Tag: Mac

As one of the largest a video game digital distribution service in the world, Steam boasts 120 million monthly active users (MAUs). For those who play games on Mac, Steam is definitely an essential app. If you find Steam won’t open on Mac, with a Error message telling you that your Mac could not connect to the Steam network, you’re not alone! Fortunately, you should be able to fix this issue easily using the fixes in this article.

Try these fixes

Here are the fixes that helped many Mac users resolve the Steam won’t open issue. Just walk your way through the list and start troubleshooting.

1. Check Steam & game stats
2. Relaunch Steam
3. Set correct date and time on your Mac
4. Delete Steam.AppBundle to reinstall Steam
5. Clear Steam cache files

Check Steam & game stats

Before trying anything more complicated, the first thing you should to check is whether Steam’s servers are online or not.

Sometimes, if there are too many players visiting Steam at the same time, its servers may not handle the amount of requests coming in, causing the Steam client on your Mac to disconnect to Steam network.

To check Steam servers status, you just need to visit the STEAM & GAME STATS page.

If you find that Steam servers are up, it means that it’s not a server side issue. But don’t worry. Just read on and try the fixes one by one to troubleshoot your Mac or your local network.

Relaunch Steam

When you get the “Could not connect to the Steam network” error message after you tried to launch the Steam client on your Mac, it gives you to options: RETRY CONNECTION or START IN OFFLINE MODE.

Click RETRY CONNECTION, then the Steam client will try to connect to the Steam server once again. According to many Mac users, a few tries in a row might do the trick.

If this issue persist, then click START IN OFFLINE MODE. Once the Steam client is opened, in the menu select Account -> Go Online… -> RESTART AND GO ONLINE.

In addition, you can also go and check if there are any Steam updates in Steam -> Check Update.

If there is no updates available, or if Steam still won’t open after installing the latest updates, you can try quitting the Steam app completely with any auxiliary processes it might be running:

1. Launch Activity Monitor.
2. Locate Steam in the list of processes. Then select it and click the stop button in the top bar.
   
3. Relaunch the Steam app.

See if this fix resolve the Steam won’t open issue. If not, try the next fix, below.

Set correct date and time on your Mac

Steam’s server might output an error if the time and date on your Mac are not in sync with Steam’s server. This may happen when your time and date are not set to automatic. You can follow the steps below to set your time and date to automatic:

1. Go to System Preference -> Date & Time.
2. If you notice that “Set date and time automatically” is not checked, click the lock icon at the bottom left corner to make changes. Then check the box next to Set date and time automatically.
   
3. Launch Steam and see if this issue persists.

If this fix doesn’t work for you. Try the next one, below.

Delete Steam.AppBundle to reinstall Steam

This fix allows you to reinstall Steam on your Mac quickly, without removing any games already installed. To do so:

Open Finder and go to the following location:

~/Application Support/Library/Steam

Once the Steam folder is opened, locate the folder Steam.AppBundle and delete it. Then simply launch Steam like you normally would. This will force Steam to download the latest version and perform a fresh install.

Relaunch Steam to see if this fix works. If this issue reappears, try the next fix, below.

Clear Steam cache files

Sometimes, corrupted Steam cache files may also lead to the Steam won’t open issue .These cache filed are kept in your Mac’s Library folder. To delete Steam’s cache from your Mac, just follow the steps below:

1. Open Finder and go to your hard drive -> Library -> Application Support to delete the Steam folder.
2. Then on your keyboard, press Shift + ⌘ + G to visit ~/Library/Caches, delete the Steam folder.
3. Go to ~/Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Logs to delete Steam from all of them.

Now Steam should be completely removed from your Mac and you can proceed with trying to reinstall it once again. Normally, after you installed the Steam app, this issue should be resolved.

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Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve fixed the Steam won’t open on Mac issues. Free feel to drop a line if you have any suggestions or questions on this issue!

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Image Credit

Infographic vector created by pch.vector – www.freepik.com

New to macOS and don’t know how to take screenshots on your Mac? If so, you’ve landed on the right spot! On macOS, you can use its built-in Screenshot app or keyboard shortcuts to capture your screen. In this article, you’ll learn how to take screenshots on your Mac quickly and easily!

3 methods to take screenshots on your Mac

There are more than one method to take screenshots on macOS. You don’t have to try them all. Just pick the method that works best for you.

