Hot answers tagged osx
41
Specifically, it means that hitting that button will produce a prompt rather than immediately performing the action of closing the window. While this is usually a save dialog, it could be anything requiring further user action.
In this sense, it is equivalent to ellipses on the ends of menu entries.
37
Inactive memory gets a horrible rap due to a crappy name. It should be called "make your Mac really fast the second, third, and fourth time it does the same task" memory except that's an awful name, too.
Here's how I explain things to someone new to the concept of virtual memory:
Wired: The system cannot run without this amount of RAM (never swapped)
...
36
Yes, you can create a fusion drive on older Macs, described in full length here:
You obviously need both an SSD and a HD. Let's assume they are known to the OS as disk1 and disk7
diskutil cs create bla disk1 disk7 to create it
diskutil cs list and take note of the Logical Volume Group ID
diskutil coreStorage createVolume <ID from above> jhfs+ blub ...
31
It's related to the Apple Events bug in 10.8.2 that also makes revealing files in Finder stop working.
As a workaround, you can terminate the appleeventsd process with sudo killall appleeventsd sudo killall -KILL appleeventsd. (Without -KILL the process is sent a TERM signal and many processes stop responding as @myhd described.)
27
The keyboard shortcut you’re looking for is ⌘ + ⌥ + ⎋, alternatively known as command + option + escape. This will bring up the Force Quit Applications window (see screenshot below).
23
Applications don't have to live in /Applications. If you have a clone of your system mounted, that can account for some duplicates, but certainly not what you are observing. The list of programs for Open with… is maintained in the Launch Services database. If the list contains many duplicates as yours does, the database looks like it needs rebuilding.
...
23
Welcome to OS X. It can be a great aid to your workflow, and make you more productive. You should be able to adjust pretty quickly after the initial learning curve. Please be advised that there are some small things you'll have to change in your workflow, as OS X is after all a completely different OS. But over time, you'll grow to enjoy it. I'll address ...
23
Your best bet is to not "defragment" SSD storage.
The life span of the drive is a function of how the controller decides to write data and how much of the capacity is held in reserve to hide small errors over time. An SSD in general will wear out due to write exhaustion before a hard drive will as the magnetic media can withstand several orders of magnitude ...
22
Pressing ShiftOptionVolume Up/Volume Down allows you to adjust in quarter-box increments. You can also click the volume icon in the menu bar and fine-tune with the slider, or open the Sound panel in System Preferences and get a bigger slider there, which would allow for finer control.
21
umount is a UNIX command that adheres to the traditional UNIX perspective that unmounting a filesystem is a system administration task.
The rationale behind is that unmounting a filesystem, if poorly planned or executed, could be disruptive, even destructive, specially on a multiuser system. So regular users are protected from this potentially dangerous ...
20
The easiest way is to:
Enter time machine (on the Mac whose backup you want to delete)
Go to the point in time you want to delete
Select the icon that looks like a cog in the finder and choose 'Delete Backup'
This ensures the backup catalog remains accurate and the integrity of your data stays intact.
20
Sure. Just go to System Preferences/Network, select Wifi and click Advanced. A list with all the Wifi networks you've been connected to will appear. Just rearrange the connection order (the ones you'd like to connect first on top) by drag-dropping.
Also, delete any unwanted network SSID (network names) if you no longer want to auto-join that.
18
The limitation imposed is based on the chipsets used on the computers motherboard. For example, the noted Apple maximums you mentioned for the MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro, are smaller than the maximums that those machines can address in practice. The MacBook Pro tested maximum is 16 GB according to EveryMac's MacBook Pro max RAM listing . And as for the Mac ...
16
According to the following blog entry Apple removed the option deliberately and it won't come back:
http://www.macpoint.be/mountain-lion-is-coming/
I also missed the option, so I wrote an App. It's in beta now:
http://batterytimeapp.com/
16
Philip, believe me, it is much better spending some time to learn (and settle in) with OS X style of work than finding some Windows (horrible) taskbar solution.
Assuming that you have a new OS X notebook, you probably have multitouch trackpad too, so try the following:
Go to System preferences (via the Apple icon in the menubar)
In the General set the ...
16
Well the version number is the correct thing to report when you have issues etc.
