RCDefault App is a Mac OS X 10.2 or higher preference pane that allows a user to set the default application used for various URL schemes, file extensions, file types, MIME types, and Uniform Type Identifiers (or UTIs; MacOS 10.4 only). MacOS X uses the extension and file type settings to choose the application when opening a file in Finder, while Safari and other applications use the URL and MIME type settings at other times for content not related to a file (such as an unknown URL

Wer sich für das Powerpack entscheidet, bekommt eine Vielzahl an Erweiterungsmöglichkeiten geboten. Mir als Tastaturjunkie springt dabei immer buchstäblich das Herz an die Decke. Und da es schon öfters hier nachgefragt wurde, präsentieren wir euch jetzt in diesem Artikel unsere meistbenutzten Erweiterungen bzw. Extensions für Alfred:

Diese Liste ist ohne Sortierung und Wertung und eher als lose Aufzählung zu betrachten, zeigt aber sehr schön, wie vielzeitig einsetzbar Alfred ist. Die Liste ist nicht vollständig und wird mit der Zeit durch weitere Themen-relevanten Artikel ergänzt. Dazu noch einen Tipp vorne weg: Mit dem “Extension Updater for Alfred“ kann man die meisten installierten Erweiterungen automatisch aktualisieren.

I’m enjoying my new iPhone 4S but I’ve found that when shooting movies it captures files at 1080p, producing big files. After downloading these movies to my Mac I often want to post or email them. I find converting them to a smaller size a bother. Is there an easy way to do that?

There is. And the avenue to that easier way is Automator. Try this:

The world can be a tedious place. Some of that tedium, such as long lines at the market and unyielding traffic jams, is unavoidable. But there are waits that you needn’t suffer, particularly when working with your Mac. Take adding multiple recipients to a single email message, for example. Of course you can add each recipient, one address at a time. But doing so is about as interesting (and necessary) as watching paint dry. With the power of address groups at your disposal you can quickly add many recipients to your message in one go. Here are answers to frequently asked questions:

Why another file watcher for OS X?

There’s already kicker, and many ruby programs that need file watching, already have solutions built in. For example ZenTest, compass etc..

The problem with file watchers on OS X is that they depend on rubycocoa. If rubycocoa isn’t available most of them fallback to file-system polling, which kills my cpu. If you’re using the system ruby that comes with OS X, you’re fine because rubycocoa is already built in.

I use rvm, which makes it super easy for me to install multiple separate and self-contained versions of ruby. I could for instance, maintain an old project that was written against ruby-1.8.6 while on the same machine starting a new project using ruby-1.9.2.

You’ll only run into rubycocoa problems if you use rvm. Have a quick google for rvm and rubycocoa, and you’ll see a huge list of people having issues installing rubycocoa with rvm.

OS X’s Quick Look lets you view a file’s contents by selecting it in the Finder and then pressing the spacebar. There’s no need to wait for the file to open in an application—it appears immediately, so you can look up a number or date, or simply see if this is the file you want. Read text files, RTF files, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint documents. Sneak a peek at Pages, Numbers and Keynote files. Play videos, in many formats, and even listen to music files. But as handy as all that is, Quick Look can do even more:

Change Mac OS X 10.7 Lion iCal and Address Book Skins from Leather to Aluminium - Easy Method
Revised: 17/2/12 - Updated to fix new image files included in 10.7.3 Update.

I am not a fan of the new leather title bar in iCal on Lion... what were they thinking? Now all we need is a wood-effect dashboard for our cars and rotary-dial iPhones...

I created new images files to go inside iCal.app and AddressBook.app to give them an aluminium look like previous versions of OS X.

This is a simplified version of my previous post which uses a package installer to apply the skins automatically without you having to manually modify the iCal.app and Address Book.app files.

This is a component level hardware compatibility list. We want to keep it as accurate as possible, but please, do not entirely rely on this list when buying hardware. Add which parts you have working in the categories listed below, or create a new category. Please keep alphabetical order inside the categories. The categories themselves are ordered by popularity. Please list any caveats or problems as well.
ONLY add hardware that you have TESTED. Don't add hardware just because you think it might work.
Please add hardware into tables.
This is for 10.7.3 builds only.

Grauers Code
Swiss Arrows
Swiss Arrows
The swiss army knife to control your windows!

