It’s possible to save power when using Maps to navigate in a car. It’s an obvious trick once you know about it, and easy too.

When you’re navigating with the Maps app, you’re probably used to it chewing through battery life. Even on a full charge my iPhone 5 doesn’t last more than 2-3 hours when navigating.

To eke out extra life, just press the Sleep button (top of the phone), once you’re on your way and are on a long stretch before the next turn/navigation point (i.e. on a freeway for 50 miles). The screen will blank, but the navigation will continue. The phone will briefly wake 10 miles from your next turn/navigation point, to tell you about it, and will wake 2 miles from it and stay awake until you get past it.

To switch back to non-power-saving mode, just swipe as usual to wake the phone.

To be honest this doesn’t save a huge amount of battery life in my tests, but it’s better than nothing. For long journeys,you really need a USB power sour …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Since the introduction of Lion the system’s Software Opdate mechanism has been integrated into App Store.app and the Software Update Preference Pane has been removed and substituted with “App Store”.

If you constantly are being reminded to install software updates you don’t really want to install, you can right-click (Control+click) the name of the update and hide it, eliminating the reminder.

[crarko adds: I think this is probably known already to many of you, but if it’s not it can be a handy trick. I find the whole App Store method for Software Update a lot less pleasant than the old Snow Leopard mechanism where it was separate, but maybe I’m just old fashioned.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Long frustrated with how calendar events look within the Notification Center I’ve discovered a way to change it.

As part of iOS 7.1 Apple improved on the ability to view calendar events by adding a list view button in the Daily view. I have noticed that if you toggle this to list view within the Calendar app then your calendar events within Notification Center will also show as a list.

[crarko adds: Is this actually new? I don’t remember having looked for this in previous versions of iOS.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Many advanced network configuration commands can be reached with the scutil command line tool. Launch Terminal.app and run:
ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_SCUTIL_COMMANDS=1 scutil –net, then type help and press the Return key to see the available options.

For example:

localhost:~ user$ ENABLE_EXPERIMENTAL_SCUTIL_COMMANDS=1 scutil –net
set “Automatic” selected
> help

Available commands:

help : list available commands
f.read file : process commands from file
quit [!] : quit

commit : commit any changes
apply : apply any changes

create interface [ | ]
create protocol
create ser …

Source: Mac OSX Hints

I’m not sure how long this has been the case, but if you copy an address, say from a web site, and paste it into the first address field (street) in Contacts, Contacts will parse appropriately.

For example, try:

1234 Easy St
Pleasantville, CA 43402

When pasted into Contacts it will correctly place the City, State and Zip into the appropriate fields.

[crarko adds: OK, I’ll admit I don’t know when this was introduced either because I’d long ago stopped looking for it. Nice to know data detectors keeps being improved.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

The command-line utility sysdiagnose can be triggered by pressing Cmd+Opt+Ctrl+Shift+Period, and it may take a few minutes to complete. When ready, the output will automatically be revealed in a Finder window (or it can be manually retrieved from /var/tmp).

What sysdiagnose Collects:
A spindump of the system
Several seconds of fs_usage ouput
Several seconds of top output
Data about kernel zones
Status of loaded kernel extensions
Resident memory usage of user processes
All system logs, kernel logs, opendirectory log, windowserver log, and log of power management events
A System Profiler report
All spin and crash reports
Disk usage information
I/O Kit registry information
Network status
If a specific process is supplied as an argument: list of malloc-allocated buffers in the process’s heap is collected
…

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Apple removed the option to add an action to Maverick’s Calendar app but you can use Automator to accomplish this.

I found that if you use Automator to add an action an Automator calendar will appear over in the Calendar side bar. Then just select the Automator calendar for the item you are adding.

[crarko adds: I had to play around a bit in Automator to figure out what to do here, but it looks like creating a Calendar Alarm action will do the trick.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

With the latest versions of Preview.app (since OS X v10.8, I believe) which save versions of files rather than the old standard Save dialogues, it took me a while to figure out how to Save As… and encrypt a PDF file with a password.

While clicking on the File menu, press the Option key, which causes the Duplicate menu item to become Save As… instead. Then you’ll see the familiar Save As.. sheet with the Encrypt checkbox. Enabling this allows you to set a password for the PDF file.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. This may be common knowledge, but serves as another example of why it’s often helpful to explore the modifier keys in an application before getting too frustrated.]

Source: Mac OSX Hints

Instead of buying expensive vector drawing software, Keynote can be used as a simple but great vector drawing tool. The problem is you can only export entire slides as images from the File menu and there will be a white background. There is no obvious way of exporting just the vector art to an image file. Fortunately there is a solution. Use the following method to extract just your vector art creation to a .png file with alpha transparency.
Create a vector-based drawing.
Drag and select the entire vector drawing you are going to export.
Choose Edit

OS X and Growl notifications are AppleScriptable and great for displaying user-defined text, but not so hot for user-defined images. OS X can only display the sending application’s icon, and Growl no longer accepts raw iTunes artwork image data or regular image files.

Growl’s iTunes limitation can be overcome by converting an iTunes track’s raw artwork image data into a TIFF file that can be read and passed to Growl:

tell application “iTunes” to set _rawData to raw data of artwork 1 of current track

set _startupDisk to (path to startup disk as text)

set _tempTiffFile to (open for access file (_star …

Source: Mac OSX Hints