7 Most Useful Quick Mac OS X Yosemite Tips

Mac OS X Yosemite is one of the best OS X Apple has ever introduced. With tons of improvements over OS X Mavericks and some UI changes has added extra flavour to user experience.

Here are 7 most useful quick tips for you to get most out of your Mac running OS X Yosemite.

TIP 1: QUICKLY TURN OFF NOTIFICATIONS

Suppose you’re working on some stuffs and you really need focus and do not want to get disturbed by notifications that show up in the top-right corner of your Mac OS X, then here’s a small workaround.

You can either disable notifications from a specific app or you can also go for “do not disturb” mode which will temporarily disable notifications to show up for rest of the day.

Turn Off Notifications From Specific App in Mac OS X

• Visit System Preferences
• Click on Notification
• On the left, select the application from which you do not want to receive any notifications
• Now click on None as the alert style for that specific app

Quickly Turn Off Notifications in Mac OS X

Using Do Not Disturb to disable notification for rest of the day.

• From Menu bar, click on Notification Center icon
• Scroll down a bit
• Turn on Do Not Disturb

You can also use a shortcut to directly turn on Do Not Disturb mode in Mac OS X. Just hold alt key and click the Notification Center icon. The icon turns dim when notifications alert are disabled.

TIP 2: QUICKLY RELAUNCH FINDER

For starters, Finder in Mac OS X is just like My Computer in Windows. Finder makes it easy to access folders like Applications, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music  Pictures, etc.

But within a period of time, Finder sometimes might become unresponsive due to various reasons. In that case you might need to know the ways to quickly relaunch the frozen finder.

There are two ways you can relaunch the Finder in your Mac.

Using Dock

• Hold down option key and right click on the Finder icon in the Dock
• Now select Relaunch

Using Shortcut Key

• Hold down option+command+esc keys together to open Force Quit Applications window
• Select Finder from the list of Applications
• Click Force Quit

Now you can easily relaunch the freezed Finder in your Mac.

TIP 3: CHANGE YOUR LOGIN ACCOUNT PROFILE PICTURE

The very first thing you do after owning a Mac is personalizing it, making the system more like yourself and set the system preferences according to your needs. And when it comes to personalizing needs, setting a login account profile picture is one of them.

Changing Your login account profile picture in Mac OS X

• From Menu Bar, Visit Apple Logo > System Preferences
• Click Users & Groups icon
• While you’re under Password tab, hover your mouse pointer over the present login account profile picture to get an edit option and click on it
• Now choose your image which you want to set as profile picture from the list of available places (Defaults, Recents, iCloud Photos, Faces, camera, Linked)

If you want to use a custom/downloaded photo as your profile picture, you’d have to drag the particular photo over the current profile picture. Scale the photo (zoom in/out) as per your need and finally click Done.

TIP 4: GENERATE STRONG & MEMORABLE PASSWORDS

Getting yourself a strong yet memorable password is a difficult task. No one really wants to compromise their accounts (eg, social networks, e-banking, etc) because of weak passwords. Passwords must never contain any information related to you and your lifestyle. Hackers might use the information related to you for brute-force attacks, and your accounts might get into wrong hands.

If you’re a Mac user, then there’s a way to generate a super strong as well as memorable passwords using Keychain Access, an application which handles all the password and certificate security in.

Make Mac OS X Generate Strong & Memorable Passwords

• Open Keychain Access Application (Finder > Applications > Utilities)
• From Menu Bar, Click on File and select New Password Item
• In next window, click on the key icon present beside Password field
• A small window pops up, and there’s the auto generated password in the Suggestion field
• To generate next password just select Memorable from the drop down menu

The length of auto generated password can be adjusted by sliding the Length slider menu.

TIP 5: CHECK VERSION OF APPS

It might be for checking the availability of newer versions or downgrading to older versions; whatever may be the reasons sometimes you might need to be aware of the version of app you’re currently running in your Mac. And there are two quick ways to know which version of application/software you’re using.

Knowing Which Version of App You’re Using in Mac

• Open Finder
• Go to Applications folder
• Single click the App whose version you want to know
• Press command + I
• Under General, you’ll get the Version of that specific app

And the next way is to open the application, and from the menu bar visit application’s menu > About.

TIP 6: INCREASE/DECREASE APP WINDOW RESIZE AREA

Mac users can resize the App/Software window by moving the cursor to the edges of an active window and finally click & drag; outside and inside so as to increase or decrease the window size respectively.

For some users moving the cursor to the exact edge can be difficult. But there’s a small workaround that increases the window resizing area, which makes it easy to resize app/software window quickly in Mac OS X.

Increasing/Decreasing App Window Resize Area in Mac

• Open Terminal (press command + SPACE, and type terminal)
• Enter the following command which changes the edge resize size to the value you set.

defaults write -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize 15

Change the value 15 to some other number as per your need.

• Restart Your Mac

In case you want to revert back to default setting, enter the following command into the Terminal and restart your Mac.

defaults delete -g AppleEdgeResizeExteriorSize

TIP 7: CHANGE FINDER SIDEBAR ICON SIZE

Finder sidebar helps Mac user to quickly access their Favourites Locations (iCloud Drive, Airdrop, Applications, Documents, Movies, Music, Pictures, etc), Devices (flash drives), Tags, Network, etc. By-default Mac system shows medium sized icons in the sidebar. Some users might want to decrease or increase the icon size.

Changing Finder Sidebar Icon Size in Mac

• Visit System Preferences (Either for the dock, or Apple Logo > System Preferences…)
• Open General
• Next to Sidebar icon size heading, use the drop down menu to select the icon size (Small, Medium, Large)

Changes takes place immediately. Now open Finder window, you’ll notice that the icon size have changed according to the size you’ve selected.

CONCLUSION

I hope you found these Mac OS X Yosemite Tips helpful. These tips also work for OS X El Capitan, I have personally tested it on this new OS X too.

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