From Panther to Tiger to Leopard and now, Snow Leopard, we’ve seen Exposé slowly maturing from a young cub to the ferocious beast it is today. There’s just so much more you can do with Exposé now compared to a year or two ago. And sticking with the multitasking motif, I’ll show you 6 different ways you can make use of Exposé in your daily workflow, shaving precious seconds off your regular routine.

Quick Look in Exposé

Quick Look is now integrated into Exposé, allowing you to preview a window without exiting Exposé. Invoke the All Windows Exposé view and while your mouse cursor is hovering over a window (highlighted by a blue rim), press Spacebar. You are now previewing that window in full resolution but wait, you’re still in Exposé. You may either press Spacebar again to return to the All Windows view or click on the preview (or press Enter) to select that window or the Escape key to exit Exposé.

This works wonders if you have a lot of windows open and they end up being generated as tiny thumbnails. There’s no more guesswork involved. You can now be sure of the window you’re selecting while still in Exposé.

Cycle through apps

In Snow Leopard, Apple introduced Dock Exposé, where you can now click and hold on any Dock icons to invoke an Application Window Exposé view. While in that view, you can press Tab and cycle through any running application. Pressing the accent (`) key will reverse the cycle order.

You can achieve the same effect via the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Keep pressing the Tab key until you reach an application you want to view in Application Window Exposé view and hit the 1 key while still holding on to Command. You can now release the Command key and press Tab or the accent key to cycle through applications on your Dock.

Reorder windows by name and type

If you have loads of open windows, viewing them individually and finding the right one in Exposé can be tricky. The order in which Exposé windows seem to be arranged in Snow Leopard remains a mystery to me. However, you can arrange the windows alphabetically if you hit Command+1 while in Exposé. Pressing Command+2 groups similar apps together in no particular (known) order.

In the screencast below, I tried to demonstrate the difference between reordering by name and by type.

Select window by name

Let’s just say that you’re working with a lot of windows and you’d like find a specific one while in Exposé. By typing the first few letters of the window you’re looking for, Exposé will refocus the highlighted window to the closest match.

In the screencast below, watch my mouse cursor as it highlights the ‘Music’ folder. I begin to type “thi” and the highlight jumps to wrap around Things. Press Enter to select that window and exit Exposé.

Quit and hide apps

Notice that now, even in Exposé, the Dock is still in view. If you left-click on any dock icon, a contextual menu will pop up to provide you with options to quit, hide, keep in Dock, open at login and show in Finder.

In the same vein, you can also quit an app while using the Application Switcher. Press Command+Tab and hold the Command key. Hit the Tab key until you reach the app you want to quit then press the Q key, still holding on the Command key. The app in question will quit without interfering with Application Switcher.

In the screencast below, I’ll demonstrate how both of these methods look like when they are performed.

Only show windows from current Space

As I said above, Spaces is another friend all for mutitasking. Alas, a caveat — when invoking Exposé in Snow Leopard with Spaces activated, all windows from every Space is shown. To make Exposé display only the windows from the current Space, a little Terminal magic is required.

Launch Terminal then copy and paste these commands in one at a time and hit Enter after each one.

defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces -bool FALSE

killall Dock

To restore Exposé back to its original settings:

defaults delete com.apple.dock wvous-show-windows-in-other-spaces

killall Dock

So there you have it, 6 useful tips to help you manage Exposé and multitask more efficiently. I hope that they come in useful.

If you have any more Exposé tips, feel free to add them in the comments section.

Image credit: James the photographer

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But even the best will still have room for improvement. I was looking for a GeekTool script to display my “currently playing” song’s data on the desktop when I found TunesArt. After playing with the app for a while, I consider TunesArt as one of those must-have iTunes software downloads.

And combined with GeekTool, TunesArt would create a lovely and functional iTunes desktop.

Tunes at your finger tips

TunesArt is a menubar application that will do its job while sitting quietly in the background. If you click on it when iTunes is not active, you’ll have the option to turn on iTunes.

And if iTunes is running, you’ll get full iTunes control and more right from the menubar; including the ability to set the song rating, option to display lyrics, title and artist of the currently playing song.

One of the true strengths of TunesArt is the ability to assign shortcut key to various iTunes control. So, even if your fingers are busy typing your next best seller, you could tell iTunes to skip the track that you hate without even have to leave the word processor.

To activate this ability, you have to go to TunesArt Preferences, and open the “Shortcuts” menu. Check the “Enable Hotkeys” option, and click in the shortcut fields to assign your preferred combination for each available control.

The Preferences window gives you many other options to tinker with. From the General menu, you can choose whether iTunes will launch and quit along with TunesArt and whether you want to fetch lyrics from the net and attach it to the songs with no lyrics.

On the eye-candy side, we have Cover Art and Notification menu. The Cover Art menu lets you choose which cover art style you want displayed on the desktop.

Meanwhile, the Notification menu deals with how (and for how long) you want TunesArt to display notifications every time iTunes plays the next song. You can use TunesArt’s own notification, or Growl (or both).

TunesArt notification will appear under the menubar icon.

If you want to, you can activate the Last.fm feature that will connect you to Last.fm and send the list of songs you’ve listened to and recommend other songs based on the list.

It’s obvious that you need to have a Last.fm account before you can use this feature.

Tunes on your desktop

TunesArt  is an iTunes software downloads that will place a cover art image of the playing song on your desktop. And if you activate the feature from Preferences – Cover Art, playback controls will appear everytime you hover your mouse near the cover art display.

The lyrics display is a nice addition for those who like to sing along. You could edit (and add) the words directly from this window. TunesArt also has a (supposedly) very nice feature to add lyrics to songs automatically from the internet. But from during my few days of trying the app, this feature was always non-functional.

User could do a quick search of iTunes library via the search window and jump to the chosen song. Assuming that you have set the shortcut key combination, all the navigationa could be done without lifting a single finger from the keyboard.

The geek and the tune combo

As I mentioned at the beginning, I use TunesArt in conjunction with GeekTool script to display iTunes information. The duet is proven to work wonders in beautifying my desktop.

The GeekTool script that I use is:

osascript -e ‘tell application “iTunes” to if player state is playing then get XXXXXX of current track’

where XXXXXX is one of the metadata of the song such as: name, artist, album, etc. You can get more metadata fields by referring to iTunes’ column headings.

Please refer to my previous article about GeekTool on how to utilize the scripts.

Some drawbacks

Please note that you will not be able to close iTunes if you are using the above iTunes script in GeekTool. The script will keep on re-opening iTunes everytime you try to close it. This issue will not be a problem for those who always keep iTunes open. The possible solution is to put the scripts in a different group with other script so you could uncheck and deactivate them anytime without disturbing the rest of the scripts.

I’ve also mentioned one bug that I found in TunesArt — fetching lyrics. Maybe because it’s still in its beta version, the lyric searching feature of TunesArt is still not working. Hopefully the developer will fix this issue in the future release.

Personally, the drawbacks are minor issues. I found the GeekTool – TunesArt combination to be truly amazing – a great alternative to Bowtie in terms of appearance, and to GimmeSomeTunes (mentioned here) in terms of functionality.

Do you know other alternative iTunes software downloads to enrich your iTunes experience? Please share using the comment below.

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You must be familiar with modern LCD screens, right? If you look carefully, most of them have a button to automatically change the attributes of the screen to adjust for the types of media which is being viewed: one specially tweaked for movies, another for photos, a separate one for text and there’s one we’re particularly interested about — night.

You see, working in front of a computer screen at night raises a particular concern. The fact that you’re staring at a bright screen late at night when your body is supposed to be turning in, disrupts your circadian rhythm. A bit of medical jargon coming your way — during nighttime, darkness permits the production of melatonin by the pineal gland. Melatonin causes drowsiness and in tandem with the central nervous system, controls the circadian rhythm. In layman’s term, all this means is the bright light from the LCD screen screws up your sleep-wake cycle.

That’s why there’s a customized “Night” setting on your LCD. Furthermore, there are several apps that will reduce the brightness of your screen while working at night; Shades is one example of a Mac app that will do just that. I don’t know if you’ve noticed the LCD’s reflection off a person’s face at night — it’s mostly bluish white. Technically, the specific colour temperature is 6500K; also known as daylight. That’s right. If you find it hard to fall asleep after using your computer, this is why.

F.lux addresses this issue but it does it slightly differently. Instead of reducing brightness per se, it actually warms the colours you see on your screen and imitates the lighting in the room during nighttime. It’s quite hard to wrap your head around until you actually use it but I’ll do my best to try and explain it.

After downloading and launching the app, it will ask you for your location and the type of lighting that’s in the room — tungsten, halogen, fluorescent or daylight. Based on the information, it calculates exactly when the sun sets in your area and adjusts the colour temperature of your screen to mimic the lighting in the room. Note that the Mac version’s interface isn’t as refined as its Windows counterpart — but it doesn’t matter very much because all of the time, the app is absolutely unobtrusive. There are no pop-ups and you won’t notice it running.

Here’s a short clip to show you how seamless the colour change is. I have to apologize for the video’s quality. The warming effect isn’t visualized in screencasts and I had to resort to using a digicam. The focus is invariably off. The point here is to show you that F.lux can actually warm the screen up quite a bit to compensate for the lighting conditions, especially if the room is lit with halogen or tungsten lamps. I can assure you that the colour changes evenly across the screen, even though it looks “top heavy” in the video.