1. The built-in Screenshot app
2. Snipaste
3. Snagit

Use the built-in Screenshot app to take screenshots

In macOS Mojave 10.14 and later, you can use the built-in Screenshot app to capture your screen. If you just need to capture your screen and share it to others, the built-in Screenshot app is convenient enough to complete the task.

To take screenshots or screen recordings using the Screenshot app:

1. On your keyboard, press Shift – Command – 5 to launch the Screenshot app and display the tools.
2. Click a tool to select what you what to capture or record.
   

	Capture the whole screen
	Capture a window
	Capture a potion of the screen
	Record the entire screen
	Record a portion of the screen

Click Options if you want to modify the advanced settings. For example, you can specify where to save screenshots. You can also choose to set a time delay or show the mouse cursor when taking screenshots.

The Show Floating Thumbnail option, once selected, will display a thumbnail of the screenshot or recording you just took in the bottom-right corner of the screen for a few seconds, so you have time to mark it up, drop it to a document, an email or a Finder window, or share it before it’s saved to the directory you specified.

To take screenshots using keyboard shortcuts:

If you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts to take screenshots, here are the frequently used keyboard shortcuts:

Keyboard shortcut	function
Shift-Command-3	Capture the entire screen
Shift-Command-4	Capture a portion of the screen
Shift-Command-4-Spacebar	Capture a window or the menu bar
Shift-Command 5	Open the Screenshot app
Shift-Command-6	Capture the Touch Bar

If you want to customize these keyboard shortcuts, on your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, click Keyboard, then click Shortcuts.

Note: On macOS, screenshots are saved as .png files and screen recordings are saved as .mov files.

Use Snipaste to take screenshots

If you need to edit the screenshot you just took, you may need to use a more efficient tool.

Snipaste is a simple but powerful screen capturing and snipping tool that allows you to pin the screenshot back onto the screen.

In other words, after taking the screenshot, you can easily add texts, lines, arrows, frames and blurs to the screenshot right on your screen (without opening the editor)!

Use Snagit to take screenshots

Snagit – The Best Screen Capture Software for Windows and Mac

First launched in 1990, Snagit is created and distributed by TechSmith. Believe it or not, up to now, over 39 million people world wide use Snagit! Snagit may be the best screen capture and recording software for content creators.

Snagit enables you to quickly capture your screen, add additional context, and easily share with coworkers. With Snagit, you can:

• give quick, simple answers
• organize and save captures
• make step-by-step instructions

Snagit is so powerful that it provides over 15 sharing outputs. With it, you can use images, videos and GIFs to share idea, give feedback and communicate more efficiently.

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That’s it! Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve learned how to take screenshots on your Mac. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to drop a line in the comment area below. Thanks for reading!

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Although apps on macOS are usually well-behaved, there are times when they stop responding and you cannot quit them normally, and the pointer becomes a pesky spinning wheel. In this case, you have no choice but to force quit the app. If you happen to experience the exact same issue, but don’t know how to force quit the app, don’t worry. You’ve come to the right place. After reading this article, you’ll learn how to force quit apps on your Mac easily!

How to force quit apps on Mac

It’s quite easy to force quit apps on your Mac, and there are more than one method to do that. However, before taking this drastic route, try closing the frozen app from the app’s menu in the menu bar, or use the keyboard combination Command + Q to quit the app.

If the app is still hanging, try the methods below one by one until you find the method that does the trick for you.

Note: you may lose unsaved changes when force-quitting an app.

Method 1: force quit from the Menu bar

If the app still doesn’t quit, you can Force Quit it from the Menu bar. Here’s how to do it:

1. Click the Apple icon in the top-left corner of your screen and select Force Quit.
   
   Or you can press Command + Option + Esc at the same time, which works very similar to pressing Ctrl + Alt + Del on a Windows PC.
   
2. Either way, it will bring up the “Force Quit Applications” box, in which you can find all the active apps currently running on macOS. You just need to select the misbehaving app and click the Force Quit button.
   

Normally, the problematic app would be closed.

Tips: You can also press Command + Option + Shift + Esc at the same time to force quit an app immediately.