Organize your windows in Mac easily and fast with Swiss Arrows. Change the size and placement of a window with just a single click.

Use the HUD panel to move and resize all your windows at once. Every window in place!

Go to General Preferences to configure the use of Swiss Arrows. We recommend to automatically open Swiss Arrows at login without showing the Preferences Window and hide the Dock icon

Got Dual Graphics Cards Working on Lion

[GUIDE] A fast and easy way to install Lion

One of the most important things to stay on top of is a regular system backup. If you’re new to Mac usage—or just never bothered to backup before—you’ll want to get familiar with a built-in Mac program called Time Machine. Time Machine works with your Mac and an external drive to regularly save important documents, photos, and even important system files. Apart from keeping spares of every file, Time Machine also keeps a record of how your system looked on any given day, making it easy for a full system restore if something goes wrong.

Recovery HD

OS X Lion includes a built in set of utilities in the Recovery HD. Restart your Mac and hold down the Command key and the R key (Command-R), and keep holding them until the Apple icon appears, indicating that your Mac is starting up. After the Recovery HD is finished starting up, you should see a desktop with a Mac OS X menu bar and a "Mac OS X Utilities" application window. Note: If you see a login window or your own desktop and icons, it is possible that you didn't hold Command-R early enough. Restart and try again.

In order to reinstall OS X Lion, you will need to be connected to an Ethernet or Wi-Fi network. The Wi-Fi menu item is in the upper-right corner of the screen. Click the icon to display all available Wi-Fi networks. Click your preferred network name and, if needed, enter a username and/or password.

File Vault 2 and embedded 'Recovery HD' disk are new additions to OS X in Lion release.

A fresh OS X Lion installation creates 'Recovery HD' by live re-partitioning 'Macintosh HD'. The recovery disk is 650MB in size (as of 10.7.2), of partition type Apple_Boot, and therefore, will be hidden during normal usage by OS X user interface. It does not show up in Finder, and not even 'Disk Utility.'

If the recovery disk 'Recovery HD' is proper, booting up a Mac without File Vault 2 while holding down the Option key will result in listing 'Recovery HD' as an alternative to 'Macintosh HD' for booting the machine up. For Macs with File Vault 2, only holding down the Cmd+R key combination will boot 'Recovery HD.'

The 'Recovery HD' of a Mac without File Vault 2 contains 'Base System Install', which is a minimal OS X kernel plus useful utility applications (Disk Utility, Time Machine, Network Utility, Pasword Utility). The main purpose is to allow partitioning a hard disk and restoring the system from a Time Capsule via the Time Machine application.

The 'Recovery HD' of a Mac with File Vault 2 does not contain 'Base System Install,' but only CoreStorage components and a minimal kernel for authenticating a user to Core Storage, to get a File Vault 2 (Whole-Disk-Encryption) protected disk mounted. Therefor, once File Vault 2 is turned on, your Mac will loose the ability to boot 'Base System Install'. The only way to start a Time Capsule restore is to boot from a Lion Installation DVD (or USB), if you had one made from the downloaded Lion installation app from the AppStore (instructions are widely written in web articles, please search the web).

When a Lion Mac is restored from Time Capsule via the Time Machine application, as of 10.7.2, the 'Recovery HD' will NOT be recreated. A Mac with File Vault 2 previously enabled will also be restored with File Vault 2 disabled; i.e. the disk will NOT be encrypted (this is right thing to do IMO). Without 'Recovery HD', File Vault 2 cannot be enabled anymore. This is a BIG problem for Mac owners who need stronger assurance of data security.

This article is a collection of my experiences in fixing this plight I had to face after restoring my Mac after my Seagate Momentus 500GB (G-Shock) crashed badly.

Hazel is probably the greatest never-think-about-it application for the Mac I know of. She doesn’t get talked about enough, so that’s what this post is: me talking about her. . . I mean it.

It’s also a selfish attempt at learning more about my favorite Mac maid… ‘cause I get the feeling I’m still not using her—it. . . it, dammit—enough. Let me know how you use Hazel in the comments.

Smart Folders use Spotlight search to automatically gather files by type and subject matter. Smart Folders are updated as you change, add, and remove files on your computer.