I’ve been using F.lux for a while and I cannot instinctively tell when the warming appears. It’s a natural transition, which I appreciate. It can also be temporarily disabled in the menu bar to work on colour-sensitive projects. One more thing I have to stress: using F.lux doesn’t mean that you will fall straight to sleep once you’re off the computer and in the bed. No, there are other factors governing sleepiness. F.lux will only help reduce stimulated wakefulness and assist you in adjusting to lighting conditions.

If you find yourself skeptical, give it a try. F.lux is cross-platform and will work on Windows, Mac and Linux. If you think it works, share your experiences in the comments.

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In the computer world, icons are an app’s visual representative and personal identity. In terms of marketing, icons are the packaging and one of the selling points. I know some people who would try out (or even buy) applications just because of the beautiful icon. If you think I’m exaggerating, visit the iTunes Store and go to the iPhone applications department.

Mac is famous for its good looking icons. Apple has set its icon standard so high that third party developers have to match or surpass the quality if they want to survive in the demanding community of Mac users.

Giving Files & Folders Some Personalities

Even though Mac users can feast their eyes with tons of beautifully crafted Mac icons, some general items always use the same old icons. I’m sure that, just like me, sometimes most computer users would love to give their personal files and folders unique personalities.

I’m not talking about changing the whole set of Mac icons for the whole system using some icon packages. I’m talking about changing icons for individual items using your own customized creation.

There are at least two ways to do that quickly and easily in Mac, manually and automatically. The first method could be done if you’ve already have ready to use Mac icons.

Getting Mac Icons

Due to the different file format, you can’t just use Windows icons in Mac – and vice versa. Mac icons are in .icns format while Windows’ is .ico.

While a great number of sites with free downloadable Mac icons are only a search engine away, a free web service to create your own Mac icons is a rare breed. The only one that I could find is iConvert. This service will help you to convert images into Mac icons. The service is also able to convert images to icons, and icons to icons for other platform like Windows and Linux.

So we can use this service to convert and use Linux and Windows icons in Mac (should you ever need and want to do that ), or convert Mac icons to be used in those other platform.

To use iConvert, you need to browse and upload the image or icon file and click “Convert“. As simple as that. After the converting process is done, the icons are available in Mac, Windows and Linux formats, ready to be downloaded.

With the icons ready, we can continue to the next step: replacing the old icons with the new.

Changing Icons

Replacing icons in Mac is very easy. You just choose a file or folder with the icon that you want to change and hit Command + I (or File –> Get Info menu) to open the File/Folder Info window.

Then drag and drop the new icon to replace the icon image at the top left corner of the Info window.

That’s it.

And as if the above method is not simple enough, the second option of changing an icon is even easier.

The Automatic Method

All the above steps can be done offline in a more simple manner using the help of a small application called img2icns. The app is available in the paid version and the free version – with some features disabled. But the free version is more than enough for daily uses.

Just drag and drop the image that you want to change into icon to img2icns and it will be automatically converted.

The next step is another drag and drop. This time, ‘the victim’ is the file or folder which needs the facelift. The new icon will be attached without all the hassle.

Alternatively, you could save the new icon as an .icns file to be used later.

Do you know of another application to create and change Mac icons? Share using the comments below!

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Uprooting yourself from a perfectly safe and familiar surrounding which you were enveloped in while using your PC and switching to a Mac may be uncomfortable and in fact, downright awkward. But trust me, once you understand the difference between the two and learn to adapt to the “Mac style”, the dust should inevitably settle and perhaps you’ll eventually enjoy using a Mac.

This switching to Mac guide or call it a crash course will be a stripped down version of most tutorials on how to use a Mac. I will only touch on the bare essentials and hopefully that will make your learning experience a less complicating one. If you need more information about using a Mac, be sure to check out MakeUseOf’s Mac Manual, written by yours truly.

Installing Apps

If you’re looking to install an application in Windows, most likely you’d have to double-click on the setup.exe file to run in the installer.

On a Mac, the majority of apps are packaged in a disk image called a DMG. The usual installation procedure is:

• Double-click the DMG to mount it
• Once mounted, its contents are automatically displayed
• Click and drag the app to the Applications folder
• Unmount the DMG

Sometimes, an app will come with an installer. Simply follow the instructions and you’re golden.

Uninstalling Apps

If you need to remove an application in Windows, you’ll have to head into Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs.

On a Mac, because most apps are self-contained, all you need to do is drag the app from your Applications folder to the Trash. Finito.

Tweak Settings

In Windows, Control Panel is the operations center. Everything you need in order to change any settings will be found there.

On a Mac, you’ll need System Preferences. It can be accessed from the Apple menu, located in the top-left hand corner or in the Utilities folder (Applications -> Utilities). Every customizable setting — from display font size and screen saver patterns to Bluetooth and Printer Sharing — will be found there. If you can’t seem to locate the setting you need, use the Spotlight search field within System Preferences to narrow down the possibilities.

Exploring For Files

If you need to explore the contents of say, the Program Files folder in Windows, you’ll definitely use Windows Explorer and would presumably start by double-clicking My Computer.

On a Mac, what you would use is the Finder. Click on the Finder icon (the smiley face) on the Dock and a new Finder Window will open, displaying the contents of your Home folder. From there, you are able to access your Applications, Documents, Downloads, Movies, Music and Pictures folders.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Most Windows keyboard shortcuts revolve around the Control button. To copy — Control + C, to paste — Control + V and so on.

On a Mac, the big kahuna is the Command button. It’s located next to the spacebar and has a clover icon on it. You’ll definitely need to reprogram your fingers (your thumb, actually) to hit this button instead of Control.

For a complete list of commonly-used Mac OS X shortcuts, refer to MakeUseOf’s Cheat Sheets page or the Mac Manual.

Launching Applications

The regular rigmarole to go through if you need to launch an app in Windows would be to click on Start, then go on from there depending on how you have your Start menu customized.

On a Mac, the Dock is where you’ll start. Drag all of your favourite apps — internet browser, instant messaging client, music player, movie player, etc — from the Applications folder onto the Dock for easy access.

Dealing With Unresponsive Apps

If something went wrong while using a Windows PC, most users will instinctively press the infamous Control+Alt+Del key sequence to invoke the Task Manager.

On a Mac, if an app isn’t responding, your safest bet is to force it to quit. You can do this by right-clicking the app’s icon on the Dock and click on Force Quit.

Alternatively, you can learn to use Mac’s task manager — Activity Monitor.

System Maintenance

If you get a whiff that your Windows PC is starting to clunker and slow down, the obvious easy-fix is to use Window’s Disk Defragmenter.

On a Mac, fragmentation is automatically dealt with by the operating system so you don’t need to worry about that. If you notice your Mac starting to slow down, take a look at some optimizers in this article and here for a couple of tips to keep your Mac running smoothly. Many (even seasoned) Mac users will advise you to run Disk Utility to repair file permissions as a cure-all for Mac slowdowns. I have to point out this is a myth. Repairing permissions deals with a very specific issue, read more about it here.

I hope that this crash course helps any recent Mac Switchers out there to comprehend the alien (albeit very pretty) operating system before them. I can’t emphasize the importance of user experience here. You’ll only learn to master a Mac after you’ve used it for some time and no tutorial can completely substitute your personal learning process.

Image credit: Daniel Morris

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Lala has become my main jukebox and is used ten times more than I use iTunes. With my setup, it doesn’t take much effort to access my Lala account. This article explains the method I use as a Mac user. I’m sure there are similar applications for PC users.

What You Need

FluidApp
Butler
Airfoil (optional)

Each of the applications, except for Airfoil, can be downloaded for free. Donations, of course, are accepted.

Creating a Site Specific Browser for Lala.com

The Lala music player lacks a dedicated desktop web application to play music. You must sign into your account and use its web application. To get a dedicated player of sorts onto your desktop, you can use FluidApp, a “site specific browser” (SSB), for a dedicated website or page. Making your Lala account homepage a SSB is like making it an application, which means it’s less likely to get lost in the clutter of all your other web pages on your desktop, especially if you use some of its advance features that I will describe below.

Instructions for creating an SSB using the application are clearly explained on its website, so I won’t rehash them here. But the following are some extra instructions for how to specifically use FluidApp to create a “Lala Player” on your desktop.

• First off, when you’re creating a SSB for the Lala music player, you’ll want a well designed icon, so download Goggans’s design posted on his Flickr photostream (once you use the Fluid creation, it won’t have the black border that you see here.)

• After your SSB is created, you can customize the browser some.
• Your SSB includes a menu bar and a set of preferences similar to what you find on any web browsing application. In the FluidApp preferences you can choose to style the window of your SSB as I have done here. I like using the black top framing or “HUD” for all my SSBs. That makes them distinctive from my main web browsing windows.

• There’s also an option in Preferences (click on Behavior Preferences) in which you can have a SSB window immediately hide when it’s not in the foreground. Using this option means you can open up your Lala Player, select a playlist or album to play, and when you click to another application, the browser window gets out of the way so you can get back to what you’re doing.

Use Butler for Quick Access

Like any other application, your Lala.com FluidApp will appear in your dock for easy access. But in my opinion, using a launcher application like Butler or Quicksilver provides even faster access.

Butler allows you to assign a Hot Key or Hot Corner to an application to launch. Since I’m more of a mouse user, I assigned a Hot Corner to my Lala app. It’s easy to do: Start up Butler and click on its Configuration tab. Drag the Lala FluidApp to the Hidden section. With the application selected, assign a Hot Key or Hot Corner that works best for you.

AirFoil (optional)

Lala is beta testing an iPhone application for its site, but until the app is released, you can use a free iPhone application called AirFoil Speakers Touch to hear music on your Lala account on your iPhone or iPod touch. The only catch with using the AirFoil Speakers is that you have to purchase Airfoil for Mac ($25), which sends audio remotely from your Mac to its mobile counterpart speaker application. This is a cheaper solution than getting Apple‘s limited AirPort Express, which can only be used with iTunes. Of course, you can also AirFoil to stream any other audio coming from your computer.