Method 2: force quit from the Dock

You can easily quit an app from the Dock by simply right-clicking the app you want to quit and select Quit. You may probably not know, macOS also allows you to force quit an app from the Dock. Here’s how:

1. On the Dock, right-click on the app you want to quit. The shortcut menu will pop up.
   
2. Press the Command key. You’ll see that Quit will change to Force Quit in the shortcut menu.
   
3. Select Force Quit to close the app.

Method 3: force quit from Active Monitor

Activity Monitor on macOS is very similar to Task Manager on Windows OS. It’s designed to monitor the performance of processes on your Mac. If the methods above failed to force quit the frozen app, you can force quit it from Activity Monitor.

In Activity Monitor, you can see all the processes currently running in macOS, and you can easily quit a certain process. By doing that, you force quit the misbehaving app. You can follow the steps below to force quit the app in Activity Monitor:

1. On your keyboard, press Command + Spacebar at the same time to bring up Spotlight search bar. Type activity monitor and press Enter to open Activity Monitor.
   
2. In Activity Monitor, you’ll see a list of active processes. Among the list, locate the frozen app and click the “X” icon at the top of the window.
   
3. Click on Force Quit to end the process. Then macOS will force quit the app.
   

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Normally, one of the methods should do the trick for you. If none of these solutions works, you can restart your Mac.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ve learned how to force quit apps on your Mac. Feel free to leave a comment below if you have any questions or suggestions on this topic. Thanks for reading!

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The App-Level macOS Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

The document-Level macOS Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

If you need to share your Mac with other people, you may not want them to see the private files and folders. To avoid this situation from happening, macOS offers us a way to hide files and folders.

If you don’t know how to do it, don’t worry! You’ve come to the right place. After reading this article, you’ll learn how to hide files and folders on your Mac quickly and easily!

To hide files and folders on macOS

It is recommended that you put all the files you’d like to hide into a folder, then you just need to set the properties of that folder as “hidden”.

After you moved all the files you want to hide to a single folder, follow the instructions below to hide that folder:

1. On your keyboard, Press the Command key and Space bar at the same time to invoke Spotlight. Then type terminal and select Terminal from the search results.
   
2. After you launched Terminal, enter the following command line, including a space at the end of it.
   chflags hidden
3. Drag the folder that contains the files you want to hide into the Terminal window and drop it next to the command line.
   
   
   After you dropped the folder, the path of the folder will appear next to the command line in the Terminal window.
   
4. Press Enter on your keyboard to execute the command. The Terminal window will not show the result of that command line. But if you go to the folder where you store the folder you wanted to hide, you will find the folder already “disappeared”.

To access the hidden file or folder on macOS

After you hid the files or folders, you can access them by simply pressing the Command-Shift-. combination.

Here is how to do it:

1. Go to the folder where stores your hidden file or folder.
2. Press the Command Key, the Shift key and the Period key (the . key) at the same time, then you will see those hidden files and folders.
   

You can also view hidden files and folders in Finder by executing the following command lines one by one:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

The command lines above tell Finder to show hidden files and then restarts it.

If you want to stop Finder from showing hidden files, run the command lines below one by one:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

The command lines above tell Finder to stop showing hidden files and then restarts it.

To unhide a file or folder

If you want to unhide a file or folder, follow the steps below:

1. Launch the Terminal app.
2. Type the command line below into the Terminal window, and also remember to type a space after the command:
   chflags nohidden
3. If the file or folder is hidden, you can open Finder and go to the folder where the hidden file or folder is stored, then press the Command key, the Shift key and the Period key (that’s the . key) at the same time to make them visible. Once you can see the file or folder, drag it to the Terminal window and drop it after the command line, as you did earlier.
4. Press the Enter key to run the command.

After you run the command, the file or folder will become visible.

One more thing

It is not a foolproof way to protect your files and folders from others, since other people can easily find those files and folders using the method in this article. To secure your files and folders, you should encrypt them. By encrypting, you prevent others with out encryption password from open them.

If you’re a macOS user and you need to use apps available on Windows platform only, usually there are two options for you:

• Dual boot
• Virtual machine

Which option is better for you?

The Dual boot option can provide you with a stronger performance than the virtual machine does. However, you cannot use the two operating systems at the same time. In other words, if you need to use apps on the Windows platform, you have to shut down macOS first, then restart your Mac to boot from Window OS.