Für FileVault ist Mac OS X Lion erforderlich. Zudem muss die Recovery HD auf dem Startlaufwerk installiert sein, das das Installationsprogramm von Mac OS X Lion bei der Installation zu erstellen versucht. Falls Sie die Warnmeldung erhalten, dass keine Recovery HD erstellt werden konnte und die Installation von Mac OS X Lion fortgesetzt wurde, können Sie FileVault 2 nicht nutzen. In diesem Artikel finden Sie weitere Informationen. Bitte beachten Sie, dass die Recovery HD im Startvolume Ihres Computers vorhanden sein muss, damit Sie FileVault 2 nutzen können (keine externe Recovery HD).

Text-expansion utilities let you create abbreviations—also called clippings or snippets—for frequently typed text. When you type one of these abbreviations, the utility automatically replaces it with the respective full text. Snippets can be words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, or even bits of code. For example, when we type mw, our text-expansion utilities expand those two letters to Macworld, saving a few keystrokes each time. When Dan types addy, his utility immediately replaces it with his home address. While the keystrokes these abbreviations save may not seem like much on their own, the hundreds—or even thousands—of keystrokes you avoid add up every day. In this way, a text-expansion utility can save you significant time and effort.

I love iTunes. As Apple’s native music player and iOS powerhouse command station, it is unlikely that anything will ever wholly replace iTunes for me. It’s an integrated hub for surfing the iTunes music store, buying iOS apps, making playlists, the Ping network (even though it’s somewhat barren), managing the media and content on my iPhone and iPad, and more. But in spite of my love for iTunes, I will be the first to admit that with a music library the size of mine, it can be a bit slow, unwieldy, and bloated when all I want to do is play some tunes.

When I began reading up on Sonora, a beta-phase app coded by Indragie Karunaratne and designed by Tyler Murphy, I was impressed with the obvious target niche that Sonora was appealing to. At the risk of sounding “scoff-y”, independently developed music players rarely appeal to me because they so often claim to be an iTunes replacement–which, for the reasons listed in the above paragraph, is unlikely for me. Sonora, on the other hand, markets itself as a companion player, humbly leaving the heavy lifting of music purchases and iOS management to iTunes and providing a lightweight player for the express purpose of playing music. Hit the jump to read more about Sonora.

OS X Lion has now been around long enough for us all to dig in and really find some interesting functionality that is either completely hidden or just enough below the service that many users don’t even know it exists.

We’ve spent hours combing through Lion for secrets and put out a call on Twitter for your favorites. This post brings over forty such hidden tricks and tips for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!

Homebrew is my favorite package manager. If you installed Xcode just for brew than this post might be interesting for you.

Kenneth Reitz created a GCC Installer for OSX without Xcode! Thank you. This package is about 500 MB. Compared to Xcode you save at least 1,5 GB on your SSD.

So let’s go to work:

Remove Xcode

[code]sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools --mode=all[/code]
This will delete Xcode. For more details see John’s post
Download and install GCC for Mac without Xcode

Currently 10.6 and 10.7 packages are available at https://github.com/kennethreitz/osx-gcc-installer/downloads
Install brew

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"

You’re done

You can verify your success when you receive meaningful version by calling gcc --version and brew --version

Die neue Funktion Lion Wiederherstellung bietet in OS X Lion alle Werkzeuge bereit, die Sie zur Neuinstallation von Lion, zur Reparatur der Festplatte und sogar zur Wiederherstellung aus einem Time Machine-Backup benötigen, ohne dass optische Medien erforderlich sind.

For those interested in getting their Dell Optiplex 745 PC powered by the new Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion", here is the corresponding link to the osx86project wiki, I wrote this entry after successfully getting it to work.

osx86project wiki link for the Optiplex 745

Use these shortcuts when you start up your computer. Unless otherwise specified, hold down the specified key immediately after you hear the startup tone (while the screen is still black).

You'll need a copy of the OS X Lion installer. If you saved a copy when you first installed Lion, great. If not, you'll need to re-download it from the Mac App Store.

To do so, launch the App Store and option-click the Purchases tab. An "Install" button should appear next to Lion. Click it to re-download the installer. You can use this option-click-Purchases trick to re-download any purchase, not just Lion.