So what do you think of this? If you’re a Lala member, drop me a few comments and let me know what you think about the site and this set up.

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If I could do that, I could just use Expose’s shortcut (Command + F3 in my MacBook) – or the Show Desktop we’ve discussed before – to show the desktop to see everything that I have to do printed there. Of course, those with large screens will have everything visible at all time even without the trick.

With my recent adventure with GeekTool, everything comes full circle. Now my tasks and events can be shown beautifully on the desktop, and I can look at them anytime I need to with a single stroke of a shortcut key combination.

To be able to show tasks and events from iCal on the desktop, we need help from two freewares: the previously mentioned GeekTool and iCalBuddy.

In short, iCalBuddy is a command-line utility that can be used to query the OS X calendar database for items. Being a command-line based application, iCalBuddy is the perfect scripting solution to be used along with GeekTool.

The installation used to be something that ordinary people would try to avoid – involving working with command lines in the Terminal. But the latest version of iCalBuddy comes with an “install.command” file, which will make the process a snap. All you need to do is double-click it to start the installation in Terminal and then continue the process by pressing any key (or Ctrl + C to cancel).

Now that the installation is done, let’s add some to-dos and events to the desktop

After installing iCalBuddy, displaying iCal’s to-do and events on the desktop is a matter of adding new shell items from GeekTool. This means dragging out shell geeklets from GeekTool prefPane to the desktop and editing the items.

The most important part of the geeklet is the Command pane. This is the place where you write the command line to tell GeekTool what to do. This is the basic command line for iCalBuddy:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy *****

The “******” is where you put the customization strings. There are a whole lot of variations that you could use with iCalBuddy’s command line. There are some manuals that come with the installation file of iCalBuddy that you can refer to for further information. You could also access the program’s manual page by running “man icalBuddy” in the terminal to read the documentation for all of the arguments you can use when calling icalBuddy.

As for me, these are the strings that I use for my desktop.

To display iCal’s to-do, I use:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy –excludeTaskProps “notes” -nc uncompletedTasks | sed -e “s/*/–/” | sed -e “s/!/!!/”

While to display iCal’s events, I use:

/usr/local/bin/icalBuddy -nc eventsToday+7 | sed -e “s/*/–/” | sed -e “s/!/!!/”

These strings are not mine. I picked them up from a discussion between iCalBuddy users and the creator. So, the credit goes to them. And as you can see, what the customization strings do are:

• removing notes from the tasks (–excludeTaskProps “notes”)
• removing the calendar name (-nc)
• changing the * symbol in front of each item with — symbols (sed -e “s/*/–/”)
• displaying events for one whole week (+7)
• emphasizing the overdue tasks and events (sed -e “s/!/!!/)

You could do your own experiment adding and removing strings (or not).

Beautifying the look

Honestly, I spent so much more time experimenting on the look than on the function; dragging the position, changing the color, adjusting the size, that sort of thing. And here’s the final result (for now).

You could just let your creativity run loose and design your own. But in case you are wondering, I’m using Apple’s standard wallpaper, and Gill Sans – Regular and Thin – for the font. As for the layout, size and color, I think the screenshot has revealed them all.

While doing this article, I also found out several communities of GeekTool users who “show off” and share their desktop designs. If you’ve tried GeekTool and think that your design is cool enough, you could share them using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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On my quest to find applications to utilize the wasted desktop space I found GeekTool, a PrefPane (System Preferences module) designed to display different kinds of system information on a Mac’s desktop: an ideal enhancement for the idle property.

But it was not love at first sight. The tool was too geeky for me. While it did improve the desktop in the functionality department, it failed miserably in the looks department. The way it would display system information was actually made my desktop looked uglier. So I left this app behind and went on with my life.

The second encounter

Then one day, when I was in need of a tool to quickly display several system information, the GeekTool name popped out again. This time the function beat the form, I was ready to live with the unpleasant look as long as the purpose was served.

While tinkering with it, I found out that GeekTool has adjustable elements to tweak the look. With a little creativity I could get the best of both world; cool functionality and stylish looks. (Please note that I’m using the 3.0 RC5 version. But for those who have doubts on using Release Candidate version, version 2.1.2 – with different UI – is still available to be downloaded.)

The first step is to install GeekTool by double-clicking at the GeekTool.prefPane icon.

The app will be installed in your Mac’s System Preferences. Choose install for all users unless you want it to be accessible only by you.

The GeekTool System Preferences will automatically open after the installation. Check the “Enable” box to activate it.

An empty transparent “Geeklet Settings” properties window will appear. The content of this window will change according to which geeklet is selected.

You could also check “Show in menubar” and “Automatically check update” if you want to.

The shell settings

The next step is to pre-configure GeekTool. There are so many things that you can do with this tool for the geek, but for our today’s topic, we’ll just use the shell console. Drag the “Shell” icon to your desktop.

After the shell console is placed safely on the desktop, a new group called “Default Group” will appear under “Manage Groups” pane. The “Geeklet Settings” window will also turn into several setting options that you can edit.

The first setting is the name and posistion of the geeklet. This is an optional value that you can skip if you want to.

The second is the command which will be carried out by the geeklet which will be displayed on the desktop. It could be programmed to display a simple line of text [echo "your text here"], date [date], calendar [cal], or the uptime of your machine [uptime].

These commands are UNIX command that usually run via Terminal. There are tons of them, and each of them can be customized using additional command strings. While it’s impossible to list them all here, you could always turn to the search engine for help.

Don’t forget to fill the the value for “Refresh every XX s”. To keep the diplay always updated, you might want to go for the value of “1″ second.

The last adjustment is “Font and Color”. Here’s where you can go wild. Using the combination of font type, color and the position of them, you could “dress up” your desktop to your liking.

There’s no strict rules on how to design your display of system information, just make sure that it would go along with your wallpaper. Here’s an example on how I adjusted the font and color to match the background.

Below is what I came up with after few minutes of trying GeekTool.

You could also look at how other people design their desktop using GeekTool in this Flickr Gallery.

This short rumbling merely touches the surface of what GeekTool can do, but I can assure you that more about GeekTool is coming your way.

Have you tried GeekTool? Do you have a GeekTool desktop to show off? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Guy was nice enough for forward the comment to me and here’s the answer: There’s no need. It’s built right into Mac OS X!

It’s called Parental Controls and it’s located in System Preferences. You may not have noticed it if you’re the sole user of your Mac but if you have children, Parental Controls can be a huge help. I’ll show you what it can do and how to set it up exactly.

Let’s dive right in! Launch System Preferences but before you can actually start to use Parental Controls, there needs to be a separate account to control. If your kid already has his or her own account on your Mac, perfect. Just select that account in Parental Controls to manage it. If not, then you’ll have to create a new account.

Head over to Accounts Settings and click on the plus button to add a new account. In the window that appears, select “Managed with Parental Controls“, fill in the appropriate fields and click “Create Account“. Right, the account has been created and is set to be managed by Parental Controls.

Now head over to Parental Controls (System Preferences -> Parental Controls) and select the account to configure its settings. To enable Parental Controls for existing accounts, simply click on “Enable Parental Controls” and the settings will appear.

Under the System tab, there are options to use a Simple Finder. This is basically a simplified Finder window. There is no sidebar and no navigation to system folders allowed. There is also an option to select applications you want to be made available to your child. It’s useful if you want to prevent your children from meddling with important apps or perhaps if you want to cut off their MSN privileges temporarily. If you check this box, the list below will unbrick and you are able to select exactly what you want your child to play with.

In the Content tab, you’re provided the option to filter profanity from the Dictionary and to restrict access to certain websites. If you’d like to give your children some room to play, you could use Apple’s filter to automatically limit access to adult websites. In addition to that, you can also add specific sites to the white- or blacklist. Personally, I find that option to have the best balance of leniency and compromise.

In the next tab, Mail and iChat, the idea is really simple: the applications will only allow communication between people on the whitelist. The thought of unsupervised children chatting online is definitely one of a parent’s worst nightmares. Who are they chatting with? Now you can safely control their communication without being overly intrusive.

The next tab is something we’re very interested in. Time Limits is very easy to use and when put into action, it is simply the best way to get your child to bed on time! You can set daily weekday and weekend time limits as well as bedtime restrictions! Your child is logged off automatically as soon as it’s time for bed! Sure, there could be times when your kids have a project due and could use a couple more hours on the computer – that’s something very easy to overcome, I’ll show you how it’s done in a while. But now, let’s log in to an account managed by Parental Controls to see how it will look like, shall we?

As you can instantly recognize, the Finder is simplified to show only the allowed applications. Navigation is crippled so your children can’t delete or modify any of your precious files.

If you’d like to change any of the Parental Controls settings, there’s no need to log off and log into your account. Say, your child wants to access his favorite website, which you had unfortunately overlooked when modifying the whitelist, no worries. You can add it instantly by entering your password (if you have an administrator’s account).

If you’ve set time limits, the remaining time is visible within a drop down menu once you click on the clock. Your children will receive an alert 15 minutes before the time runs out completely and they are able to save their work or ask your permission for more time to play.

Parental Controls is really awesome and extremely useful if you’re a parent. It will allow you to monitor and restrict your kids’ computer activity without being too intrusive. Settings which you’re able to control i.e. communication, apps, navigation; are really flexible and can be changed on the fly. Your child will always go to bed on time, and you can sleep soundly knowing that they’re safe from online intruders.

