MacTricksAndTips.com

iCloud is all the rage and is really good at sharing documents between your iOS devices. I use it to move documents between my Mac and iPad. Recently I showed you how to turn off iCloud documents in there entirety. This post is an extension of this. I am going to show you how to turn off the default save location from iCloud to your normal hard drive. I am using this tip regularly because, although I use iCloud, I use my hard drive far more often as a save location.

When you beging to use Terminal, on your Mac, or on another unix type system you will slowly but surely begin to use more and more files. Most of the time you would like to view the contents of the files to see what they are about and if you need to change them. Although you could use a text editor such as nano or vi, to view the files, today’s command is going to introduce Terminal command called ‘cat’ that allows you to view and open files quickly and simply without having to do anything complicated.

Before all of this multi tasking, multiple apps, Mac OS X layout, applications previously ran in single application mode. Back when Mac OS was invented you had one and only one app present on screen at the time. Although the limitations of the OS probably contributed to this, having one app present at a time helps with your work flow as you are only interested in the current app. No other apps are wanting to grab your attention. Today’s trick will tell you how to enable single application mode, where only one app is present on your screen at one time. Note, you can have more than one app open, however you can only see one at the time.

This is quite a difficult term to quantify in a simple title. Basically this post is allows you to type into Terminal when it is not the selected window. For example, if you have a Terminal window open in the background, so another app is selected, when you type it will type in the selected app as expected. This trick will allow you to hover your mouse over the Terminal window, when you type it will type into Terminal and not the selected app. This term is defined as “Focus Follows Mouse”, it is not present on many apps on your Mac, however you can enabled it for Terminal and X11.

I tend to post quite a lot of Terminal tips. They are useful for adjusting system variables and making changes to your system. They allow you to change things that you would not normally have access to. Sometimes I build and make my own bash scripts, which run in Terminal like a normal command, to get them to run efficiently they are placed in a system folder to allow you to access them by name and not the full path to the scripts location. The problem arises when you forget where the script is located, especially annoying if you want to change it. This command, which is very simple will show you how to find the command you are looking for.

Here is a trick that will allow you to have two or more instances of VLC or Quicktime Player open, which can allow you to play more than one movie at the same time. This is useful if you are in an environment where you have an attached monitor and want to play one movie on one screen, and a second movie on a different screen. All running from the same Mac. This tip can also be used to play more than one movie or music file (or any media) at the same time. Useful if you want to watch a whole season of The Simpsons, but don’t have to time to watch them individually.

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.

Here is a rather cool trick that allows you to change the modification time of a file. There may be a variety of reasons for changing the modification time of a file, usually get an app to work with the file. Making the change is simple and involves a simple in built command within Terminal.