The marketing names are from wikipedia
╔════════════════════════════╦════════════════════╗
║ Version ║ Codename ║
╠════════════════════════════╬════════════════════╣
║ Rhapsody Developer Release ║ Grail1Z4 / Titan1U ║
║ Mac OS X Server 1.0 ...
15
Be careful with sudo and making sure you pick the correct Mac's files since there is no undo or confirmation of the following command:
sudo tmutil delete /Volumes/drive_name/Backups.backupdb/old_mac_name
The sudo command needs your password (and it won't echo to the screen, so just type it and pause to be sure you're dating the correct files before ...
15
Yes and no.
The Fusion Drive is taking advantage of Core Storage to act as one logical volume, which you see as a single volume but can actually be made up of multiple physical volumes (in this case, an SSD and an HDD).
You can create and manage Core Storage volumes with the diskutil command in Terminal. (Disk Utility does not yet have extensive Core ...
14
With the advent of Notification Center, the display of badges on any app can now be managed alongside display of banners, popups, and other notification-related settings.
Go to the Notifications preference pane in System Preferences, and select the Mail app from the list - the option to turn off the Dock badge should be there.
14
The Java exploits have been accessing through java on websites. You do not need to enable this e.g. in Safari you can set a preference to use Java or not.
If you have a command line java application (e.g. Bitcoin) this is then is as risky as an other application. You need to make sure you have the latest version of third party libraries and executables to ...
13
Both shell- and AppleScripts can be used just about anywhere either is appropriate.
AppleScripts work better when talking to apps and user-level system facilities. (For instance, you can say tell app "iTunes" to play and it will, or tell app "Finder" to open the first file of the second window.)
Shell scripts (you referred to bash) work better when talking ...
13
There's no built-in OS X behaviour that exactly matches that of iOS, but you can use what's often referred to as a site-specific browser to turn sites into OS X apps.
Fluid
Fluid lets you turn sites into single apps that appear like any other OS X app — in their own windows, with separate dock icons. Pretty useful for web apps like Gmail, but you can use ...
13
The answer is in the comments on this TUAW post. The keyboard focus on the mini player (indicated by the blue focus ring) is on one of the playback controls, which prevents them from hiding. Click the mini player background to bring it to the foreground, then press tab until the focus ring moves to the Up Next or Search icons, and track information will ...
13
Here you are some major points:
Reinstall your Mountain Lion.
Don’t run benchmarks on your new SSD
Benchmarks usually write a lot of data to the disk (to test the write
speed), wearing it out. So it is the best way how you can ruin your
SSD even before you start using it. Don’t do it.
Enable TRIM
OS X supports TRIM only for Apple-supplied ...
13
The Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the Java SDK are not inherently unsafe. The problem relies for the most part in certain ways the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) accesses (and can be fooled to) certain pieces of the operating system.
Like every other complex piece of software, Java is no different than, say, .NET on a Windows machine or Mono.NET on any ...
12
I often have to do this with images of plots of data. I use the command line tools that come in the Imagemagick package; I think I installed it on my system with MacPorts.
The actual tool you want to use from Imagemagick is the convert tool. If you have your two 320x428 images, say a.png and b.png, you can do
$> convert +append a.png b.png c.png
to ...
12
There isn't a perfect fit for a unified Appleworks replacement - but each of the 5 functions is available directly from Apple either pre-installed or on the App Store.
Apple now has the iWork suite, which used to be a single package you can buy, but is now separate apps on the App Store. It is made up of Pages (word processor), Keynote (presentation ...
12
Apple documents the lowest levels of the Mach Kernel and the virtual memory subsystem fairly well on the web as part of it's developer documentation.
Kernel Programming Guide: Memory and Virtual Memory
Since that kernel was developed by Carnegie Mellon University, you can find dozens of papers describing it quite easily.
If that is too low level for ...
11
So far as I know there isn't a nice automated way to provide the benefits of System Restore as it is implemented on Windows. For all its utility for Windows users, though, System Restore can't be used to backup/restore individual files & whatnot at the whim of the user - that requires a separate backup system.
Time Machine on OS X, on the other hand, ...
11
Only the MacBook Air (Mid 2011 or newer), MacBook Pro with Retina display were originally supported supported for Power Nap. The reason for this is An SMC update is required to gain all the functionality of Power Nap, and these are the only models Apple has chosen to actively write the firmware updates to support the feature. In other words, it's not that ...
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