The Mac Admin's Blog

How to change icon size in Mac The tip of changing icon size on Dock will really be beneficial when you have lots of icons scattered all over your desktop. It is really simple to do this: Going to contextual menu (right click or command+click) on the desktop and select “ Show View Options ” a new menu will appear. This is used to organize the size and spacing of the icons. Apart from changing the size and space between icons, this window also helps you answering these questions: How to change spaces between icons on Mac? How to change font size on icon labels? Position of icon label i.e. bottom or right? Icon preview to be enabled or not? How to change 'Arrange by' type?

How to map a printer on a Mac In this post we will talk about mapping a printer on a Mac. The process to configure a network as well as local printer will remain same hence perform same steps to map either type: i. Goto Preferences and open Printer & Faxes. ii. Click on " + " on the next screen select IP tab. iii. Enter the IP Address and click on Add. iv. Mac will collect required information and add the printer automatically. If in case this does not works we need to add the drivers: Go to Preferences > open Printer & Faxes > IP > goto Print using & select the driver from the menu. Though all the drivers are preloaded whle installation of OS X but sometimes we also need to add the drivers.

How to clear DNS from Mac OS X Every time when you open a web page its DNS gets stored in cache of the computer. If you want to know what is DNS, read this topic to clear the concept. When these DNS cache become old, in some of the cases they start creating problem. The idea is to delete DNS cache saved in the system. The command has to typed in Terminal, for Leopard it has to be: dscacheutil -flushcache If you still have Tiger running on your Mac, then type the following: lookupd -flushcache After running this command, cache will be clear and it may take a bit longer to open web pages. It is not recommended to constantly flush your cache, once a month or once every two months would be good enough.

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.