If there are any other apps that operate better than Parental Controls, I’ll be glad to hear about them. Leave your suggestions in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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There are of course other ways to organize desktop clutter, such as buying a bigger screen, opening less windows, or grouping the windows into several virtual spaces. I accidentally found a rather old application – but working just fine under Snow Leopard – which takes a completely different approach to the problem: making the windows disappear.

To show or not to show

Whether it’s only to hide your games when your boss is around, or to instantly switch your cluttered desktop into a clean working environment (where only the chosen windows are visible), Show Desktop is your solution.

As the name suggests, this small application will hide all the opened windows and show the desktop. Maybe similar to Expose, but more powerful. And all it takes is just a click.

When you run this application for the first time, Show Desktop will appear in the “Icon mode“. You can activate its function through the app icon in the dock.

Clicking the dock icon will hide all the open windows. Everything is disappeared, only the desktop is visible. The windows are not minimized nor closed, they are just vanished. In this state, the dock icons of those applications will look transparent.

If you click the Show Desktop icon while all the windows are hidden, the minimized Finder icon will appear at the dock ready to be clicked back to the desktop. But to restore everything back to where they belong, you have to click the Show Desktop dock icon again while holding the Shift key. You could also use Alt + Tab to restore only one of those hidden applications.

Further enhancements

For those who prefer to have a menubar item of Show Desktop instead of a dock icon, you could do so by going to the Preferences, either using the menu or “Command + Comma” key combination, and then tick the “Show in menubar” box.

Changing between the Dock icon and the Menubar mode requires you to restart the application.

From these General Preferences, you could also pick the icon style and choose whether you want Finder to stay open after you hide other applications. If you want to have access to this “hide/show all” ability the whole time, be sure to tick “Open Show Desktop at login” box.

In the Menubar mode, the one that you could click to hide or show all the windows is the menubar item. To show the preferences, you have to use Control + Click (or right click) at the item. The pop-up menu will also show you a list of open applications.

But the coolest feature of this app is the ability to make a kind of ‘whitelist’ of applications that will not be hidden. Users can add their own choice to the list.

Using this ability, you could repeatedly hide all the other open applications and leave only one specific app that you want to work with. This allow you organize your desktop and focus more on the work at hand and discard all the distractions.

A little trick

This app would be perfect if it has a shortcut key combination to activate the show/hide applications function. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have one. To overcome this limitation, I tried to create the shortcut key using the Keyboard preference pane. It was an unsuccessful attempt.

However, I found a simple cheat. If you use a launcher – something like Quicksilver or Google Quick Search Box – to “launch” Show Desktop while this app is already active, a similar effect (hide all windows) would be triggered.

The opposite is also true. If you use a launcher to open Show Desktop while holding the Shift key, all the hidden windows would appear.

Have you tried Show Desktop to organize your desktop? Do you think you will ever need the function to quickly hide applications? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Let me put this in perspective for you – I had less than 4 hours to research a topic for my next article (from scratch), think of the angle which should be presented to you (the readers), write the article, proofread it and submit it – all within the four-hour time frame. I’m not saying that it’s impossible but really, quite close to the limit.

Since then, I got myself a UMTS device and luckily from a provider which offers unlimited usage for a fixed monthly fee. I know for a fact that a lot of other providers out there charge by the megabyte. Those of you with such a tariff and are looking for a way to reduce your internet usage, read on.

Both of these issues (battery life and restricted internet usage) can be addressed with one simple application – BashFlash. You see, flash is a major pain in the ass. It appears in ads as animations and online video players. And it does two things very well; firstly, it takes up a lot of your internet usage because of those damned flash videos that masquerade as advertisements which automatically load whether you want them to or not; and secondly, when flash videos play, it uses a whole lot of CPU power, heating it up, and draining the battery because the fan has to run and cool it back down again.

Here’s where BashFlash comes in. It’s a menubar app that detects the activity of the Flash plugin. Whenever Flash takes up a significant amount of processing power, BashFlash’s menubar icon will turn from grey to red, allowing you to kill the Flash plugin.

Now, before you download BashFlash, know this: you need to be running an Intel Mac on Snow Leopard at 64-bit. Don’t know if you’re running at 32- or 64-bit? Check this page out, basically you need to have at least an Intel Core 2 Duo processor. Also, you need to use Safari in order for BashFlash to work. Firefox and other browsers doesn’t run Flash as a separate plugin so BashFlash can’t kill the process.

If you happily fulfill both requirements, then let’s see what BashFlash can do for you. After installing it, BashFlash places its icon on the menubar. If there is no Flash content running in Safari, the icon will appear grey. Once a flash-enabled ad or video loads, the icon will turn red and subsequently allows you to kill the Flash process.

And look what happens immediately. The plugin is temporarily disabled and the video stops playing, CPU usage goes back to normal, internet usage normalizes, and battery is saved. All is well.

Reload the page and everything starts up again, including the Flash plugin. Nothing is permanently disabled so you get to choose exactly when and how to deploy the Flash killer.

Again, BashFlash will only work with Safari and Intel Macs running on Snow Leopard at 64-bit. Do you get annoyed with flash ads that suddenly spike up your laptop’s core temperature and start spinning the fan unnecessarily? What do you do about it?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Speaking of optical disks, CD and DVD are the most commonly used media by common people nowadays to store their multimedia digital memories. Being a media that supports interactive menus, it’s a bit surprising that most people use DVD only to store the raw data – just a direct copy of the files from the hard drive.

Maybe they just don’t know how to make a DVD, or they think that creating DVD interactive menus is not for everybody, “those complicated things are too advanced for my simple brain” they might say.

Getting started with iDVD

But compiling pictures and videos to make your own interactive DVD shouldn’t be a daunting task. Apple provides its users with a tool to make a DVD easily. The name is iDVD.

I was opening iPhoto to organize my photos and videos taken from my cameras when I saw that there’s iDVD sitting there nearby waiting. Curious, I opened it and found out that the DVD creation process is as simple as using other iLife apps like iWeb and Garageband.

When you open iDVD, you’ll get the familiar menu with several start options. As our purpose today is to quickly and easily create an interactive DVD with our personal photos and videos, the suggested choice is “Magic iDVD“.

The next step is giving your project a name and choose the theme for it. There are several theme groups available: 7.0, 6.0, 5.0 and older versions. Each group has several themes to choose for. I just picked the “Revolution” theme as it’s the first choice that appeared.

Then you can browse the media folder to find items that you want to include in the DVD. The materials could be music, pictures and movies. Adding them to the project is just a matter of dragging and dropping.

Hit preview to see what the end result will look like. A preview window will appear, complete with the remote control-like playback interface.

If your project contains a big size of data collection, it might exceed the maximum capacity of the disc and iDVD will give you a pop-up notification.

You could delete some files to reduce the size, or you could try to modify the encoder setting. To do that, open “Project Info” from the “Project” menu (or use Command + Shift + I),

And choose the lower quality setting from the “Encoding” drop down menu.

Click “Start Project” to enter the next stage.

Giving the final touch

There are other things that you can adjust from the menu interface. Click the “Menu Info” buttom at the bottom left of the window.

The menu info window will appear. Here you can adjust the loop duration, audio volume, buttons and drop zone. You could also change the background music simply by dragging and dropping any audio file from the hard drive to the audio box.

You’ll see the general folders of the DVD such as Movies, Pictures and Music. The folder and sub folder names could be edited easily by double clicking on it.

While editing the names, a text object setting dialog will appear. You could choose the font type and size here.

The last step is producing the DVD. From the File menu choose “Burn DVD” or hit “Command + R“. You could also save the DVD as an image to store in the hard drive (Shift + Command +R).

Another way to start the DVD burning process is by clicking the “Burn” button at the lower bar of the window next to the “Play” button. The process will stall unless you have a blank DVD ready in the drive.

And all that’s left to do is wait. The time will depend on how big your files are and how strong your Mac is. You could do something else while iDVD handle the necessary steps one by one.

There are a lot of iDVD features still uncovered by this short introduction, but I think it should be enough to start your own DVD project.

Have you tried compiling personal movies and pictures into an interactive DVD? Do you know other free alternatives to iDVD? Please share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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The game was Texas Hold ‘Em, without a shadow of doubt the most famous gameplay variant spawned. It is easy to learn, simply addictive but inexplicably difficult to master. I digress.

During the tournament, we faced a minor speed bump. In Texas Hold ‘Em, blinds increase periodically and since this was a tournament, we decided that the blinds would go up every 15 minutes. Sure, that sounded sensible at the time but there wasn’t a clock in the room and none of us was wearing a watch. We had to resort to using our mobile phones to tell us the time. Every so often, one of us yelled, “Time to double the blinds, guys!” Personally, I considered that pretty inconvenient — especially so when you’re in a competition, it was distracting.

At the end of the tournament, one of the players suggested that we should bring a clock to time the blind increments. My mind immediately went, “What? A clock?” My innate geekiness wouldn’t allow myself to succumb to utilizing what I can only describe as “wall art”. I was positive that there was an app, somewhere out there in vastness of the internet, made for this specific purpose.

And there is. It sure took me a rather long time to find it, though.

It’s called Old Timer (a cunning play on words, I have to admit) and it’s available for Mac and PC because it runs on Flash. Ironically, I didn’t actually set out to look for a poker timer, per se — to be brutally honest, I didn’t think that an app like that existed. I initially searched for a timer application that would display a pre-set countdown and play an alarm once it reached zero. That proved much harder to find.

