Every operating system needs a decent amount of free memory to function properly, and without a sufficient amount applications are prone to run more slowly and your Mac will seem more sluggish. Whilst Mac OS is a fairly robust and modern operating system built on a solid UNIX-style foundation (unlike Windows), there are nonetheless occasional glitches and issues plaguing users that can make things grind to a halt over time. Issues such as what’s know as memory leaks (caused by inefficient or sloppy coding) in applications, as well as inefficiencies in the core OS can cause your Mac to perform less than optimally, so it’s always wise to make sure your system is as up to date as possible.

Thankfully, there are a few things that you can do to resolve some of the most common memory usage problems. After all, buying a new Mac or more memory (RAM) isn’t necessarily a viable solution to the issue – memory is a bit like a motorway – the more capacity there is, there more that will inevitably be used up! Regardless, it’s advisable to have as much RAM as possible installed in your Mac, and certainly more than you need so that Mac OS has room to manoeuvre.

If your memory issues are caused by too many applications (and tabs in Safari) being open, then closing a few of these will certainly help things move along smoothly. But what if you’ve already done this and your system memory usage is still going through the roof? This article discusses some of the common memory usage issues and tips to resolve them in Mac OS Lion.

1. Check How Much Memory You Have

The first thing to do is to check how much RAM your Mac has. If you can’t remember the configuration, the simplest way to check this is to choose About This Mac from the Apple Menu which opens a small window showing basic system information as below.

View your Mac's system memory

The amount (and speed) of installed memory is shown – obviously the more the better, but most Macs these days come with at least 4 GB of memory. Its speed is also a factor that contributes towards performance – DDR3 is the most common speed and considerably faster than DDR2 or DDR1. If you have less than 4 GB then you should certainly consider upgrading your memory, but bear in mind the analogy that taking your foot off the accelerator pedal won’t increase your speed; rather, it will just stop you slowing down. Memory can be thought of as a bottleneck in your system, so the more you have and the faster it is, the better.

From the About This Mac screen, selecting More Info will helpfully bring up a more detailed view – click on the Memory tab to show the details about memory installed in each slot (most Macs have 2 memory slots which accepts 2 lots of memory modules, such as 2 x 1 GB, 2 x 2 GB, 2 x 4 GB – and they are always installed in pairs. This means that if you have 2 x 2 GB and want to upgrade, you need to chuck those away and buy 2 x 4 GB modules – you can’t just add a 4GB in one slot and leave 2 in the other.

View more details on your memory configuration

2. Check Memory Usage With Activity Monitor

Every Mac comes with a fantastic utility called Activity Monitor. This useful application lets you inspect CPU activity, memory usage, disk and network activity, and is often the first port of call to determine what’s going on in your system. Activity Monitor presents a list of system and user processes which are currently running, and lets you see how much memory they’re taking up – you can sort applications and processes by the amount of memory used and check them over time to see if it’s ballooning. If any application’s memory usage is steadily increasing over time, it should be obvious and can help you to track down the root of the problem.

Open Activity Monitor from the Applications -> Utilities folder on your Mac or just type its name into Spotlight. When it opens, the first thing that you’ll see is the main window with a long list of all the processes currently active.

Activity Monitor is a great tool to view what's going on inside your Mac

To determine which greedy process is hogging memory, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom to display overall system memory statistics. At the top of window, choose All Processes from the drop-down selection, and then click the Real Mem column header to order them by the amount of memory used.

Of course, just knowing which process is using the most memory won’t solve the issues, but at least it will point you in the right direction. For example, Mac users consistently report that Safari uses heaps of memory which grows steadily over time – possibly caused by having lots of tabs open or plug-ins (such as Flash) and extensions enabled, or perhaps due to inefficient code in Safari itself.

In the bottom of the Activity Window, if you can see a lot of Page Outs then it means you have had some RAM shortages since the last power on. Note that the coloured pie chart is only a snapshot of the current status of your Mac, and tells you nothing about the usage history or previous peaks in demand.

3. Perform a Software Update (and Update Safari)

It goes without saying that it’s always wise to keep your software up to date, and most Mac users are very good at this – after all, Mac OS constantly reminds you when there are application updates available, and anything obtained via the App Store can be updated that way. However, if you use Safari as your main web browser (and most of us do), then it’s especially important to keep Safari updated. The reason is that since it seems to be the main offender in terms of memory use on the Mac, new versions are regularly being released that address some of the most common related issues.

