There’s nothing new about the term “open source” as it relates to software - it’s been around for more than a decade now. However, as being a tad tech-suave has settled into the collective consciousness, the reliance on commercial software solutions is dropping daily.

Whereas the connotation initially was that open source projects were buggy and unstable (I mean, how could anything being worked on for free not be?), and commercial software was solid and trusted - over the last 10…

Using hotkeys, that is. By default the hotkeys for toggling the language input is set as Command+Space. But since Spotlight’s default hotkey is also set as Command+Space, that leaves the language-togglin’ hotkey essential disabled. We need to go into system preferences and change that.

Fluid is a ‘Mac’-only application that allows you to create “site-specific browsers“ to bring web apps more concretely onto your desktop. So, you can make individual apps for your Mac - which are small in size, and fast - for web services such as Facebook, Facebook Chat, Flickr, Last.fm, Google Reader, Google Docs, G-Cal, Gmail, Hahlo, Blogger, MySpace, eBay, and hundreds of others.

It’s so simple  to make your own app (once you have Fluid) that you can do it in just…

One of the hidden beauties of owning an Apple Mac is the wealth of effectively free ‘tech support’ offered up by fellow users.

Not only is this support free, it is well organized - across a few key forums and discussion groups, which I shall review below - and is dished out freely by Mac experts who often reply to new queries (or cries for help!) within hours of the original post.

What do such Mac users in these forums get in…

As much as one might like to be a polyglot, freely conversing in a number of the world’s gorgeous languages, most of us are steadfastly mono- or bi-lingual.

Many applications on your Mac, however, come bundled with an array of ‘localizations’ so that one release of a company’s app can suit the needs of practically all of their global users. But that represents a waste of valuable disk space for 99.9% of people who use their apps in just one language,…

As short as popular microblogging platform Twitter’s history is, I’ve already run the gamut. I joined the site early on, but as updating required logging into the site, I quickly lost interest and dropped it from my bookmarks - until I was introduced to Twhirl.

Twhirl is a desktop Twitter client that runs under the rather clever Adobe AIR platform on both Mac and PC operating systems. At the forefront of it’s impressive feature list is the ability to quickly manage…

Like with any operating system, you likely don’t utilize all the features that you potentially could. Heck, some of the features, you probably didn’t even know they existed. Or maybe you just didn’t bother to enable them.

That’s likely the case with Mac OS X’s Active Corners feature, which is a neat little tool that helps you do many different tasks just a little bit quicker.