OS X Mavericks Portable Genius

Chapter 6 What Can I Do with Utilities?

Utilities do lots of the dirty work for your Mac. They diagnose problems with your network, help you partition or format drives, take screenshots, manage passwords, and much more. Some utilities are more specialized than others, but there’s a little something for everyone in Mavericks’s utilities. In this chapter, I explore the Mavericks utility offerings and the basics on how they can be used to enhance your Mac experience. I also delve a bit into Terminal as homage to the Mavericks UNIX underpinnings. These utilities (for the most part) can be found in the Applications→Utilities directory on your Mac.

Working with Software Utilities

Software utilities help you with matters related to software functions, such as monitoring color profiles and taking screenshots. Even though some of these utilities may touch hardware from time to time, typically their work is software-centric.

All the utilities in this chapter have Help systems that can teach you much more about those that interest you the most. To access the Help system for any application, simply click Help in the menu bar.

Using AppleScript Editor

AppleScript Editor is a tool that helps you write and edit AppleScripts. “Great,” I can hear you say, “but what are AppleScripts?” AppleScript ...