OS X startup programs

Ever wondered which programs get loaded every time you turn on your Mac?
It's easy to see your login items by going to System Preferences (Applications -> System Preferences.app) then clicking on Accounts under the System heading. Once opened you can select "My Account" and click the "Login items" tab.



To see a more comprehensive list of programs, including system services/daemons you can go to preferences in iTuneUp (hit [cmd] + [,] in the main screen or select preferences from the iTuneUp menuitem near the clock) and then click view under Startup items.

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View all network connections on OS X

If you're interested in seeing which of your Mac applications are connected to the internet you can try running the lsof (list open files) command.

1. Open Terminal.app (found in Applications -> Utilities)
2. Type lsof -i
3. Hit ENTER

lsof will now show you the list of network connections. If you have administrative rights you can run "sudo lsof -i" to see *all* connections, even those made by system processes such as daemons.

lsof outputs a variety of information by default but we're mostly interested in:

• COMMAND - The name of the command or program
• PID - Process ID of the connected program, you can use this to get more information about the program later. e.g You can look for this PID in Activity Monitor.app to see more statistics
• USER - The name of the user running this app, usually this is your user name or "root" if the process is a system service/daemon
• NAME - The address and port the application is connected to. If you see something similar to *.* or *: that means the application is listening for connections.

View all running tasks on your Mac

An often overlooked utility that's built right into OS X is the Activity Monitor.app.

It lets you view all running processes as well as their memory and cpu usage allowing you to narrow down which apps are misbehaving.

Another handy feature is the updating dock icon.

By control-clicking or right clicking on the Activity Monitor dock icon you can set it to display CPU usage, CPU usage history, network usage, disk activity or memory usage in real time...

Activity Monitor.app lives in Applications -> Utilities.