Access your computer from anywhere in the world




Control your iTunes library with Jaadu
Access and control your computer from anywhere

iTeleport gives you full control of your computer's mouse and keyboard while providing a rich visual display of your computer screen on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

We also want to provide our users with the best support possible, so if you have any questions at all regarding iTeleport, check out our Support page or feel free to contact us directly.

Technical Specs:

A patented touchpad interface for mouse control and screen navigation. iTeleport's interface is the easiest, most intuitive way to control your desktop from your iPhone or iPad. (US Patent #7,870,496)
Easy setup instructions
iTeleport Connect, a connection utility that automatically configures router and network settings so that you can use iTeleport over both WIFI and 3G.
Support for Mac, Windows, Linux, and AMX Touchscreen Interfaces
Over 15 multi-touch gestures
Support for ultra-high resolutions -- we've successfully tested on two Apple 30-inch Cinema displays with a combined resolution of 5120 x 1600!
Full support for Retina Display in iPhone 4
Support to run iTeleport in the background (on iOS4.0 or later)
Remote and Modifier menus for access to arrow, function and special keys, as well as shortcuts to common actions

One of the little-known time-saving features of Mac OS X is services—hidden, single-feature commands that you can access from a special Services menu, or, sometimes, from a contextual menu. These features are generally provided by applications—built-in OS X applications or third-party programs—and let you quickly preform actions that usually require launching additional programs and taking many steps. Here are answers to frequently asked questions about how to find, use, and manage services.

Quick Look is a delightfully simple way to browse the contents of the files on your Mac without launching their parent apps. (Select a file, press the space bar, that's it.) But if you’re looking at, say, a PDF or Word document, Quick Look can frustrate, because it doesn't provide any way to select and copy text; if you find a snippet of text you’d like to copy and paste, you still need to launch the parent app. Unless, that is, you know a secret shared by Keir Thomas (author of the excellent Mac Kung Fu

The Apple Developer Tools are a suite of software tools from Apple to aid in making software titles for the Mac OS X platform. They come on the Snow Leopard installation CD as part of the Xcode suite, but aren't installed by default.

Introduction to Instruments User Guide

Instruments is an application for dynamically tracing and profiling Mac OS X and iOS code. It is a flexible and powerful tool that lets you track one or more processes and examine the collected data. In this way, Instruments helps you understand the behavior of both user programs and the operating system.

With the Instruments application, you use special tools (known as instruments) to trace different aspects of a process’ behavior. You can also use the application to record a sequence of user interface actions and replay them, using one or more instruments to gather data.

The Instruments application includes the ability to:

Examine the behavior of one or more processes

Record a sequence of user actions and replay them, reliably reproducing those events and collecting data over multiple runs

Create your own custom DTrace instruments to analyze aspects of system and application behavior

Save user interface recordings and instrument configurations as templates, accessible from Xcode

Using Instruments, you can:

Track down difficult-to-reproduce problems in your code

Do performance analysis on your program

Automate testing of your code

Stress-test parts of your application

Perform general system-level troubleshooting

Gain a deeper understanding of how your code works

ClipMenu is an awesome free clipboard history manager for Mac OS X that keeps track of nearly anything copied into the clipboard, ranging from plain and rich text, URLs, images, even files. ClipMenu defaults to remember 20 items but can be set to whatever you want, each clipboard item is then stored for easy retrieval from the menu. Just select an item from the menu and it gets copied into your active clipboard buffer ready to be pasted or used elsewhere

Sometimes, there are applications on your Mac that devour up all that precious disk space, leaving you with not much storage for documents, music, and other applications. These apps sometimes do so without any indication, which can be frustrating when you're in desperate need of a few extra megabytes. Read on to find out how to reclaim that disk space and keep those apps from occupying your Mac.

You may have forgotten about Photo Booth, but Apple sure hasn’t. In Lion, Apple updated its software for quickly capturing photos from your Mac’s built in camera, adding full-screen mode and new visual effects that leverage face-detection features. But while Photo Booth’s feature set is still pretty simple, there are a few power user tricks to the software that may help you get more out of it.

First of all, there's the flash. When you snap a photo with Photo Booth, the software briefly makes your Mac’s display go bright white, to simulate camera lighting. But there's a new option in Lion to disable that flash permanently: Go to the Camera menu, and deselect Enable Screen Flash.