In contrast, the virtual machine option allows you to run Windows OS directly on macOS, which means, you can use these both macOS and Windows OS at the same time. That’s cool, right? However, the virtual machine is always a big consumer of your Mac system resource. So, it might not be a good choice to install a Windows 10 virtual machine on the Mac that equipped with a small memory.

*In this post, I’d like to focus on the latter option: how to create a Windows 10 virtual machine using VirtualBox. After reading it, you’ll be able to install a Windows 10 VM with VirtualBox quickly and easily!

What is VirtualBox?

Oracle VM VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Created by Innotek, it was acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2008, which was in turn acquired by Oracle in 2010 (excerpt from Wikipedia).

VirtualBox can be installed on the following platforms:

• Windows
• macOS
• Linux
• Solaris
• OpenSolaris

How to create a Windows 10 virtual machine using Virtualbox?

1. Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox on your Mac.
2. Download the Windows 10 ISO file from Microsoft.
3. Launch VirtualBox. Click New to start creating Windows 10 VM.
   
4. Name your Windows 10 VM, then select where you’d like to store your VM. As for Type and Version, select Microsoft Windows and Windows 10 (64-bit) respectively. Then click Continue.
   
5. Move the slider to allocate the memory size of your Windows 10 VM. Then click Continue.
   
6. Follow the on-screen instructions to decide whether you need to add a virtual hard disk or not. Here I’d like to select the second option and click Create.
   
7. Select the file type of the virtual hard disk.If you don’t need to use this VM with other virtualization software, you can select the first option. Then click Continue.
   
8. Choose whether you’d like the virtual hard disk file to be dynamically allocated or not, then click Continue. In this step, I’d like to select the second option: Fixed size.
   
9. Confirm the file location for this VM. Move the slider to allocate the file size of the virtual hard disk. The recommended file size is 50 GB. Then click Create. It make take some time to complete.
   
   
10. Click Start.
    
11. On the popping-up window, click the file icon to locate the Windows 10 ISO file you downloaded.
    
    Click Choose.
    
    Then click Start.
    
12. Follow the instructions on the popping-up window to install Windows 10 (VM). It may take some time to finish the installation process. During installation, the Windows VM will restart several times.
    
13. If you see the Windows 10 desktop in VirtualBox, Congratulations! You’ve created a Windows 10 VM on your Mac.
    

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That’s pretty easy, right? If you have any questions or suggestions on this issue, you’re more than welcome to leave me a comment below. Thanks for reading!

If you’re a Windows veteran like me, after switching to macOS, you may be confused by the document (file)-level keyboard shortcuts on macOS. So in this post, I’m going to show you some of the most frequently used document-level keyboard shortcuts on macOS. After reading it, you’ll be familiar with those document-level keyboard shortcuts!

Document / file -level keyboard shortcuts

Copy the selected item to the Clipboard:

Cut the selected item and copy it to the Clipboard:

Select All items:

Duplicate the selected files:

Paste the contents of the Clipboard into the current document or app. This also works for files in the Finder:

Undo the previous command:

Reverse the undo command:

Save the current document:

Find items in a document or open a Find window:

Show the Get Info window for a selected file:

Move the selected item to the Trash:

Empty the Trash:

Empty the Trash without confirmation dialog:

Print the current document:

Show the Character Viewer, from which you can choose emoji and other symbols:

Use Quick Look to preview the selected item:

Create a new folder in the Finder:

Move the dragged item to the other volume, instead of copying it:

Copy the dragged item. The pointer changes while you drag the item:

Make an alias of the dragged item. The pointer changes while you drag the item:

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Hopefully, after reading this post, you’ve been familiar with the document (file)-level keyboard shortcuts on macOS! If you’ve any suggestions or questions on this topic, please let me a comment below. Thanks for reading!

Related posts:

The System-Level macOS Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

The App-Level macOS Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

In my previous post, I talked about the system-level macOS keyboard shortcuts:

The System-Level macOS Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know

In this post, I will focus on the app-level macOS keyboard shortcuts. After you read this post, you’ll be familiar with those app-level keyboard shortcuts.

App-level keyboard shortcuts

Use the app in full screen:

Switch to the next most recently used app among your open apps:

Open preferences for the front app:

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That’s it! If you master the keyboard shortcuts in the post, I believe you can boost productivity when working with your Mac. Just as always, if you’d like to share your thoughts or ideas, or if you have any questions on this topic, you’re more than welcome to leave me a comment below!