Apple has offered some of its retail employees early access to OS X Mavericks. Genius Bar and floor staff at the company's chain of Apple Stores have been invited to install, test, and report on their experiences with Mavericks, and Bryan Chaffin argues this is good for everyone, including Apple's customers.

Apple released Java updates for Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and OS X 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion). The update brings Java SE 6 to the most recent version.

Sandro Cuccia shows you how to use the power of templates in Apple's iWork apps for the Mac to create professional-looking documents and presentations. These techiques will work with Pages, Keynote, and Numbers.

If you've never checked out the Path Bar or the Status Bar in the Finder, you're about to learn some groovy stuff. Using these features, you can see how much space is remaining on a drive you're browsing or immediately know where your current folder lives on your Mac. Here's the scoop.

Apple dropped its cat-themed names for OS X with the introduction of OS X 10.9 on Monday and is now naming its operating systems after locations in California. OS X 10.9 is Mavericks, which isn't as high profile as other California spots such as San Francisco, or maybe the Golden Gate Bridge. So where exactly is Mavericks?

Apple gave users their first glimpse into OS X 10.9 on Monday during a keynote event at the company's annual World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. The next version of OS X does away with the cat naming scheme in favor of California locations -- starting with Mavericks. OS X 10.9 will also include Finder Tabs, system-wide file tagging, and enhanced multiple display support.

If you're running Mountain Lion, your version of Preview will let you insert pages into a PDF from other documents or straight from a scanner, and you can even drop in blank pages, too. It's a handy thing! In this tip, Melissa Holt's going to go over the whole process. Maybe we'll get lucky and she won't make any silly jokes! Nah, probably not.

Buried in the bowels of your Mac’s operating system are a handful of utilities that you may (or may not) take for granted. One such utility, the Archive Utility, has a slew of customizable features. Jared Apperson is brave enough to dive in and see what's there, and he's happy to take us along.

If you're getting tired of changing which account Mail tries to send from every time you compose a new message, you'll want to read this tip. We'll cover how to set your default account on your Mac, and heck, we've thrown in how to do it on your iOS devices for no extra charge. We're good like that.

Apple released security updates for Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and Lion (OS X 10.7) on Tuesday, for both the client and server versions of the OSes. The patch notes have no specifics, so we don't yet know what was fixed in the updates.