For example, the latest version of Safari (which is 5.1.7 at the time of writing) addresses memory and performance issues as indicated below in the Software Update window.

Make sure you have the latest version of Safari

If you haven’t already set Software Update to check automatically, open System Preferences and choose Software Update from the System panel located at the bottom. At the next screen, choose the automatic settings you’d like (e.g. when to check for updates), or just hit the Check Now button to check immediately.

Set Software Update to download and install the latest software automatically

4. Update / Disable Flash (and Other Offending Extensions)

Adobe’s Flash gets a lot of bad press on the Mac unfortunately. As they say there’s no smoke without fire, so it’s probably somewhat true that Flash (especially the older versions) do in fact consume more system resources than they should. There’s a simple way to solve this – firstly make sure that your Flash player is as up to date as possible (the latest version of Safari disables older, less secure versions) as follows:

• Go to System Preferences and under Other choose Flash Player (if it’s not visible, it should be available in the View menu)
• From the Advanced tab in the Updates section, select Check for updates automatically, which will periodically check for the latest version

It's vital to have the most recent version of Flash installed

Secondly, it’s fairly easy to install an extension for Safari to block Flash on websites completely (when the extension is enabled). Click To Flash is perhaps the most well known and can be downloaded from the Safari Extensions Gallery. It gives you more control over when to view Flash content in websites and can be selectively turned on or off from Safari’s preferences, in the Extensions section.

If you have lots of Safari Extensions, it’s also a good idea to try disabling some of them (one at a time) and then view memory usage in Activity Monitor to see whether that makes a difference. If you find a specific extension is to blame for the increase in memory, try disabling it to see what happens.

Block Flash with a Safari Extension, and try disabling other extensions

5. Use Third-Party Apps to Free Up Memory

There are dozens of third-party apps available in the Mac App Store that claim to be able to free up system memory with just one click of a button. Most of these should be able to improve performance somewhat, and range from totally free to just a few pounds. Quite how effective they are might depend on each user’s applications and the way they use their computer, but they are certainly worth a try – especially the free ones!

Check out some of these apps which can free up your Mac’s memory. They can be obtained via the App Store:

1. FreeMemory (£Free)
2. Memory Free 2 (£Free)
3. MemoryFreer (£0.69)
4. Memory Cleaner (£3.99)
5. Memory Sweeper Pro (£0.69)

Keeping track of all the files on your Mac can be a endless task, whilst you probably keep your downloads and your documents in certain places you’ll probably find that despite your best efforts files and folder can sometimes end up all of the place on your Mac. If you’re trying to keep a collection of files together in the same folder based on when they were created, data they contain, how often you open them or for most other general reasons there’s an inbuilt feature on your Mac called Smart Folders that’s going to help you out. In this guide I’ll talk you through how to create smart folder, show you the sorts of options you can modify using them and show you how and where you can save these folders so that you can have handy access to your collections of files from inside your Finder window.

The first step is to open finder, it’s the icon with the face on it that should be in the bottom right of your Dock.

Once you’ve got finder open you’ll wan to choose File on the menu bar, and on the dropdown list that appears under it, select New Smart Folder.

A new finder window will pop up, it looks similar to other finder windows, except this one has a search toolbar running along the top. Click the + button highlighted in the image to start adding smar folder criteria.

You’ll be able to select from the kind of file, the date last opened, the date last modified, the date created, the name and the contents of your files. You’ll also be able to add as many filters as you want by repeated clicking the + button.

Once you’ve added all the filters you want, and checked that the right sort of files are being found by having a look through the preview in the finder window of the files that are being collected by this smart folder, you’re ready to save it. Just click the save button next to the – (minus) icon.

If you want to keep handy access to this new smart folder close by make sure you save it somewhere you’ll remember and keep the tick bock next to the option Add to Sidebar selected. Once saved your smart window will stay in the sidebar on your mac and auto-update itself based on any changes to files you make.

Sorting out your life with a to-do list always seems like a great idea at the time, you’ve got a mounting collection of tasks to accomplish, barely anytime to fit them all in and rather then actually starting any of them you decide to spend an hour or so putting them all in order. Once this is done you actually start the slog of the tasks themselves and before you’ve know it you’ve forgotten all about the list itself and got distracted playing Angry Birds on your iPhone. Does that situation feel familiar? If it does you’re going to love Epic Win, a to-do list app for your iPhone that transforms your boring old to-do list in a light, fun and genuinely useful RPG.

