The Mac Admin's Blog

How to force quit an application in Mac This post will update you process to force quit an application if in case it is creating any issue or is freezed. Just as we used ctrl+alt+del in PC we use force quit in Mac. The process to force quit an application is by pressing command+option+escape which will take you to the window to select the application that you want to force quit. Using Force Quit with Finder : Unlike the applications force quit can never be used to quit the Finder. Mac has designed Finder to be open evey time no matter what are you doing on the machine it will be running at the background. On force quit window in front of Finder you will find an option of restart rather than force quit. So the idea is, never waste time searching option to quit finder, Mac will never allow you.

Unable to trash/delete items Sometimes you might face the issue that you are unable to delete items on your Mac. If this happens the reason would be in right on that file which means the permission assigned to your id is 'Read only'. All you have to do is, change the permissions and you will be able to delete/trash the file. The steps are: 1. Open 'Get info' of the selected file by pressing Command+I in combination. 2. In this window, where the option Sharing & Permissions is mentioned, expand it and change the rights from drop down menu. 3. Once done reopen try to trash it and will be deleted. This could be done only if you have made changes in the rights or you are admin on the Mac machine. This will surely resolve the issue of being unable to move items to Trash.

While trying to save settings in IE it does not saves it Sometimes when you make changes in your Internet Explorer and when you restart the machine next time it resumes old settings and you find that your settings are gone. The solution is very simple, find the .plist file saved in the library and delete it. Now launch IE all over and then try to make changes as soon as the application is launched. This is one of the most annoying act of IE while working on a Mac and I suggest using Safari or the choice of webmasters... Firefox.

How to recover text from a damaged document in MS-Office Launch MS Word in Mac OS X. In the Word menu, click on Preferences . Now under Authoring and Proofing Tools , select General . Please don't forget that the Confirm conversion at Open check box is selected, then OK . Click Open on the Standard toolbar. On the Enable pop-up menu, you need to click Recover Text from Any File . Open the document and its done. This is no trick, Microsoft has given this option if any of the file gets corrupted.

How to connect to FTP using Safari Ever thought while working on an important project what will happen if your Interarchy or any other FTP application stops working? Now if you have Tiger or later version you can use your Safari to connect to FTP and transfer files without dedicated FTP client. The step is very simple, all you have to do is type the details of the FTP site as below and hit return/enter key. The format is ftp://username:password@domain.com , by using this trick you can get your project moving on till you IT guy comes to fix the FTP client issue. SFTP might create issue while connecting, FTP is recommended.

How to change permissions on a file Here is the simple step to change permissions on a file. If read access is given to a user it can be converted to read/write access. In order to do this, we just need to open 'Get info' window, down the bottom there is an option of ownershiop and permissions. Select the drop down and change the permissions on this file as per your requirements.

How to change default application to open a file Sometimes we need to open a .pdf file and it opens in Word. It could be an error and sometimes it could be a necessity to change the default opening application as per your choice. Here is the simple way to do it. We have to use ' Get info ' in order to make this change. To reach ' Get info ' just select the file and hit Command+i . Once you get this window, you have to select the "Open with" and choose the application that you need to set as default application to open a specific file type.

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.

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...

Real time screen recording from your Mac screen. Want to capture everything on your screen? 3d games bogging down ordinary screen capture software? Those days are over: welcome to iShowU HD. Built for speed. Built to “just work". Features of this application are available here . iShowU HD has been rebuilt from the ground up to provide blazing real-time performance with a brand new, easy-to-use interface. With professional features like drag-and-drop to Final Cut and multi-channel audio capture just a single click away, iShowU HD has all the power you’ll ever need at a price you can deal with. If interested, visit iShowU Easy to use Just drag the capture rectangle over what you want to record and...

Getting rid of confirmation prompt in Terminal while closing Sometimes when you close an application, you get a confirmation prompt if you really want to close it. We rarely close the window accidentally and if there is nothing to save in the application then this prompt is irritating, though not useless for novices. So if you find it irritating, here is an option for you to close this down so that it will not bother you next time when you close it. All you have to do is follow the below mentioned steps: i. Once Terminal is launched, go to Preferences > Settings > Shell. ii. Here you will find multiple options. iii. The one you have to work on is at the bottom under “Prompt Before Closing”. iv. Turn it to never and this will stop the warning/prompt every time.

Using AirPort to connect to the Internet The prerequisites are you should have an AirPort card installed in your computer and you should be in the range of an AirPort network that is connected to the Internet, then you can use AirPort to connect to the same Internet line. In order to get connected to an AirPort network you need to follow the following steps: 1. Choose Apple icon and go to System Preferences then click on Network. 2. Select AirPort in the Network Connection list and choose a wireless network from the Network Name pop-up menu. 3. Might be possible that you'll require to enter the password for the network. 4. If the network you are expecting is not in the list, it may be a “closed” network and not be available in the list, then... 5. Try clicking "Other" and then enter the network 'name and password' if asked for. 6. Here there is chance of AirPort not being in the list, if so, click Add (+) at the bottom of the list and choose AirPort from the Inter...

Ready to make your Mac fastest ever? Working simultaneously on a Mac and any Core2duo PC you will experience that the speed is too slow on Mac while performing the same task on both the machines, but now with Snow Leopard, Apple claims your Mac machine will be faster than ever (make sure your drivers and the hardware meet the compliance). Mentioning some of the tasks that Apple claims about 10.6: Installation 1.8 times faster. Backup 2 times faster. Wake up 2 times faster. Shut down 1.75 faster. Join network 1.55x Times faster than Leopard. Resolution in iChat 4 times clear than before. 75% faster shut down. 55% faster connectivity to networks. With Snow Leopard, Safari 4 delivers up to 50 percent faster JavaScript performance thanks to its 64-bit support. So get your fingers ready for faster rate of click to work on Snow Leopard.