Old Timer is the perfect companion to a self-hosted, homebrew poker game. As soon as I launched the app, it gave me the option of running in full-screen. Instantly, I knew this was the one I was looking for.

The app is immensely simple to use. You are allowed three different modes of gameplay — all day, average or multi-table. Since my tournament consisted of several different tables, that was the mode I selected. Then, I had to enter my customized blind increment levels, the number of players, length of each round before the blinds double, cost of buy-in and rebuys, and finally the starting amount of chips distributed to each player; then hit Play.

Cleverly, Old Timer calculates the total number of chips in play and how much there is in the pot. But what I’m really pleased with is the timer! It’s a gorgeous white on black display with large fonts that everyone can see from across the room. What’s more, it shows how much the blinds should be at any given moment. Oh yes, it pays to be a geek!

In the final minute before the blinds increase, Old Timer plays a short soundclip to indicate that there is less than a minute left. It also displays the values of the blinds in the subsequent round. When the timer reaches zero, there is a wonderfully posh indication that new blinds are in play; and the timer automatically resets itself for the new round. It’s just perfect.

Old Timer will work on both Mac and Windows and there is no other way to say this – it is the perfect blinds timer for a home hold’em game. If you know any better texas hold em blinds timer, I’m all ears; suggest them in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But recently, I could barely keep up with everything that happened around me just relying on my biological RAM alone. While I’ve tried several free to do applications to overcome my anxiety, I couldn’t find free apps that can match the power of Apple’s iCal calendar.

So I chose iCal Calendars to help me manage my life better. One problem though, adding multiple tasks and events to iCal requires a rather lengthy process, including keeping it open at all time. Luckily, there’s FlexCal. This small application which reside in the System Preferences is designed to overcome that very problem.

The installation and settings

The installation process is quick and easy. Double click the prefPane file and choose which users you want to install this app to. Unless you use your Mac with several other users and don’t want the other users to use FlexCal, choose “Install for all users of this computer“.

Then the System Preferences will be opened. Since FlexCal is still in 32-bit, System Preferences needed to be restarted before you can tamper with FlexCal settings.

There are several things that you should adjust to make FlexCal comfortable to use. First the “Setup” tab. Click the “Start FlexCal” button (obviously) and tick the “Start FlexCal at login” box to make sure that this app will be available at all time.

Then you need to set your own shortcut to be able to access FlexCal quickly. Click on the shortcut field and press your chosen combination.

Don’t forget to choose which window should be opened every time you hit that shortcut key. If you add Tasks a lot, choose “Task Window“. The same thing goes the other way around. But whichever you choose, it’s not that important (and you’ll see why later on).

Next is the “Advanced” tab. This is the place to further configure FlexCal. You could choose to add an alarm to all new Events and how early should the alarm goes off. You could also choose which calendar should be the default place for all tasks and events, and whether you prefer to use Textual or Graphical style to display the calendar.

Using FlexCal

Using this app is a only matter of hitting the shortcut key. If you choose “Task Window” as the default, this window will appear every time the key combination is pressed.

But you could easily change the window to “Events Window” by hitting the combination one more time (and continuously alternate between the two).

Hit enter after typing the task/event and it will be saved to iCal. To cancel it, use the Esc key.

You could move between the field using the Tab key (forward) and the Shift + Tab key (backward), but you couldn’t edit the “Calendar” and “Priority” drop-down menu without using the mouse. The rodent is also needed to change the style of calendar from Textual to Graphical (and vice versa).

I wish the developer would add the ability to use the keyboard to its full extent so the process of adding Tasks and Events to iCal could be done without the need to lift a finger from the keyboard.

Other than that minor annoyance, FlexCal is something that every iCal user should have.

Do you use iCal calendars to manage your life? Do you know better free alternatives to add Tasks and Events to iCal quickly and easily? Share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I would use a social bookmarking website but honestly, I don’t find them very useful since I’m almost always on my MacBook and I hardly use another computer. In this case, the perfect solution would be a desktop app to store all my links of interest so that I can go through them slowly after I’ve settled down.

In a previous article, I’ve detailed the steps needed to use Stacks to store URL’s so that I can browse them later. This minimizes bookmarking clutter since it provides an alternative location to temporarily store bookmarks. The problem is, I tend to forget about the URLs after a while. The Stack doesn’t exactly yell out, “Hey, look at me! You have 20+ sites yet to read here!” I needed a more centralized solution that would display the number of sites I have saved but haven’t yet read.

That’s exactly what I found with Quiet Read.

This app sits quietly (no pun intended) in the menu bar awaiting links. Whenever I’m in the middle of a power search (you know, those frantic searches where you open lots and lots of webpages in the hopes of finding the thing you’re looking for but hardly ever do) and I think that I’ve found a seriously awesome app, I’ll drag the link and drop it over Quiet Read.

The indicator refreshes automatically to display the number of items it currently holds. That’s one of my favorite features; I don’t get that when using Stacks. In fact, nothing else happens whenever I add a link into Quiet Read, proving it to be really very unobtrusive, thus permitting me to carry on with my power search or whatever it is I was doing.

Now, allow me to elaborate. What exactly can you store in Quiet Read? Basically, any web link in almost any form can be saved. I can click and drag a link from any browser; in this case, I’m using Safari, and drop it in the menu bar icon. Links are listed chronologically, not alphabetically — which again, is really great because I can determine the order in which they were saved. I can also click and drag the favicon from the address bar and drop it into Quiet Read. Additionally, any highlighted (selected) URL can also be dragged into the app.

Now, maybe I feel that some of the URL titles don’t really work for me. Some of them aren’t very descriptive. Well, Quiet Read allows me to edit them by Option-clicking on a title. When I’m done reading a saved site, I simply click on the menu bar icon, select the title and press Command-Delete to remove it from the list. Easy peasy.

I like Quiet Read because of its simplicity and the fact that it doesn’t do much more than it’s supposed to. No frills — just the way I like it.

Quiet Read is completely free and runs on Snow Leopard.

What do you use to put aside websites to read later? Bookmarks? Read It Later Firefox extension? Tell us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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I too work with many windows opened at one time: mail, browsers and its tabs, text editor, media player, you get the picture. Most of the time I have to get the information from one window and use it on another. This method of working requires my agility to switch back and forth between windows and tabs, and also my wisdom to find the information among the clutters.

My best friends during the time of trouble with Mac window management are Alt + Tab (to switch windows), Exposé’s F3 (to show all opened windows) and Control + F3 (to show all opened windows within one application). Sometimes, I use Spaces to separate the “working” windows and the “entertainment” windows to unclutter the workspace a little.

Afloat – take two

Then I stumbled upon Jackson’s old article about Afloat and it really helped me with Mac windows management. But almost a year has past since that article was published and Afloat has been updated with a new Snow Leopard-compatible version and several new features.

So I thought it would be nice to have another look at this app from a slightly different perspective.

We’ll start with the installation. Unlike common Mac apps that only need to be dragged and dropped to work, Afloat needs SIMBL before it could be put into action.

After the installation, you need to restart any opened applications to be able to use Afloat. The app will add new menus under Window menu in any Cocoa application. Here are two pictures comparing the Window menu before and after the installation of Afloat.

It’s also been said that Afloat will not work with Carbon apps like Finder and iTunes. But I tried restarting Finder using Command + Alt + Esc and the new menus appear.

Maybe it’s because I use Snow Leopard. After I’ve searched a little bit on the net, I found out that according to Snow Leopard technology page:

All system applications except DVD Player, Front Row, Grapher, and iTunes have been rewritten in 64-bit.

Translation: there are not many Carbon apps left (Cocoa apps are 64-bit) and that Afloat will work for almost all the main applications. I don’t know about third party software yet since I haven’t explore too many applications after installing Afloat.

Now let’s see how this app could help us in solving our Mac window management problems.

The Seven Steps

First problem: working with several windows.

Solution: Instead of flipping through the windows, you could just put the source window always above others.

There are few steps to do to achieve this without disturbing the workspace.

1. First, go to the source window and hit “Command + Control + A” to keep the window always floating above.
   
2. Then hit “Control + Command + 1″ to make the window transparent.
   

   Note: Control the transparency level by using “Command + Control + Page Up/Down” or “Command + Control + Two finger scroll on the multi touch trackpad”. Restore the window to the non-transparent state (opaque) by hitting “Command + Control + 0″.

3. You could also use Overlay command (from Window –> Adjust Effect menu or Command + Control + F) to make the source window transparent, floating above other windows, and unaffected by mouse click or keyboard input. Look at number 2 in the picture.
   

   This “Adjust Effect” window will also give you access to set the window position (number 1), and the transparency level (number 4) as discussed above.

Second problem: the window we need is located in a different Space from the window we use.

Solution: Instead of turning off Spaces or moving the needed window around Spaces, you could keep the window on all Spaces, by checkin the option as shown in the picture above (number 3).

Third problem: it’s difficult to work with a transparent window.
Solution: Instead of turning the transparency effect on and off, you could just make it opaque when active by giving checkmark to the number 5 option in the picture above.

Fourth problem: the size and/or the position of the window is not right.

Solution: you could just resize and/or drag the position of the window, but you could do it easier by performing Quick Resize using Command + Control key while click and drag using the right mouse button anywhere in the window. You could also do a Quick Drag using Command + Control and left mouse button.

Normally, resizing the window require you to click and drag a specific point at the bottom right of the window, and moving the window could be done only by clicking and dragging the title bar of the window.

Fifth problem: you don’t know the location of the file that you are currently working on.
Solution: You could try to do a “Save As” and then click cancel. That might work with some applications. But there is an easier way, using Float’s “Show Window’s file in finder” menu or using the “Command + Control + Up arrow”. This is by far my most favorite feature of Afloat because I often have to rummage through Finder to just email the document that I’ve just finished.

