MacTricksAndTips.com

Very are various different bottle necks on your Mac that effect the performance of your computer. Originally it would be your CPU being too slow, then RAM was an issue and resulted in a lot of disk paging. Now, I think, the issue of bottle necks on your system is your hard drive. This post will show you a cool app designed to test your hard drive speeds. Its one of the nicest looking, and easiest to use apps out there. Although you can use Activity Monitor to gauge the hard disk speed, this app can be used on individual disks.

This is just a quick post detailing a neat feature of Mail and the ability for it to solve minor problems relating to emails appearing twice, not at all or it being generally confused if you updated your POP settings. The trick is to rebuild your Mailbox. This method causes Mail to delete the database and catalogue each email that you have downloaded. It will rebuild the database, so if an email appears twice or looks a bit strange this should clear it up, it also helps if you can’t find an email when you search for it.

With the ever growing trend of digital cameras and the ability to take many shots a once, particularly if you have an DSLR, you may find you have a lot of duplicate photos. Although disk space isn’t a premium as it once was, having many duplicate files of the same image really is pointless. Today’s app is called PhotoSweeper and it is designed to search through your iPhoto, Aperture or simply the images you add to the app, and see which are duplicates. It does this based on how the image looks so it can be pretty good.

Every time you change the extension of a file, whether it be an image, movie or a system file you Mac will throw up a warning telling you about the change. Although this is useful most of the time, sometimes you may just want to get rid of it and ignore the warning. Thankfully I was given a solution to this problem allowing you to change this setting with Terminal. From my understanding this tip works in Lion and Snow Leopard, it probably works with older version too.

There are a wide variety of apps out there for modifying photos, you could use something as powerful as Photoshop or something built into your Mac such as Preview. Today’s app is called Color Splash Studio, its a simple app designed to desaturate images and allows your to selectively colour portions of the image, hence the term ‘Select Colour Photography’. This technique allows you to highlight areas of your image and is an interesting way to define focus and create unique images. Although you can do this with a powerful image editor this app allows you to do it simply and quickly, producing really good results.

Today is a quick tip about moving your iPhoto library. If you want to move your ever growing library of photos to an external disk, or another internal hard drive it take no time at all. Your Mac is clever enough to work out the change and update the library as needed.

There are a variety of different DVD rippers available for your Mac. However, one app that tends to be quite popular and full of features is MacX DVD Ripper. Its a DVD ripper and converter all in one, so you can take your favourite movie or video, rip the file out with the app, and then rebuild the video file in a format your want. Since you are such a special reader MacTricksAndTips has been able to get a free copy of the app to every reader who downloads to app from there site.