You can’t know in advance just what you’ll want to know later. You can’t do this the right way, you can’t do it optimally. As your needs and insights change, you’re bound to wish you’d recorded things you didn’t, and you’re likely to find many of the things you did record to be obvious, banal, and dull. (Don’t worry about that: you, or your biographer, might find those very things precious someday)

Some things are unpredictable: you’ll describe those in text. There’s no alternative. Nobody could have expected that to happen, and so you’ll have to start from the beginning.

But other things are more predictable, and you might want to have a regular slot in which to file the information you’ll record in every update. These slots offer you several advantages:

Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

Github has just released Hubot to the public (Say Hello to Hubot).

What is Hubot?

I have installed it on my MBP running Max OS X 10.7.2

Instructions:

Download and install Node.js & npm - sites.google.com/site/nodejsmacosx
Download and install Redis - redis.io/download
I just used homebrew for this ‘brew install redis’. If you don’t have it, just manually install Redis by following their instructions.

Lion bootfähig auf Stick

Ich habe mir Mac OS X 10.7 im Mac App Store gekauft, hätte davon aber gern eine bootfähige Installation, etwa auf einem USB-Stick oder auf DVD.

Hier mal ein kleines How-to wie man sich einen bootbaren Mac OS X 10.7 LION Installier auf einem USB Stick erstellt. Da Apple den Löwen jetzt über den Mac App Store vertreibt wird man erst mal keine Installations-DVD zur Hand haben. Das Upgrade von Snow Leopard zu LION geht zwar ohne Probleme ohne diese Medien über den Mac App Store, aber wenn man seinen Mac mal neu Installieren will weil einem z.B vielleicht die Platte abgetaucht ist, dann braucht man ein Installations-Medium.

Built right into OS X Lion, Lion Recovery lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc.

The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.

Piezo makes it a snap to record audio on your Mac.

MindManager 9 für Mac
ist da!
Mit MindManager gelingt Ihnen mühelos die Umsetzung von Ideen. Unstrukturierte Rechercheergebnisse und erfasste Anforderungen werden zu fertigen Strategien, Präsentationen und Projektplänen – und das alles in derselben visuellen Umgebung.

You want to install the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, and MySQL on Lion? Ok, that’s cool, we can do that instead of watching the latest Twilight movie. No problem.

We’re going to be using homebrew and rvm to get this all up and running. This is a bit of an opinionated method of getting everything installed. There are several ways of installing a modern Ruby and Rails environment and in the end, they all get you to the same place. Another popular option for getting ruby up and running is ruby-build and rbenv.

For the purposes of getting everything up and running quickly, I find rvm to be a bit easier to use and explain so I’m going to use that. Another quick note: while these instructions are written for Lion, they should also work on Snow Leopard, particularly the osx-gcc-installer instructions.

It’s all too easy to say “oh, I’ll just delete some stuff” and then never do it. Take action today and cut the flab from your file system by locating the major space-sucking culprits.
1. Balancing the Blocks

The first step isn’t always the easiest, but this time it is: determine just how much space you have remaining on your Mac’s main disk. If you’ve read this far, chances are it’s not much. To get the complete picture, click on the Macintosh HD icon (or whatever you call your main drive) in the Finder, then type Command-I to bring up its Info window. From here, you can see the capacity of your drive as well as the amount of space available.

Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue!

This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of the customizations and tips that we’ve covered here on OSXDaily before, but since they can be activated from a central location at the click of a button, it’s very simple for even the most novice of users to change the way OS X Lion looks.

Mac OS X Lion brings a revamped Preview app that includes the extremely useful Digital Signature feature built right in. Using your Macs built-in iSight camera to capture your signature, Preview can keep multiple electronic signatures on file which can then be appended to PDF’s.

Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, but now with Mac OS X 10.7 the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings. Some of the characters are pretty funny so even if you have no intention on using them they’re fun to browse through.

From almost any Mac OS X Lion app, select the “Edit” menu and pull down to “Special Characters”, or hit Command+Option+T
From the character choices, click on “Emoji” and then choose a set: People, Nature, Objects, Places, Symbols

One of several changes to Mac OS X Lion is how resetting passwords is handled, previous versions of Mac OS X would have a password reset tool easily accessible from the Utilities menu but that isn’t available anymore. There are still multiple approaches to resetting a lost user password in OS X 10.7, this walkthrough will cover two different methods, the first is unique to Lion and the second is a traditional workaround to reset a password.

