PreferencePane Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Flash Player for Mac updated to 10.3, adds preference pane and auto-updates

by Michael Rose (May 14th, 2011)

The beta version of Flash Player 10.3 gave way Thursday to the release version, downloadable freely from Adobe for installation on your Mac. The new build finally restores auto-update capability, which was unstable or unsupported on Mac OS X for quite a while. Now you'll be prompted to patch ...

Airlock automatically locks and unlocks your Mac using your iPhone or iPod touch

by TJ Luoma (Dec 15th, 2009)

I work in a busy office. Occasionally a coworker will call or knock on my door and ask for my help with something, and the two of us will go to wherever I am needed. Most of them time I get back to my office and realize that I have left my MacBook Pro unlocked. To solve this, I've tried various ...

Give your Dashboard a kick in the pants

by Michael Grothaus (Dec 14th, 2009)

After reading through the comments on my post about Dashboard Widgets, I noticed quite a few people lamented the fact that the widgets have to go through a 'start-up' process every time you turn on your Mac or log out and log back in. Well, not anymore. We actually covered this four years ago, ...

Secrets preference panel updated for Snow Leopard

by TJ Luoma (Nov 5th, 2009)

From time to time we have shared hidden settings in applications which can be used to "tweak" an app's behavior, such as forcing Snow Leopard's dictionary to reuse the same window or make the print dialog expanded by default. These settings are normally changed using the Terminal.app which can be ...

Mac 101: Change your desktop picture

by Dave Caolo (Aug 6th, 2009)

Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of posts aimed at novice Mac users and veterans who like the occasional refresher. Many new Mac owners want to customize their Mac's look and feel. A simple place to begin is the desktop picture. It's easy to change and there are several options, from the ...

Apple's System Preference icon goes "Green"

by Cory Bohon (Oct 21st, 2008)

With the introduction of EPEAT Gold rated MacBooks and MacBook Pros last week, Apple has definitely been warming up to the environmental movement lately. So, it was only fitting that they would change a small part of System Preferences to reflect the EPEAT rating. That's right, the Energy Saver ...

Retro backgrounds available for Widgets Preference Pane

by Dave Caolo (Sep 2nd, 2005)

Back in June I wrote about Widgets Preference Pane, which is a Mac OS X preference pane (as I'm sure you guessed) that gives you great control over Dashboard and your widets. Use it to quickly view all of your installed widgets, deactivate, activate or delete any of them, install new widgets via ...