Standard OS X title bars have several hidden features that can be very helpful. If you hold the command key and click the title of a window1 you will get a menu that allows you to drill down through the hierarchy to the root of the filesystem. However, that’s not the only useful trick you [...]

One of the lesser known OS X niceties is the ability to get spelling suggestions/completions from any standard Cocoa text input. To accomplish this, simply hit the Escape key1) in any supported application (iChat, Mail, and TextEdit are some examples) and be amazed. I find this feature very useful for quickly obtaining the correct spelling [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to set up a ramdisk in Mac OS X, here’s a quick script you can use. Simply invoke it with a size in MB and the name for your volume and it will create and automount it for you. It also won’t leave any dangling directories in your /Volumes/ when you [...]

If you’re a Mac OS X user running Subversion on the command line and mounting remote disks you may have run into instances where you want to globally ignore ._*, .AppleDouble, and *:2e_* files. To do this simply open your Terminal and edit your ~/.subversion/config file and look for the line below. #global-ignores = *.o [...]

If you’re a Mac user who utilizes Terminal.app with any regularity you have probably run into some Linux servers where the Mac Delete key behaves as forward delete instead of backspace (Ubuntu, Debian, and a few other distributions have this issue). This is a really obnoxious problem, but fortunately there is an easy global fix. [...]

I have recently begun switching from Aperture to Lightroom for my photography workflow (look for another blog post about that at some point), but on my new unibody Macbook Pro I noticed that Lightroom appeared to be unbearably slow when dumping large volumes of data.  I suspected that FileVault (which I only keep enabled on [...]