Epic win is currently available for just £1.99 on the official Apple App Store. The set up is simple, you pick a novelty character from a small selection and begin to complete “quests” with it. The big difference between EpicWin and a traditional RPG is that all of these quests is set by the user, you write down what it is you need to accomplish, give it a score out of 300 based on how important or vital it is, and then assign it a category that mirrors those traditionally found in RPGs.

Of course the joy of this app is that the quests can be anything you can think of, from remembering to buy some milk to finishing your novel, you’ve got total free reign on what you want your character to achieve and how many points you’ll get for ticking off various items from your quest list. Yes, you could cheat your way through, but really there’s no point, there’s not much of a game here, and whilst you will unlock loot and upgrade your character, essentially you’ve just being given bits of art in exchange for pressing buttons.

The weird thing is if you deconstruct the  app you’ll realise the whole things is a bit pointless, but if you just get into the spirit of things, particularly if you’re the sort of person who easily gets sucked into RPGs or time-wasting iPhone games, you’ll find yourself happily gaming along with EpicWin and actually being productive at the same time.

There are some genuinely useful to-do app functions working behind the shiny gloss of the comic RPG interface, tasks can repeat themselves, get synced with other online sources, have alarms set up to them, assigned specific time-limits, get copied and pasted around, and even trashed and then untrashed into a Recycle Bin like folder.

Of course if you’re deadly serious about your to-do lists you’re going to want the sort of functionality found in more expensive and more professionally designed apps, but if you’re a gamer who wants a to-do list app that’s genuinely fun and might even trick you into getting more done than you would usually just so that you can ‘level-up’ it’s well worth spending the £1.99 for EpicWin.

Missing gigs is a real pain, but with the huge amount of bands touring and the vast array of venues and different ticketing websites it can be incredibly difficult to keep track of who is playing where and when. Songkick, a London based startup company, has managed to work around this problem by building one huge centralised and constantly updated database of concert listings around the world. You can sign up for an account here and start tracking the bands you want to see and receiving personalised alerts for  when their latest tours are announced and when tickets for dates near you go on sale.

They also make a great app (available for free from the official Apple App Store) that lets you keep track of when concerts are announced and when tickets go on sale whilst on the go. Best of all is the integration between the app and the music you have stored on your phone. When you first load the app it will quickly scan through the music library on your iPhone and instantly tell you if any of the bands you’re currently carrying around in your pocket are playing any gigs near your current location.

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You’ll then be provided with a useful list of all the artists, where they’re next playing and when, complete with thumbnails of the artists and the ability to flick between artists you’re currently watching, plans you’ve already made and gigs that have just been added to the Songkick data base.

If you don’t want to flick through your followed artists Songkick also gives you options to search by specific location, so if you have a favourite venue you can quickly open up the entire listings for that location and browse through the upcoming events.

In much the same style if there are artist’s you’re really dying to see that aren’t actually on your iPhone, and haven’t been picked up by the automatic scan, you can search through Songkick’s huge list of artists to track down your favourites and start following their tour dates.

There’s only one major hitch with the otherwise user-friendly and beautifully designed Songkick app, and that’s how the app works when you try to actually by tickets. All the access to the database, and all the browsing of  tracked artists and venues is done in-app, but as soon as you try to book a ticket Songkick essentially opens up a windowed version of safari and directs you to the mobile version of their website. The site does look alright and will let you jump through the hoops that will eventually lead to you owning a couple of tickets to whatever you fancy, but it’s a shame that the app doesn’t actually handle the purchasing of tickets.

It’s a minor point really though, so if you want to find out what gigs, concerts and shows are going on around you, and don’t mind buying them from a mobile based website running in an app go ahead and grab the free Songkick app.

It can be hard to use computers successfully if you have a disability. While Apple have made it much easier with the iPad for disabled people to use it, the Mac without anything remains a struggle. However one of the less talked about features of OS X is the built in ‘Universal Access’ feature, which allows you to customize all your Mac’s settings to cater for the disability you have, whether it be eyesight, dyslexia or something else. Here’s how you can find it and use it to cater for your needs.