The desktop in Mac OS X Lion has simplified the Finder window sidebars by showing just a few choices, with the emphasis on the ‘All My Files’ directory rather than individually pointing to your Pictures and Documents folders. If you prefer to see more from the Desktop window sidebars, you can customize what’s shown easily.

Mac OS X and iTunes has been slowly going the way of minimalism with subdued grey interface elements and icons, some people like the change and others don’t. We just showed you how to get color icons back in the OS X Lion Finder sidebars, and in the comments, Prescott Perez-Fox posted a resource file that works to bring the color sidebar icons back to the latest version of iTunes in Mac OS X Lion too. Here’s how to use that file.

OS X Lion brought greyscale icons to the Mac OS X Finder window sidebar, but if you’d rather have some color back in your desktop window sidebars, you can get this done easily through a third party plugin.

If you’ve been following some of our other Lion tips, you may already have SIMBL installed, otherwise it’s a small download.

If you’ve been busy customizing the Favorites folders and colorizing the Finder sidebar icons, you might want to change the font and icon size of that sidebar text while you’re at it, which has been increased in OS X Lion.

Oddly enough, this isn’t in the “Finder Preferences” or “View Options” where you might expect to find it:

A fair amount of users are reporting that upgrading to Mac OS X Lion has caused their Macs to run hotter in general and their fans to constantly engage, creating excessive and unusual fan noise. For users who have just performed an upgrade from 10.6, this is usually because of Spotlight and the mdworker & mds process combination, which irons itself out over the course of an hour or so.

If waiting it out hasn’t resolved the heat and fan noise for you, or those Spotlight processes aren’t running, you might want to try resetting the System Management Controller, or SMC. This seems to be particularly effective for MacBook Pro and MacBook Airs that are running hot with considerable fan noise after the Lion installation.
Fix Fan Noise & Heat in OS X Lion by Resetting SMC

For MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air models with internal batteries:

Shut down your Mac
Plug in the MagSafe adapter
Press and hold Shift+Control+Option+Power button at the same time
Release all keys and buttons simultaneously
Press the power button to turn on your Mac as usual

In nearly all Installer and Package apps, you have the option to view exactly what files will be installed and where the installer wants to place them. This is an often overlooked feature of the OS X Installer, and it you’ve ever wondered what and where on earth that random .pkg wants to throw its contents, this will show you exactly that.

Launch any Installer or .pkg in Mac OS X
Hit Command+i or pull down the File menu and choose “Show Files”

Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional backup locally on the Macs primary hard drive. This has its obvious advantages, since you can restore to past Time Machine backups right away from anywhere, but if you’re trying to conserve disk space this can be a real pain.

Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion initiates a sometimes useful, sometimes not feature: local backups. Called snapshots, this seems to be kicked off when your primary Mac is a laptop and the Time Machine backup is an external drive, so OS X Lion compensates for the potentially unavailable external disk by keeping an additional backup locally on the Macs primary hard drive. This has its obvious advantages, since you can restore to past Time Machine backups right away from anywhere, but if you’re trying to conserve disk space this can be a real pain.

For those running a Hackintosh (a PC built to unofficially run Mac OS X) who haven’t upgraded to or installed Mac OS X Lion yet, your excuses to delay the 10.7 update are dwindling. The newly released Unibeast tool from the ever-resourceful TonyMacX86 makes the entire process easier than ever. The requirements for using Unibeast are simple:

Assigning different wallpapers to different desktop spaces is much easier in Mac OS X Lion, here’s the quickest way to do this:

Enter each space individually
Right-click on the desired background image and choose “Set Desktop Picture”
Repeat for the next desktop space

If you are a fan of Mac tips and tricks and customizing OS X, you absolutely have to get TinkerTool for Lion.

TinkerTool is broken into 12 main sections covering Finder, Dock, General, Desktop, Applications, Fonts, Font Smoothing, Login Items, Safari, iTunes, QuickTime X, and Resume (OS X Lion’s Restore feature), each section has a handful of options ranging from UI tweaks to behavioral changes. The other great thing is that you can always return to the default state and undo all the changes you make, meaning there’s no threat of accidentally screwing something up.