Have you tried Afloat? Do you know other tips on using Afloat? Share using the comments below.

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• How To Pin Any Application Window To The Top (5)
• Improve Window-Management in OS X with Afloat [Mac] (14)
• How To Organize Your Mac Desktop With Spaces (10)
• How To Hide Running Programs on Windows with OuttaSight (8)
• Your Easy Guide to Windows 7 Themes (16)

More often than not, all your Mac probably needs is some maintenance. Here are some tips to optimize your Mac and keep the system running healthily.

1. Quit Inactive Applications

Probably one of the most overlooked causes of a slowdown is running an app in the background without knowing. Sometimes, this happens to me as well — I can’t tell you how many times I’ve left Photoshop running by accident.

Apps running in the background use memory even if they’re inactive, depriving the operating system. Hence, forcing it to use the available hard disk space as virtual memory; leading to an excessive amount of pagings and slowdowns. This also puts unnecessary strain on your hard disk, especially so if you’re running low on free space.

So, keep an eye on the Dock for apps that shouldn’t be running. Be frugal with your memory usage and you’ll notice a different in the system’s performance.

2. Disable The Dashboard

If you hardly use widgets, then you should disable the Dashboard in order to prevent the widgets from loading. The less memory you have to spare, the more reason you should do it.

Disabling the Dashboard requires the use to Terminal. Before you get all frightened, relax. It’s not that difficult.

Launch Terminal from Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app. Copy and paste this line of code into Terminal and hit Enter:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES

Don’t quit Terminal just yet. The Dock has to be restarted in order for this hack to work. So copy and paste this line of code to restart the Dock then hit Enter:

killall Dock

You can quit Terminal now by pressing Command+Q. With Dashboard disabled, nothing will happen when you press on the dedicated Dashboard button (F4), hit F12 or click on the Dashboard dock icon; preventing the widgets from launching and hogging precious memory.

To re-enable the Dashboard, copy and paste this code into Terminal and hit Enter:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO

Then, restart the Dock by using the code above.

3. Look Into Preferences

There is a lot you can do within System Preference to make sure that your Mac is running as smoothly as possible. For starters, you could take a look through your list of apps which automatically launch on login. You can find it under Accounts setting then hitting the ‘Login Items’ tab. I’ve listed this tip in a previous article but I can’t emphasize how important it is. Apps that launch when your Mac powers on prolong start-up time and take up memory. Keep this list lean and mean.

Then spend some time examining other options and evaluate if they’re absolutely essential to be running. For example, if you’re don’t use Bluetooth, then make sure to turn it off. Enabling File Sharing shows that you’re generous and kind but is taxing to your hard disk — especially if you’re sharing the Movies folder. Having someone stream movies from your Mac while trying to run Photoshop is well, for lack of a better word, hazardous. My advice is to disable File Sharing and other unnecessary Sharing options, and revert to using a pendrive to share files.

One last tip regarding System Preferences. After using your Mac for a while, there must be a load of preference panes installed. They are listed under the ‘Other’ section. Take a look at what’s installed and whether or not they’re needed. Preference panes are loaded during start-up and take up memory as well. If you find something that you deem not essential, right-click on it and remove it.

4. Make Room To Breathe

Hard disk space isn’t only meant for storing files. I’ve seen some people fill their hard disks to the brim. Mac OS X requires at least 20% of the hard disk drive to be free in order to perform smoothly. It uses this space to swap memory with the RAM (paging), write system files and other temporary files. By leaving OS X very little free space, you are choking the system, metaphorically speaking.

How can you free up used disk space? Run an inventory and remove applications that you hardly ever use. Take iDVD and Garageband for example, it uses up free space in the gigabytes. If you don’t frequently use these apps, remove them — you can always reinstall them from the OS X Install Disc.

Buy an external hard disk and store your large movie files over there instead of occupying the space on the primary (system) hard drive.

You can also use applications like Filelight (direct download link, Snow Leopard compatible), GrandPerspective or OmniDiskSweeper to display your hard disk usage in an easily-digestible graphical interface and find the culprit that’s hogging your valuable disk space.

5. Update Frequently

Updating your system may feel troublesome to certain users, especially when it involves restarting. It should be made known that Apple releases updates to fix bugs and potential errors which may harm the system. Occasionally, performance updates are issued to address issues regarding improper hardware operation like this one, for instance, which was developed to fix hard drive stalls on Macs running Leopard and Snow Leopard.

To scan your Mac for available updates, run Software Update from the Apple menu in the menubar.

So there we have it, five (frequently overlooked) tips to keep your Mac optimized and running smoothly. I hope that this helps solve the dreadful spinning beachball of death syndrome.

How often do you run maintenance on your Mac? Do you have any other tips to keep OS X running lean and mean? Jot them down in the comments, I’d love to hear your ideas.

Image credit: maczydeco

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I’ve spent most of my free time last week in front of iPhoto. Aside from tagging faces with their names, I also have a lot of fun tagging photos with their location. This iPhoto feature is called Places, and it’s the ability to organize photos based on where they’re taken. Places is a nice example of integrating Google Map to an application.

Let’s go Places

I’m not much of a traveller myself – yet – so I could only imagine how cool this feature will be for those travelling photographers. I don’t own a GPS-enabled camera either, so imagine again, if I did because Places supports geotagged photos.

I could, however, tag my existing photo collection. All I need are some free time and a decent internet connection.

Photos are usually grouped by events, and every photo in each event is usually taken at the same location. So, to start tagging photos with their location, the best place to start is “Events” under the “Library” menu.

Select an event and click the small “i” sign on the bottom right corner of the event box. It will appear when you hover your mouse near the corner. Alternatively, you could select the event and go to “File –> Get Info” or hit “Control + I”.

An info box with some basic information about the event will appear. You could edit the event’s description and location here.

Every time you edit the place, iPhoto will offer you to find that location on a map.

After few seconds of searching, a map will automatically appear. The location that you’ve searched will be pointed with a pin. Click “Assign to event” button and all the photos in the event will be tagged with that location.

If you are not sure whether the pin really pointed to the correct location, you could zoom in the map by double clicking on it or by clicking on the “plus” (+) button on the bottom left of the screen. You could also choose to view the map by Terrain, Satellite, or Hybrid (combination of both).

If there are several locations within one event, you could tag individual photos with different places. All you have to do is select pictures with similar location, and repeat the above process.

Finding the missing places

One of the (dis)advantages of living in an “unknown” part of the world is that, most of the times, the location you’ve entered can not be found by the map search.

If this is the case, you have to locate the places yourself. Rediscovering places in the map is fun. Drag the map to center the position of the approximate location and click “Drop Pin” button.

To place the pin in the exact point, zoom in on the map and drag the head of the pin to the desired position. You could also set the size of the area by sliding the arrows that appear by the sides of the circle.

The final step is writing down the name of that place.

Organizing by Places

After the fun part is done, we can continue with even more fun: enjoying the photos based on the places. Zoom in on the area that you want to explore and click “Show Photos”. All the photos taken within the range of that map will be shown on the screen.

Or, instead of “Map” view, you could also choose “Thumbnail” view where you’re given the option of narrowing down the on the location.

Surely, with a GPS-enabled camera, all the geotagging would be done automatically. And those adventurers who travel a lot will have their map filled with pins. How exciting!

Do you go places and take pictures? Do geotag your photos to organize them? Share your adventures using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Face Recognition to Organize Photos With iPhoto [Mac] (5)
• Manage your iPhoto with these plugins (11)
• Windows 7 Libraries Explained – And Why You Want Them (51)
• Share Your Trips With EveryTrail (8)
• Photology – Must-have Photo Search Software for Windows (3)

At the time of writing, the plugin, which is called SignatureProfiler has been updated for Snow Leopard but for the last couple of months, I’ve reverted to using good old reliable text as my email signature — until today.

I recently found out how to spruce up emailing by using my Facebook profile badge as a signature. It’s pretty neat and like all Facebook badges, you can easily customize it to your liking. We’ll go through the steps required to make it in a little while. Right now, I’d like to point out a few things.

Firstly, this trick is meant to be used in Mail, Mac’s default desktop mailing application. It works without the need for any addition plugins but you are required to set up your email accounts in Mail. Secondly, you also need to pair the account with a signature — just text will be fine at this point, it doesn’t really matter since it’s about to be replaced. Lastly, you’ll need TextWrangler, a free HTML-capable text editor or any other HTML editor.

Let’s get started, log in to your Facebook profile then scroll down until you see this link:

If you have never created a badge before, then go ahead and create one. It’s very simple and you only need to follow the on-screen instructions. A horizontal badge works best in this situation. Add whatever you like into the badge: your name, your profile picture, your status, your websites, anything! When you’re done, preview your badge. If you’re happy with your creation, click on Save. On the next screen, you’ll be presented with the sharing options. Click on “Other” and the badge’s code will appear. Click on it once and press Command+C to copy it to the clipboard.

Open up TextWranger or any HTML editor of your choice and paste the code in a new document. It should look something like this:

Notice that I’ve selected a part of the code which is actually not necessary for your signature. It adds a link to your profile and another link for others to create their own badge. It won’t look very pretty so we’re going to delete it. Here’s how it should look like after removing the useless bits.

