As Apple explains on their website, “Activity Monitor shows the processes that are running on your Mac”. From this, you can see how your Mac’s activity and performance are being affected. It’s really simple to use and understand, so let’s dive straight in.
In many ways, you can compare this Activity Monitor to the one in Windows, when you type Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard. It shows your information about your computer, in an easily understandable way.
Read MoreHey there, my name is Sam Berson! I'm a young web developer and video producer, with a passion for high quality work. A few months ago, I took ownership of the site from Jordan, and I'm excited to announce that I'll be taking The Instructional forwards and can't wait to see what the site is capable of.
Whilst I work on the new plans for the site, the content published may be a little thin, however, after that period, we'll hopefully begin publishing lots of useful guides and tutorials on a regular basis.
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Text substitution in iOS, while not comparable to something like TextExpander, does have the advantage of being available to use in any app. Even in iOS 8, TextExpander snippets will require using a custom keyboard.
Using iOS text substitution is still a great way to substitute abbreviations and characters for alternatives, and this guide over at iMore has some great tips.
If for nothing else, specifying that the phrase "eml" should be substituted with my email address is one of the best hacks I've ever used and makes it so much easier to log into websites and apps.
While Apple's Aluminium Remote Control is decent, you can actually control your Apple TV from almost any other remote, especially universal remote controls, which can help de-clutter the coffee table.
If you aren't a universal remote like a Logitech Harmony which can be automatically programmed, Apple has published a support article explaining how to use some spare buttons on an existing remote to control your Apple TV.
Mitchell Cohen has put together a small but very useful roundup of a few commands that are good to know of when working within Terminal.
I'd also recommend reading his follow-up post that has a few more commands, as well.
iStumber creator and former Apple Wi-Fi engineer Alf Watt shared a few great tips over at Mac Observer on getting the most from your Wi-Fi setup. While these may look trivial, these are often a topic of debate between technicians, so it's great to get the final word straight from the horse's mouth.
Hidden within the command-line is an extremely useful utility named textutil. With it, you can convert a wide variety of different text document formats.
MacIssues goes into more detail about how you can use this command, which can be very useful if you don't necessarily have a suitable app to open it in.
Mac Power Users co-host Katie Floyd has written a definitive guide on creating the best possible strategy for backing up your Mac, from Time Machine and disk clones to offsite backups. If you're serious about keeping your data safe then this is a must-read.
Fusion Drive is a utility that combines an SSD and traditional hard drive into a single storage space. Your Mac then automatically manages where data is stored, moving files and apps between the SSD and HDD depending on how often they're used. It's a great compromise between SSD's high speed and HDD's large capacity.
While Fusion Drive is officially only supported on an iMac or Mac mini purchased with an SSD and HDD combination, it can be set up on any supported Mac. Macworld published a useful guide back in 2012 on how to do this and after a few minutes in Terminal, you'll have a fully working Fusion Drive set up and ready to use.
Rick Stawarz builds upon David Sparks' method of automatically putting a Mac to sleep using Drafts on iOS and makes uses of Launch Center Pro, offering a great one-tap solution to sleep your Mac.