OS X Daily: “Clear iMessage Chat History in Mac OS X” plus 1 more

Posted: 05 Mar 2012 09:48 AM PST

iMessages for Mac

iMessage keeps track of chat history, providing you with a lengthy record of conversations in a scrollable chat log. Unlike iOS, there isn’t an in-app method to delete the chat history in OS X (yet), instead you will have to turn to the Finder or command line:

Quit out of Messages for Mac
Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To Folder” window
Enter ~/Library/Messages/
Select all files in the Messages directory and move to trash, files will be named chat.db, chat.db-shm, chat.db-wal, etc
Empty the Trash and relaunch iMessages

Clear iMessage Chat History

You can also do this through the command line. Quit out of iMessage and open Terminal, at the prompt type the following:

rm -r ~/Library/Messages/chat.*

Relaunch iMessages and to find an empty chat history.

Remember that iMessages for Mac is currently in beta, there will probably be an easier way to delete chat history in the final version when it ships this summer with OS X Mountain Lion.

Thanks for the tip Kevin!

4 Simple Mac Maintenance Tips

Posted: 04 Mar 2012 11:02 AM PST

Mac Maintenance

Macs are notoriously trouble-free and easy to maintain, but that doesn’t mean you should ignore system maintenance entirely. Here are four simple Mac maintenance tips that will help you keep your Mac running at its best.

1) Run Disk Utility

Running Disk Utility every month or two is a good idea for two reasons: repairing permissions, and more importantly, verifying and repairing the hard drive. Disk Utility is included on all Macs and found in the /Applications/Utilities folder, the two necessary procedures will be under the “First Aid” tab and can be run one after another.

1a) Repairing Disk Permissions
Repairing permissions is good practice, though it’s never the cure-all that so many claim it to be. Nonetheless, it’s still a good procedure to periodically run, especially after installing or uninstalling a bunch of applications.

1b) Repair Disk
This is probably the most important thing to do with Disk Utility. While you can verify the boot volume at any time, the best way to repair the boot disk is to boot from the recovery partition by holding down Command+R and running Disk Utility from there. This will be necessary if bad blocks are found or if the drive is corrupt. Be sure to run Verify Disk not only on the drive itself (physical drive name), but also the boot partition (Macintosh HD). If any errors are found, they’ll appear in red, and thankfully Disk Utility is usually more than capable of handling such repairs on it’s own.

Repair Disk in Mac OS X

2) Keep your Mac Software Updated

Keeping your Mac software up to date is vital. Periodically run Software Update from the  Apple menu, and periodically check the Mac App Store for updates of your apps there too. Updates can come in the form of general bug fixes, feature enhancements, and security fixes, and it’s so easy to do there is no excuse not to.

Software Update will check for updates once a week by default, but the Mac App Store has to be manually checked for updates in OS X Lion. With OS X Mountain Lion, Software Update moves to the Mac App Store so this whole process will be automated for OS X 10.8 users.

Software Update

3) Clean Off the Desktop

Believe it or not, having a lot of files on the desktop will actually slow down a Mac. The slowdown is less noticeable on the newest and beefiest Macs, but nonetheless it still happens. This is because each file and its icon preview take up RAM and resources, and the less RAM you have the more you’ll notice the sluggishness resulting from a cluttered desktop. The best solution is to get in the habit of filing things off the desktop and into appropriate folders, but if you can’t be bothered to do that than just grab all files and move them into a single directory and deal with it later.

If you can’t remember to do it yourself, there are apps that will automatically clean it for you by moving files and folders to a designated place at a regular interval.

Clean Off the Mac Desktop

4) Regularly Back Up the Mac

Performing regular backups is essential Mac maintenance. Not only will you be able to quickly recover from potential disasters, but keeping your files backed up is just good practice. By far the simplest back up solution for Macs is Time Machine. You’ll need an external hard drive, but once you set up Time Machine the rest is very simple and automatic backups occur without any effort.

If you haven’t set up Time Machine yet you really need to do so. Get a large and cheap external hard drive and then configure Time Machine through System Preferences, it’s extremely easy and in the event you ever need to recover from a backup, you’ll be very thankful you have one.

You should also get in the habit of backing up manually right before performing system software updates, it’s rare but things can go wrong, and it’s bes to be prepared.

Time Machine