Preferences Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx

by Samuel Gibbs (Jul 11th, 2011)

Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index ...

iPhone OS 4.0: Multitasking support hidden away for pre-3GS devices

by Mike Schramm (Apr 10th, 2010)

After Thursday's iPhone OS 4.0 event, when asked why multitasking was being excluded on devices older than the iPhone 3GS, Apple said that the older devices just couldn't do it. However, that wasn't quite true. A developer, who's been messing around with the iPhone OS 4.0 preview, has found that ...

Manage multiple cameras with Cameras

by Megan Lavey-Heaton (Jul 7th, 2009)

Flexibits has just released Cameras, an application designed to manage multiple camera hookups on your Mac. With Cameras, you can direct which programs launch when you connect any number of photo-related devices to your computer; including digital cameras, the iPhone or a digital media reader. ...

Mac 101: Make your own keyboard shortcut

by Dave Caolo (Jan 24th, 2008)

There are two types of Mac users: the mouse-centric, the keyboard jockeys, and those who refuse to sleep with Windows users. OK, three types. This tip is for users like me whose knowledge of each application's set of keyboard shortcuts is prodigious. Even we get stumped occasionally when a shortcut ...

TUAW Hack: Mess with your iPhone Settings screens

by Erica Sadun (Dec 18th, 2007)

A little while back, I posted about some undocumented SpringBoard settings on the iPhone. Many readers seemed to enjoy learning about these settings, but they wanted to avoid performing the esoteric property list edits needed to adjust them. In response, I give you the following: controls that ...

Cached Leopard Mail images: friend or foe?

by Erica Sadun (Nov 7th, 2007)

TUAW reader Simon wrote in to us, to share one of his favorite new Leopard features--and its unexpected consequences. After clicking on an All Images search, he was astonished to find any number of odd gifs and jpgs pertaining to, um, Viagra, and er, male enhancement. He quickly realized that All ...

TUAW Tip: get more control when creating new Journler entries

by David Chartier (May 31st, 2007)

While poking around at my favorite new app for getting a lot of my writing done, I found a way to enable a bit more control when creating new entries. By default, Journler has this 'Use quick entry creation' preference checked under the Advanced pane, which allows you to create a new entry using ...

Mac 101: Launch at startup, the Login Items tab

by Mat Lu (May 18th, 2007)

Everybody has programs that are pretty much always open (Mail, iTunes, Quicksilver, etc.), so it's good to have them launch automatically at startup. There are a couple of different ways to do this. If the program is already running you can hold down your (left) mouse button on its Dock icon and ...

Mac 101: Hide Hard Drives, CDs, etc on your Desktop

by Erica Sadun (Apr 27th, 2007)

I like a relatively neat Desktop. I keep out just those items I need to access right away for my day-to-day work. It's so easy to clutter Finder, especially when you use multiple hard drives and partitions, an iPod, a memory card reader and the odd CD or DVD. An often-overlooked Finder preference ...

Apple updates Apple ID site, finally allows editing

by David Chartier (Nov 29th, 2006)

Apple has updated their My Info site to allow more Apple ID editing goodness. It's been a while since I've taken a crack at changing any of this information, but last I remember, it wasn't possible to change the actual email correspondence address of one's Apple ID. The My Info site offers a slim, ...

WiLMa - location-based settings

by David Chartier (Aug 3rd, 2006)

WiLMa is a utility for adjusting various settings like Mail servers, default printers and even desktop wallpaper based on which Location you're using (check your Apple menu if you're unfamiliar with the Location menu). WiLMa can even open and close applications and set a default network to join. If ...

Location Switch Automator action

by David Chartier (Jul 17th, 2006)

Location Switch is an Automator action that adds some painfully missing features to Mac OS X's built-in Locations option (y'know, that feature you never touch in the Apple menu?). Location Switch can a whole host of application preferences and settings based on which location you chose, such as ...

Opera 9 goes Universal

by David Chartier (Jun 20th, 2006)

Opera, the little browser that could (and did - go free, that is), has finished its beta and reached version 9, going Universal in the process. New features include: a built-in BitTorrent client adding your favorite search engines to Opera's search bar simply by right-clicking them ...

Maintenance 3.5 released

by David Chartier (May 23rd, 2006)

Maintenance, the Automator action that performs many system repair and clean-up tasks, has been updated to version 3.5. New features include: Ability to automatically restart after Maintenance has run Ability to automatically view the results file Time stamp added to results file Also, for ...

.Mac syncing UI silliness

by David Chartier (Apr 3rd, 2006)

Today's "what were you thinking, Apple?" is brought to you by the .Mac System Preference pane, iSync and that "Sync Services wants to sync more than X% of your items" popup window. In case you can't figure out the silliness that is the image I've included with this post (and I ...