1. Open System Preferences.

2. Open the ‘Universal Access’ tab, which is located under the ‘Personal’ panel.

With all these options you can toggle your display colors, instead of black on white you can have white on black as well as turn on zoom so you can focus on a piece of text if you struggle with eyesight. You can also enable the Voiceover function, and completely customize it to suit your needs with the VoiceOver utility. Things like sticky keys and mouse options can be customised and enable screen flashing when an alert sound occurs.

Your Mac can really be completely customised to your needs, so if you have a disability of some kind, I would highly recommend buying one over a Windows machine, where a ‘Universal Access’ functionality isn’t built in.

The Dock on your Mac is one of the most used bits of Mac OS X, it’s where you keep your most used apps, where you store the folders you often look in, and it’s where apps your currently using hide when you’ve not got them fully opened. Like most aspects of OS X the Dock is also fully customisable, and in this guide I’ll talk you through some of the most commons ways that you can customise the Dock on your Mac. I’ll explain how to add apps to the dock,  how to resize the dock, how to alter how folders are displayed and how to remove items from the Dock.

How to Add and Remove items from the Dock

Possibly the easiest way to customise your Dock is to add and remove items from it, this is as simple as dragging and dropping. To add items to the dock just pick them up with the curser and drag the to the lefthand side of the dock. If you’re doing it right the other apps will shuffle up and make room for what you’re trying to add.

To remove an icon from your dock just do the opposite, pick it up and drag it off your dock. You can either drop it on some empty space above your dock or drag it all the way to the trash on the right of the dock.

To change the order of apps the process is the same, just drag and drop icons around until they are in the order you want.

How to alter how folders are displayed on the Dock

If you’ve got a folder on your Dock there’s a number of ways you can have the dock display it. Right-Click (or two finger click) any folder on the Dock and you’ll get a menu. You’ll be able to select between grid, which is how the Apps folder displays, or Stacks, which open as vertical menus above the folder.

You’ll also be able to choose how to sort the contents of these files, I normally keep my downloads organised by Date Added so that I can always see the most recent additions, but keep my documents folder in alphabetical order. If you want to open any of these folders in finder you can use the same menu and choose the bottom “open” option to go straight to a finder window.

How to resize the Dock

To resize the Dock you need to locate the vertical divide on your Dock, this is the line that separates out the open/pinned apps you have on the left of your Dock from the folders and Trash on the right. To change the size of the dock and the icons in it just click and drag on this line, your Dock will resize accordingly.

You almost certainly already have one user account on your Mac, but did you know that you can add extra users to your Mac so that you can share your computer without compromising your privacy or logging on to find all of your personal settings altered? This guide will talk you through how to add, edit and delete users on your Mac.

How to add a new user

1. Go to the System Preferences menu and select the Users & Groups pane, this will be where we’ll be adding, editing and deleting users so make a note of where it is.
2. Click the “New User” button at the end of the list of current users (this is the plus sign at the bottom).
3. A pop-up window will open, you’ll be able to select the account type here. Administrator accounts can access everything on your Mac, sharing-only account will only be able to access the shared files, and standard account will have a high level, but not total control, of your computer.
4. Add the user name and passwords that you want to assign to the account, make sure this is something that your new user will be able to remember! You’ll have to verify the password by typing it in twice. You’ll also be given the option to add a password hint
5. Finally click the Create Account button and you’ll finish up the process and add the account to your Mac

How to edit a user’s account

1. Find the Users & Groups pane in your Mac’s system preferences.
2. Select the account that you want to edit from the list of users.
3. From here you’ll be able to edit any of the settings your account is currently able to change.
4. You’ll also be able to assign pictures to accounts, just click the picture icon next to the account name in the users list, you’ll be able to select any photo on your Mac as the login image.
5. Close the window and the changes will be saved

How to delete a user from your Mac

1. Find the Users & Groups pane in your Mac’s system preferences.
2. Select the user that you want to remove from your Mac
3. Then click the delete button; this is the minus (-) key at the bottom of the list of users. Make sure that you’ve selected the correct user because this process is irreversible!
4. Hit okay to at the confirmation window to erase all of that users data and information.

We’re fully in the midst of the wireless revolution, and wireless internet seems pretty ubiquitous nowadays, so it’s extremely annoying when you realise that your hotel, or conference center, or university is firmly stuck in the stone age with wired ethernet connections required in to join their internet service. The bad news is that there’s no way to magically transform the whole infrastructure into a wireless one, but the good news is that your Mac can rebroadcast the internet connection it’s receiving via the ethernet cable as a local Wi-Fi hotspot so that your other wireless devices can share this connection. This guide will walk you though the steps you’ll need to carry out in order to share your wired internet connection wirelessly.

