticulously combed through your iTunes Library, carefully capitalizing song names, renaming tracks, and adding album art. So what happens when someone dumps a pile of new music on your lap? The last thing you want to do is spend hours sifting through all the music you already had, plus all the new stuff.… Read more

Resetting Safari, Firefox, Camino, Opera, OmniWeb, and iCab.

Periodically your web browsing experience may become exceptionally slow or give you odd behavior such as the page content not updating, which in most cases is a result of corruption in temporary files such as caches and preferences. In order to make troubleshooting these files simple, many browsers have reset options readily available, but others do not. Here are the locations of various places to reset histories, caches, and other temporary items on several popular Mac browsers (the latest versions of each).… Read more

Snow Leopard Tip: Manually setup new Mail accounts

Setting up an email account is not always straight forward. Apple, with each Mac OS X release, has attempted to streamline the process offering automatic account setups. For some users, however, this poses an issue with control.… Read more

Apple releases iPhone Configuration Utility 2.1

Apple's iPhone Configuration Utility 2.1, released last month, isn't designed as an end-user troubleshooting tool--it's really meant to help enterprise users create configuration profiles for device deployment--but it provides three functions that can be very useful for troubleshooting or security.

1. It can uninstall applications directly from the host computer, which can be useful for removing stubborn apps that cannot be deleted directly from the iPhone. Some third-party applications can cause systemic issues, which can be resolved through their removal via a host computer.

2. It allows easy access to the iPhone's console log, which … Read more

Apple KB Updates: router firmware, home directories on FAT32 partitions, and more.

Apple has updated and released a few troubleshooting-based knowledgebase articles, which cover a few recommendations and current problems that people are experiencing in OS 10.5 and 10.6, including keyboard issues on MacBooks, the use of home directories on FAT32 volumes, and keychain issues at login.… Read more