The Mac Admin's Blog

How to hide the Dock in Mac & how to re-size the Dock In this simple post we will find the ways of: Hiding the dock. Moving the dock to left or right & Resizing the dock. Go to System Preferences and launch Dock, you will get the screen pasted above. The first option of Size will determine the size of the dock. Position on screen will set the doc on left right or bottom as per your choice. From here itself you can select icons to animate while launching. One of my favorite option is Automatically hide & show the Dock . This will show the dock when the mouse is hover. There are some cool features to play with the doc.

How to hide a folder or how to create a hidden folder in Mac Ever worried about hiding your personal stuffs on your Mac? This post is gonna bring shining in the eyes of the users who own a Mac but have to share it with others. I'm going to mention a cool trick about how to create a hidden folder and also how to hide a folder in Mac OS X. This can be done by using Terminal and it is really easy as the command is of just one small line. The basic concept working to hide a folder is to add a dot/period/point before the folder name will make it invisible, though it will remain at the same place. So here is the Terminal magic. (A) How to create a hidden folder: i. Go to Application and open Utilities. ii. Launch Terminal. iii. Now you have to go to the folder in which you want to create the folder. iv. Command to enter a folder is cd foldername , e.g. cd Desktop . v. Once you enter the folder then create the hidden folder by the command mkdir .foldername e.g. mkdir .macmasters vi. Thi

How to hide doc & menu bar in a specific application Yesterday I got a mail from one of my user Bill and was asking if there is any way that he can hide doc when he is running his safari. Since then I was trying to find the trick to get this done for Bill. I was not sure if there is any way to do this until I found this cool method. Using property key references, this is a code that makes certain changes to your system. When you will run the application, it will check the property references and perform accordingly. Its an application programming interface (API), a small bit of code, that will make this change occur. Now without taking you in depth of how it works let me show you the procedure how to do it. Launch the application, in Finder right click (ctrl+click) on the application and select “ Show Package Contents ” and go to ' Contents ' then open “ Info.plist ” in TextEdit. Now in this file, try to find the command (dict) and then paste the following command and save

How to take screen shot in Mac The idea of writing this post came in my mind when I asked one of colleague to send me a screen shot of an application in Mac as I was out of office. She was unable to do it till I guided her how to do it as she has been a Windows user and was very used to PrintScreen button. The main problem is that there no inbuilt key on the Apple keyboard but Apple have included two ways of taking screen shots. The first way is to use the Grab tool in Utilities . Once you launch this utility you'll find few options in the menu bar. If you expand the Capture menu there are four sub-menus namely Selection , Window , Screen and Timed Screen . The fourth option Timed Screen is really wonderful which gives you a option to take a screen shot after 10secs. This could really be beneficial when the mouse is busy and you need to take a print screen of Mac when mouse is busy. Another method of taking picture is pressing those three buttons in combination Command + Shift +

How to increase the size of a mouse pointer Ever wished for a bigger cursor so that you can see it easily on the screen? Now, you can make you cursor larger and easier to be located on the desktop. In order to get this done, you have to: 1. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu. 2. Now select Universal Access . 3. Open Mouse & Trackpad and drag the Cursor Size slider to the right to make it larger. Now it should be visible without your specs too.

Fast User Switching for faster change between two accounts Working in a shared Mac this was one of the major issue I faced that whenever I try to login on the machine, I had to wait for long time which was painful during productive hours. After some research, I got an option that has fixed my problem to some extent. You can try this by enabling Fast User Switching to allow you to switch between accounts without logging off and logging on each time. To get this done, you have to go to System Preferences , and select Accounts and then Login Options. From here you need to turn on Enable fast user switching . Now you can switch between users using a pull-down menu on the right side of the menu bar and you don't have to logoff/in every time.

How to unmount external/eject drives? Sometimes we get a disk or disk image stuck and not gets eject even after restarting the Mac holding down the mouse button. If that does not unmounts, you can force it with a Terminal command. In order to do thid, launch Terminal and use “ df ” to list the drives. Search and locate the drive that you want to unmount, such as /dev/disk3al. Then run command “ diskutil unmountDisk force /dev/disk3al ″ this should force it to unmount. Make sure you try this command after making sure that you have pointed the correct drive.

Steps to remove unwanted applications from login items Once you are an old user on Mac, you will install multiple applications and softwares depending on your needs. Some or many of them might go to your start up items and make your machine slow at the time of startup after login. I am going to mention a small tip to remove the login items that are not required so that the start up process consumes as less time as possible. This is really effective and you can feel the difference once you follow these steps. In orded to reach login items, you need to go to System Preferences , select your account under Accounts and go to Login Items tab. On this window where the login items are displayed, select the one of your choice and remove the check from the ones which are not required. There is another option for doing this, you can also right click on the desired application on the dock and uncheck the option “ Open At Login ”. Just to inform you that this shortcut way won't work for ap

How to hide inactive icons from Doc If you are a user who has switched from a PC to a Mac, you might be in habit of seeing only active icons on the task bar. In Mac the case is different as you can see all the icons of applications displayed there. I am mentioning a small step for you to hide the inactive icons in the doc. If you want to get this done then you have to type a small command in Terminal . defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool TRUE killall Dock It might take couple of seconds to perform this task and this will be fixed, now your desktop will show only running application. If you want to see the active icons then type TRUE, in the command above and if you type FALSE, everything should be back to normal and if there is any stack, it will disappear.

Twitter application for Mac users This application also, like other applications is designed to focus primarily on the feeds. This is clearly represented within the window of the program. Every tweet is clearly mentioned in a bubble looking area and the authors image is next to it. Your own tweets are on the right side of the application with everyone else’s is on the left so that you can clearly make out who’s are who and the conversation. Tweetie is lot more than just a way of following your Twitter feed. You can send messages and also there are some cool features accompanying that. For instance you can add a second, third and a whole number of other accounts into the app. This is really great, if you have more than two accounts it can become difficult, to manage and post too both. Tweetie lets you do this, the secondary accounts are signified by the logos below the main features on the left hand side. One other cool feature is the ability to have threaded direct messages. I don’t r