The first step is an obvious one, make sure you’re connected to the internet via the supplied LAN ethernet cable, and make sure the Wireless on both your Mac the the device you want to share your connection with is turned on.

Next you’re going to want to find the sharing settings on your Mac, they’re in the systems preferences menu which you can access by clicking the Apple icon on the top left of the menubar.

Once you’ve got system preferences open click the “Sharing” button highlighted in the image above, it’s found under the Internet & Wireless option bar. The sharing menu has a number of options running down the lefthand side, but we’re only interested in the one marked “Internet Sharing”, don’t click the checkbox to turn in on yet, first we need to set a couple of options.

You need to make sure you have the “Share your connection from” and “To computers using” set correctly. Seeing as this article is about sharing a connection from Ethernet to Wi-Fi you’ll want to select Ethernet (or USB Ethernet if you’re on a MacBook Air like me) on the first menu (Share your connection from), and then select Wi-Fi from the selection of check boxes in the second menu (To computers using). But it’s worth noting that you could share different internet connection in different ways, like sharing a Wi-Fi connection via Ethernet, or a Ethernet connection via Bluetooth.

Before we start sharing you’ll want to access the Wi-Fi Options menu under the main menu. This pop-up will give you access to the details of the Wi-Fi network you’re creating and let you assign a name, as well as the encryption level and the password for the network.

You don’t have to set a password, but for security reasons I highly recommend you do.

Once this is all done you’ll be ready to press the “on” check box next to where it says Internet Sharing. Once this is click your connection will be rebroadcast as a local Wi-Fi connection. To join simply use your wireless devices as normal and select the name of the network you’ve just created and input the password you’ve chosen.

Bandwidth will be shared between all your connected devices, so be careful if you’re download files on one device, it will impact the others around it, otherwise have fun using Wi-Fi in places that are still stuck with Ethernet connections!

The other day, we did a post showing you some of the best alternatives to Instagram if you were interested in closing your account after the Facebook takeover. While we mentioned a few, including Imgur and Flickr, we perhaps didn’t mention the one that was the most similar to Instagram: PicYou.

I only heard of this service afterwards, hence why I didn’t include it originally. It’s now only fair to give their service a mention as they are pretty much the direct replacement.

The concept is exactly the same as Instagram. Upload a photo, apply a filter and share it. In fact that’s almost the first message you see when you go onto their site, so they clearly mean business. Also just like Instagram, you connect using your Facebook and/or Twitter account, so everything is nicely integrated.

The final similarity, and perhaps the most important one is the PicYou app, which is probably the most important part of the whole thing. Instagram’s success is in part down to a good, easy to use app, something which Pic You mimics perfectly, allowing you to share photos from your mobile device in a few taps.

Some stats for you: after the Facebook acquisition, the app rose to #15 in the App Store and currently has 750,000 active users. It’s growing fast, if you don’t the appeal of all the other alternatives we suggested, try PicYou.

For the average Mac user, the Terminal is something that’s either too complicated to use or completely unknown. If you don’t know what it is, it’s the place where you can have your Mac execute custom commands, many of which you can’t do through other means. It’s a great tool, and unlike many believe, if you know what you’re doing, it’s relatively easy to use, especially if you already know what commands to put in there.

Finding Terminal

1. Open your Applications folder.
2. Open the Utilities Folder.
3. Open Terminal.

Now for the ten cool commands you can use with it:

1. Watch Star Wars Episode IV – the full movie, right in your terminal!

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

2. Let Terminal talk to you

say [insert what you want it to say here]

3. Limit your Safari web history to a certain number of pages

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitHistoryItemLimit [insert number you want here]

4. Put a gradient behind a stack icon:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean YES
[New Line] killall Dock

5. Turn the menubar white (restart required)

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer ‘EnvironmentVariables’ -dict ‘CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE’ 1

6. Add spaces to your dock (you can cam separate applications)

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{“tile-type”=”spacer-tile”;}’

7. Add widgets to your desktop

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode YES
[Next Line] killall Dock

8. Show Hidden Files In Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool YES

9. Install Software Updates

softwareupdate -i -a

10. Screen Capture

screencapture-S ~/Desktop/screen.jpg