Alright, now we’re going to add a space above the signature just for the sake of convenience. It’s much easier to add a space at this point, which will go between your email message and the signature; rather than having to press the Enter key several times after composing your email. Add <p>&nbsp;</p> to the beginning of the code, like this:

We’re almost done. All we need to do now is to remove the width and height attributes from the code. By leaving the attributes there, we are telling Mail that no matter what, the signature has to be that width and height. In actuality, the Facebook badge changes in dimension depending on your status, links, etc. So remove this part of the code:

Finally, we’re ready to save the HTML file. Click on File, then Save As. Type in any name followed by “.html” as shown in the screenshot. Select the Desktop as the destination and click Save.

Double-click the resulting file and it should open up in Safari. Check if everything is in order then save it as a Web Archive — click on File, Save As and select Web Archive as the format. Again, make sure that the Desktop is selected as the destination and click Save.

Just a little bit more and we’re done. Remember when I mentioned earlier that you should already have a signature attached to your email account in Mail? Well, if you haven’t created one, I suggest you do it right this instant because we’re going to look for it. Open up a new Finder window and delve down to ~/Library/Mail/Signatures. There should be a minimum of 2 files there if you only have 1 email account set up. One file should be formatted as .webarchive.

To check if it is indeed your email signature, double-click it and it should be displayed in Safari (Snow Leopard users can use Quick Look). Once we’ve determined that this is the signature we want to replace with the Facebook badge, copy the file name. Mine looks like “FED17D3A-AC4C-490D-93CB-80634BD2A114″. Use this to rename the webarchive file which you’ve just saved on the Desktop. After you’ve renamed it, click and drag it into the Signature folder. Finder will ask you if you’re sure you want to replace the existing file, click Yes.

And we’re done. Relaunch Mail and give it a whirl. Compose a new mail and your signature should show up.

How easy was that? No plugins, additional software or expert skills required! For our non-Mac friends who also want to use their Facebook profiles as email signatures, I’m sure Saikat’s post will teach you a thing or two about integrating HTML into Gmail.

What do you use as your email signature?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• The 2 Easy Ways to Promote Your Latest Blog Post with an Email Signature (15)
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With today’s limit set at terabytes, you can literary store millions of photos. Our problem now is not choosing what to shoot, but how to organize the photos afterward.

For most amateur photographers, the term “organizing photos” goes as far as collecting them into albums based on events, or maybe by the people in the images. While grouping photos chronologically by events is often done easily and automatically every time you move the photos from the camera to computer, sorting photos based on the people in each picture is not as easy as it sounds. Especially if you have to do it manually.

Recognizing the faces

The mundane task of how to organize photos can now be done easily and almost automatically using iPhoto. This photo management application that comes with iLife suite offers its users the ability to assign names to faces and organize the pictures based on the person in the photos.

This feature is called Faces. And using it, users can click and open every photo that contain a specific person in all of them.

The first step to enable Faces is to choose a picture with a person in it.

Then click the “Name” icon located on the bottom left of iPhoto’s window.

The chosen picture will be enlarged to fill the window. Click the “Add Missing Face” button that replaced the “Name” icon.

You’ll see that iPhoto will try its best to locate faces inside the picture. A square will appear around the faces with the tag “unnamed” below it.

All you have to do is double-click the tag and replace “unnamed” with that person’s name.

Repeat the process for other “unnamed” tags, and you can continue to do the same for other pictures with faces of different people.

From here on, things will get easier because iPhoto will help you by trying to recognize the same faces that have been tagged before. If you choose a photo with a previously tagged person in it, iPhoto will ask you to confirm the name.

Click the check mark to confirm or the cross to tell iPhoto that the name is incorrect.

However, no machine can replace the human ability to recognize faces. The Faces feature of iPhoto is amazing indeed, but it still makes stupid mistakes here and there. Once it thought that my little daughter’s dress was a face.

Mass naming the faces

If you have thousands of pictures, it’s possible that you’d be wiping off cold sweat right now thinking about renaming faces thousands of times. But you don’t have to be afraid, because iPhoto provides you with a way to do it almost automatically. Almost, but still better than having do it manually one photo at a time.

Click “Faces” on the left pane and choose one of the faces appear on the right.

While you are at it, you can edit the person’s full name and add email address to each face by choosing “File –> Get Info” menu or Command + I or by clicking the small “i” icon at the right bottom of the image.

After choosing a person, the screen will show you all the photos with that person in them. If you scroll down a little bit, you will see the second half of the screen labelled “So-and-so may also be in the photos below”.

Choose a close up view and “Confirm Name” from the bottom menu.

All the photos will focus on the possible faces of the chosen person. Your job is to click on every frame with the correct image to confirm the name to the faces. You could minimize or enlarge the size of the box by moving the slider, located at the bottom right of the screen.

There are other cool iPhoto abilities but we’ll save them for another time.

Do you use iPhoto to manage your photos? Do you know of other alternative photo management applications for Mac? Share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Use Geographical Info To Organize Photos in iPhoto [Mac] (1)
• Manage your iPhoto with these plugins (11)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Saving, Exporting & Uploading To Picasa Web Albums (6)
• [Google Picasa 101] – Master The Special Effects In Picasa (16)
• [Google Picasa 101] – How To Edit Your Photos (14)

Today, I’ll be featuring a tool that takes the functions of Activity Monitor and pushes them into overdrive. The tool in question is called atMonitor and it’s like Activity Monitor on a ton of steroids. The interface is almost the same. One of the many noticeable differences, though, is the addition of an information panel in the Top Window.

If you find that a particular runaway process, let’s say for example, ATSServer, is constantly using up 100% CPU power in Activity Monitor; the standard response is to perform a Google search and determine whether or not it’s safe to quit the process. Not required in atMonitor. That’s where the information panel comes in. It will display all the necessary information about every process or application that’s selected and allows you to make a judgement on the spot.

If an application is selected, it will query osx.iusethis.com for its description and latest version. It will then compare the latest version against the version installed on your Mac and tell you if an update is available. Besides that, there’s a Version column which displays the current version of every app/process running and an icon next to it that symbolizes if it’s up to date.

If there’s an app which is outdated, just click on its icon in the information panel and you’ll be taken directly to the app’s web page. How cool is that?

Another awesome feature is Reveal. Let’s say you find a fishy rogue process running in atMonitor, you can use the Information Panel to read more about it. Subsequently, let’s assume that you decide that it shouldn’t be running because it belongs to an app which you’ve deleted; you can easily kill the process, then use the Reveal button to display the particular file in Finder – then Trash it!

Another cool function is Renice Process. atMonitor allows you to alter the processing priority of particular apps. You can increase or decrease the priority, providing more CPU power to more important apps. This function will definitely come in handy while performing CPU-intensive tasks like applying layers in Photoshop or encoding video.

atMonitor comes in three different forms of view: in the menu bar (essentially replacing a few of the monitoring menu bar apps I know), a floating window and a Dock icon (can only monitor one parameter). These three views provide you with real-time monitoring and reporting so that you have a general idea of what’s going on and can easily scan for the most memory- and CPU-intensive apps. To be absolutely honest, I’m a creature of habit and I already use iStat Menus and couldn’t be bothered to switch. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try atMonitor’s menu bar view. Personally, I prefer using Top Window because it resembles Activity Monitor.

Those are just a few of atMonitor’s features, there are several advanced functions I haven’t tapped into yet. Triggers, for example, allows you to set up and run a certain script whenever a particular parameter (CPU, RAM, Temp) reaches a predefined level. Just think of the possibilities!

atMonitor is available for free and runs on Mac OS X 10.5 and higher (Snow Leopard supported). Download it and give it a try. Do you think that it has potential to replace Activity Monitor?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• RegFromApp Monitors & Reports On Registry Changes Instantly (7)
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For digital-age music lovers, the biggest advantage that iTunes has is the ability to play well with large-scale music collections. Add-sort-search and other library management tasks could be done easily and flawlessly.

But to some people, two of those great features become iTunes major limitations. First, iTunes only manages and synchronizes to Apple music players i.e. iPods. And second, the only store accessible from iTunes is (obviously) Apple’s iTunes Store.

A DoubleTwist Mac Review – Considering the alternative

Not everybody have iPods and/or iPhones. And for those who own one, it’s very likely that they also have other gadgets. To be able to synchronize our music collection to these non-Apple gadgets, we need help from other sources.

There are several alternatives that available for Windows, but the option is more limited for Mac users. So I did some searching and one of the few tools that I managed to find is doubleTwist. We’ve covered it once before.

This app is available for Mac and Windows and promises to give users the ability to synchronize their collection to other multimedia-capable devices. It also provide alternatives to iTunes Store to purchase and download music: Amazon MP3 Store.

Being the opposite of a shopaholic (especially everything related to digital online shopping), I don’t think that I would use the store feature. But I surely could use some help in synchronizing my music and movie collections to my mobile devices.

The first impression

The first time you open doubleTwist, a log-in window will appear. If you already have an account, just fill in your email address and password and click “Log In”.

Or else, click “Create Account” to open the registration window, fill in the needed information and click “Sign Up”.

The first thing that I wanted to check after the main window open is how much of my system memory used by doubleTwist. Users from Windows version reported that this app is not memory-friendly. Sadly, the same thing goes for Mac version that I’ve tried.

It consumes a major portion of the memory, even when it’s idle. I tried to compare it with the idle iTunes and the result is a bit shocking.

But memory-hog aside, let’s see how useful this app really is.

Connecting the devices

I have to admit that I’ve prepared myself to do some copying from my collections into doubleTwist library. At the very least, there should be some folder synchronization process that I must go through. But I was wrong.

You’ll notice that doubleTwist automatically uses the Music folder plus the existing iTunes Music Library and playlists as its own “Music” Library. This really is a nice time saver because no effort is necessary from user’s side.

