MacTricksAndTips.com

Every so often you may need to delete the spotlight index or rebuild it. There may be a variety of reasons, for example if you clone your hard drive and spotlight isn’t picking up every file or folder, or you believe that you can’t find the file you want when you do a spotlight search. Rebuilding the index is simple, and it doesn’t take long for spotlight to be up and running again.

Mac’s are generally known for not having many viruses are malware, however there is a recent trojan – known as Flashback – making the rounds that has infected a large number of Mac’s. Although it has probably only infected a small proportion of the number of Mac’s out there, being the only one that has done any real damage it is worth checking your system to make sure you are safe. There are a variety of tools to remove the system vulnerability.

We have a rather cool post today, an info graphic about text editors for developers. It was created by the guys over at Conosco, an features some awesome text editors for developers. It has a couple of personal favourites including Coda and TextMate, plus a couple that you may not have heard before. Check it out by clicking on the image to see it in full screen.This info graphic is the first for MacTricksAndTips, so I hope you enjoy it.

Your Mac has some fantastic shortcuts and workarounds to allow you to get things done faster. Today’s quick tip is inserting the time and date with a shortcut. It uses the built in Services options that come with your Mac. It only takes two seconds to enable and allows you to write the full date, time as well as the short date with a keystroke. Comes in very useful if you find you are writing the date frequently.

Angry Birds is probably one of the most popular games for any iOS device. Its pretty popular on the Mac too. Today I am going to review its latest incarnation Angry Birds Space. It takes the fun of Angry Birds and puts it in space, with the added concept of no gravity and even more challenging puzzles. If you enjoy the Angry Birds series, you will certainly enjoy this version.

When you delete a file on your Mac (or any other operating system), you don’t actually delete the file. The data for each files still resides on your hard disk and given good recovery techniques you can get it back. When you empty the trash all you Mac is doing is removing the entry to where you the file is located. Since the block of data on your disk doesn’t have an entry file associated with it, your Mac will write over the space. This is why files you have stored on your Mac don’t get over written. Now if you want to ensure those files are gone for what ever reason, I am soon going to do a block level duplication of my drive and I only want the actual data, you can erase the free space by over writing it.

I remember back in the era of dial up, where downloading a file in two days was good going, that to get the best performance out of your connection would be to use a download manager. I remember using GetRight for Windows, which always helped speed up any download. Now most of the Internet has moved to either cable, fiber optic or ADSL, the use of download managers has changed from speeding up your connection, to managing the download process, even going so far to slow it down. Today’s app review is going to be Folx, a fully fledged download manager for the mac that can handle all of you downloads. As a bonus, I also have a discount code to get 20% off.

I use VLC as my main video player, however in the recent update to 2.0 I have noticed that every time I open the VLC app or play a video, it will build the font cache. Although this takes a second or two to finish, it is a bit annoying. This post will show you the setting you can change within VLC’s preferences to stop the app rebuilding the cache.