Remote Login is a feature in Mac OS X’s Sharing preferences that allow remote users to connect to a Mac in a secure fashion by using OpenSSH. Essentially, it starts an SSH server, which includes SSH, the secure replacement for telnet, SFTP, the secure replacement for FTP, and SCP, for secure copying.

OS X Lion (read our OS X Lion review here) is supposed to include 250 new features, but in reality, that's probably an understatement. No matter where you click in Apple's latest OS you'll encounter tricks and options that Apple doesn't necessarily advertise, but which advanced users will want to know about. This story includes fourteen tips that will take you from creating your own bootable USB key to customizing your dock to, heaven forbid, creating a restore partition with OS X Snow Leopard.

In response to my story on how to restore Apple OS X Lion via the Internet, a number of readers wrote in to voice concern about their newfound reliance on broadband Internet connectivity. And with good reason: Plenty of folks simply don’t have access to fast or reliable Internet connections. While Apple will make OS X Lion available on a USB key, it’ll run you a $40 premium ($69) and you’ll have to wait until next month to get it. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Building on the instructions posted on OS X Daily, I’ve walked through the process of retrieving my Lion download from the Mac App Store and making my own bootable USB key. You can, too; it’s easier than you think.

We use a technique called "site specific browsing" to create a dedicated browser instance for certain websites and their features. We've debuted with 50 widely used websites and services in the Web App Shop™ including Google+, Facebook, Twitter and Quora. Within each app you'll find yet another instance for key features. This provides a whole new level of multitasking within a single window. Smart Bar™ unifies navigation across many different websites allowing access to features quickly, without effort and with little instruction.

Noch nie war es so einfach, mit einem Mac das eigene Postfach vom Provider nach Hause zu holen: Apple serviert die dafür erforderlichen Mail-Server-Zutaten mundgerecht und preiswert im Rahmen der Lion-Server-Software, und um die E-Mail-Dienste zu starten, genügt ein einziger Mausklick. Für die Kommunikation mit der Außenwelt muss man nur noch an wenigen Stellschrauben drehen.

Downloading and installing the massive Xcode installer is a huge hassle if you just want GCC and related tools.

The osx-gcc-installer allows you to install the essential compilers from either pre-built binary packages or helps you create your own installer.

Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor that includes:
• a live word count
• a Get Info panel for in-depth statistics
• a zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
• an Inspector panel with lots of sliders
• date-stamped backups
• autosaving
• a page layout mode
• an alternate colors option (e.g., white text on blue)
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• a floating windows option (like Stickies has)
• find panel allows regular expressions (pattern matching)
• all of Cocoa's good stuff (dictionary, word completion, etc.)

If you are like me and you always feel the need to run the latest ZFS bits on your Mac, there’s a feature you probably don’t want to miss: the verbose mode.

How to do so? Just boot up your Mac and press [Command]-[V] to see log messages instead of the boring apple logo. And if you want to make that mode persistent, open your Terminal and set -v as default boot argument:

sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Disabling verbose booting is just as easy:
sudo nvram boot-args=

And if you’re curious what the current nvram settings are, type the following:
nvram -p

git clone https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles.git && cd dotfiles && ./bootstrap.sh

When setting up a new Mac, you may want to set some sensible OS X defaults:

./.osx

To update, cd into your local dotfiles repository and then:

./bootstrap.sh

Suggestions/improvements welcome!

Dictionary apps aren’t sexy. Even Apple’s Mac app “Dictionary” doesn’t get stage time during press events. Yet, Dictionary is among the top reasons to buy Mac OS X Lion. Features like Wikipedia integration, multiple dictionaries, gesture support and multiple word views make Dictionary a pleasure to use. Here’s why you ought to get excited about a dictionary application.

Movist

Have no fear. SuperDuper v2.6.4 is here, and it's compatible with Lion! SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. It's the perfect complement to Time Machine under Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion, allowing you to store a bootable backup alongside your Time Machine volume—and it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs! SuperDuper's interface confirms all your actions in simple, clear language to ensure that the end result is exactly what you intended. Take a look, and click for additional screen shots!

As impressive as many of the features of Lion (Mac OS X 10.7) may be, the new OS is not without its flaws. And for some people, many of those flaws are little changes that, collectively, affect the overall experience of using OS X. For example, the fact that the user-level Library folder is now hidden, or that opening new windows has gained some additional—and, some feel, unnecessary—animation.