A lot of dock apps, such as Mail, Reminders and many more have small icons in there dock icons indicating how many unread messages you have to deal with. If there are only a couple of reminders this isn’t too bad. However, after a while these numbers can balloon and become quite annoying. Turning off the number is very simple, it is a simple preference change within System Preferences. Within one click you can remove the number and have a simple dock icon instead.

Notification Centre is a great way to receive messages and be notified of various different aspects on your Mac. I have previously written about stopping notification centre messages, however this was related to applications. Today’s post is going to describe how to stop the notification centre pop up message for the App Store. This is usually due to an application needing to be updated. Although you should update your apps frequently to ensure there are no bugs, the message can get annoying.

Books are a great way to learn new topics and act as a bible of knowledge to refer from. I regularly buy new books to read and retain. Although we may be going to an all digital age, having a good book to read has no substitute. I was recently asked by a reader what books I recommend to read. This list has all of my favourites, that I have read or plan on reading in the coming months. If you have any recommendations please leave a comment. I have linked to Amazon as they usually have the best price.

Every time you right click on a file you are presented with an open and open with menu. The open with menu gives you many options to open the file in other applications. Most of the time this suffices. Today’s trick is going to show you how to open any file with TextEdit or any application you choose. Although this trick doesn’t give this option within the Open With menu option when you right click, the option is instead under the service option. It is just as accessible and just as quick.

Automator is a powerful tool. It can do just about anything and allows you to program functions and applications quickly and easily with little programming knowledge. One of the coolest features of Automator is the ability to build Services which are accessible from the menu bar or the right click menu. Services allow you to run Automator workflows at the click of a button, speeding up the way your work and doing cool things in the process. Today’s post is a comprehensive list of a variety of different Services built upon Automator that you can build and implement yourself.

Siri is a powerful that allows you ask your iPhone or iPad a question or command and receive a response. It makes using your iOS device a lot simpler, and allows you to find the answers to complex questions quickly. The problem with Siri is that is uses voice recognition, a problem if it cannot understand you or are speaking in an environment which distorts the sounds. Today’s, simple, trick is going to show you how to edit a Siri command and re-submit it. This allows you to resend the correct command and hopefully receive the response you require.

When you use spotlight search within Finder it will search through every single folder on your Mac. This is very useful, however as your Mac grows and the number of files and folders increase this can cause a little problem. Simple spotlight search will return hundreds of results. The tip I am going to show you today is how to limit the number of results to the current folder you are searching in. This means when you have a Finder window open it will only search through that folder. This is more useful. You can at any point search through every folder in your Mac.

Every time you open a new Finder window from the menu bar or using the shortcut Command + N it will display a certain folder. This is the same folder every time you use the command. This can be a very useful location like the root of your hard drive, or your documents folder. However, if you don’t use these folders or it have been set to an obtuse folder it can be difficult to use, or very annoying. This can easily be changed to something more useful.