The same thing goes for doubleTwist’s “Photos” library – it uses your Mac’s Photos folder and iPhoto library;

and “Movies” library that uses your Mac’s Movies folder and iTunes Movie Library.

The developer claims that this app is compatible with hundreds of devices – Blackberries, Androids and Palm Pre are among them – and there is the complete list on their website.

My Windows Mobile phone hasn’t been supported by doubleTwist Mac version yet, but I tried it anyway because many users reported successful media synchronization to unsupported device. But no such luck.

Then I plugged in my MP3 players one by one, and they all appeared on the device list and I could drag and drop my music to them easily. Unfortunately, doubleTwist doesn’t support folders so all the items from every folder are there in one list.

One easy way to manage the transferring process is by creating one playlist for each device that you have, and put your selected songs there. This way, you’ll only need to select the playlist and move the songs to your device in one go.

Wish list and wrap up

This app still has a lot of things to fix and is too far behind in terms of features to be in the same level as iTunes. One feature that I really love to see is the ability to automatically synchronizes a playlist to a specific device. I also hope that the memory hog could be trimmed down to minimum.

So to wrap everything up, I have to say that despite all the negatives, I still think this app would be useful for Mac users who want to make their music collection available to non-Apple devices.

Have you tried doubleTwist? Do you know other alternatives to synchronize your multimedia collection to non-Apple devices? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Sync iTunes Library to iPod and your Music Folder (Windows) (10)
• Sync All of Your Media Files in One Place with doubleTwist (12)
• The BIG Book of iTunes [Free PDF Download] (49)
• Move over iTunes – Mozilla’s Songbird is Here (42)
• Manage your iPod with SharePod (15)

One of the alternatives that we could use to create documents on a Mac is Apple’s Pages, part of iWork’s suite of productivity applications along with Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentation). The suite is tagged at US$79 and available for 30-day free trial. While the price is far less Microsoft Office suite, paid is still paid. But I think Pages has great features that’s worth the look, even it’s only during the free trial.

The Power of Templates

At the most basic level, Pages is a word processor. So you can use it for your everyday word processing activities from creating a document, writing and editing the text, importing other elements like charts and pictures, to printing or saving the document as a PDF.

Pages can also open documents from many other formats including Microsoft Word documents. Your work from other computers under any other OS can be resumed on your Mac using Pages. The same thing goes for the other end, Pages can also save your work as Word documents. To reveal more saving options, click the little arrow beside the name field when you save your work.

But the true power of this app lies in its beautifully pre-designed templates. Users can use these templates to quickly create professionally looking documents. As Apple puts it, “Even before you start writing, your document looks great.” This template-based method is also used by iWeb, Apple’s webpage design application.

There are over 180 templates for you to choose from, divided into two categories: Word Processing (work-related kind of documents) and Page Layout (more to the ‘fun’ type of documents).

From the Word Processing category, there are Letters, Envelopes, Forms, Resumes, Reports, and Outlines; while from the Page Layout category, there are Newsletters, Brochures, Flyers, Posters, Cards & Invitations, Business Cards, and Certificates. Both categories also offer blank documents and miscellaneous templates.

You can add your own templates and they will appear in “My Templates”.

Creating a good looking document using Templates

My first encounter with Pages was when my friend asked me to help him create a class newsletter. He was amazed at the stunning result that we produced in a short time.

And the process of creating that document required no rocket science. Here are the simple steps for creating good looking documents using Pages’ templates:

1. Open Pages and create a new document.

2. Choose a template

3. Edit the text and replace the pictures

4. Add as many pages as you need

5. Don’t forget to save your document after you’ve done.

Each template listed in the Template Chooser comes with several types of documents and each document consists of several types of pages. Playing with the combinations will provide you with a large number of choices and could keep you busy – in a fun way – for quite a while.

But if you think that the pre-designed templates are not enough, you could add more templates – free or paid – from the internet. One of the recommended places to get free templates is iWorkCommunity.

You could just open the downloaded templates, but if you want them to appear in Pages template list, you should put them inside this folder:

~/UserFolder/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/FolderName

Creating your own templates

But why stop at using templates from others? If you think you have an artistic side that you could be proud of, or if you think that you will consistently use a series of layouts over and over in your project, you could create your own templates, either for personal use or to be shared with others.

You could start building your template from a scratch by opening a totally blank page or you could also do it by modifying another template.

If you are starting from naught, you’d want to add elements to your documents like text boxes, and shapes. This can be done by going to the “Insert” menu or by clicking the icon in the toolbar.

To fill in the text boxes, you could generate some “Lorem Ipsum”s from Lipsum Generator.

To add pictures, open Media Browser from the View –> Show Media Browser or by clicking the toolbar icon.

Then insert some pictures by dragging and dropping the items from media browser to document.

Every element of the page can be edited by selecting it and open the Inspector (View –> Show Inspector or Command + Option + I or the Inspector toolbar icon).

Add more pages according to your needs and repeat the steps.

Once the layout process is finished, you should enable every element of the page(s) as a placeholder. This way, you are able to customize those elements later when you use the pages you’ve created as template.

To do this, go to “Format –> Advanced –> Enable Placeholder Text Authoring” menu. Then select the text and choose “Format –> Advanced –> Define As Placeholder Text”.

To do the same with images, click on the item but choose “Format –> Advanced –> Define As Image Placeholder” instead.

The final step is to turn your document into template. Choose the thumbnail of a page and go to “Format –> Advanced –> Capture Pages” menu.

And name the page.

Repeat the process to other pages.

You could manage multiple pages in a template from “Format –> Advanced –> Manage Pages” menu.

Then use the arrows to rearrange the order and the minus (-) button to delete the pages that you don’t need.

If you want to share your creations, they are available in the same location as your other imported templates: ~/UserFolder/Library/Application Support/iWork/Pages/Templates/

So far I haven’t found any free Mac alternatives for template-based word processors similar to Pages. But if you know any, share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But despite the endless warnings, we just can’t keep our hands off. Curiosity is an inseparable part of human nature. Human advancements are the result of making mistakes and learning from them. That’s why there are tools like Secrets, which allow non-geeky users to play with those scary configurations safely and unlock hidden mac features.

Tell me your Secrets

Secrets is a Mac OS X preference pane developed by Blacktree – the same guys who brought us Quicksilver. This little app will allow Mac users to peek into their feline’s deepest secrets which were usually only accessible via command line in Terminal.

To download the app, go to the developer’s website and click on the “PrefPane” link. The latest version at the time of writing is 1.0.6 (10.5+). It means that this app is not for Tiger users and below.

Using it is fairly simple. After installation, just open System Preferences and click on Secrets under the “Other” group.

A window full of modifiable items will appear, ready to be tinkered with to access hidden Mac features. In the left pane is the list of Applications and on the right is the list of their secrets (modifiable hidden settings).

You could go through the applications list one item at a time and change the settings of each one by one, or you could also use the search function if you know which settings that you are looking for.

*Editor’s note: It is advisable to only change one setting at a time and view their effects, in order to prevent crashes or other unfavourable results.*

In my opinion, the most important function of Secrets is the “Revert” button located at the bottom of the window. Clicking this button will revert the system to its default value. This is the safety net for the times when the changes you’ve made causing your system to become unstable.

The Secrets society

The feature that makes Secrets superior to other similar applications is its growing database of secrets. If there are new items available or if you install new tweakable applications, Secrets will download those entries and add them to the hidden Mac features list.

The update process is automatic, but you can use the “Update Secrets” button to invoke it.

Part of this ever growing database comes from ordinary users like you. If you know an unlisted secret or two, you can contribute them to Blacktree’s database so that everybody else can also benefit from them.

If you spot non-working secrets or if you have a secrets wish list, you could also contribute your thoughts to them.

Sharing few useful secrets

There are many useful secrets that I found among tons of other secrets. Here are few examples:

1. The ability to change the login desktop picture –> This is the first item on the “Top Secret” list. Click on the location on the right and Secrets will let you choose other desktop picture for the login windows.

   

2. Check spelling as you type –> this item is located under the “System” group. As a person who doesn’t use English as the main language, the constant red line that appears under every word I type could be very annoying. Disabling this option gives me a more relaxed view.

   

3. Login window text –> Dig deeper into the System group, you’ll find option to add login window text, along with other login options.

   

4. Enable/Disable Dashboard –> Not everybody uses Dashboard. While some people uses Widgets heavily, others might see them just as additional burden to the system. There are many ways to enable/disable Dashboard, but I found that using Secrets is the easiest.

   

5. Adding separators to the dock –> Secrets allows users to add separators to the dock either on the left side or on the right side (or both). There are also options to add Stacks.

   

   And here’s what the result looks like.

   

6. Quit Finder in the menu –> If you’ve ever wanted to quit Finder, you could use this option to add “Quit Finder” in the menu.

   

   And if you don’t believe me you could do that, here’s the proof.

   

7. X-Ray vision –> And here’s my favorite: Show X-ray folder in Quick Look. You can find it on the “Top Secret” or Finder section. If you activate it, you can view the contents of a folder while using Quick Look. (Secrets will ask you to quit Finder before the result could take place). Not really useful, but totally cool.

   

   Try it yourself by selecting a folder in Finder and hit the Spacebar key to activate Quick Look. Then take your time.

   

Have you tried Secrets? Do you know some other cool secrets that we can activate? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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But the iTunes Store is not the only web-based product from Apple that integrates well with Apple’s other popular products. There’s also MobileMe.

This is a service that provides its users with the ability to keep their email, contacts, and calendar up-to-date on all their devices automatically. MobileMe also provides a suite of web applications that let users access their information using a web browser, share photos and movies, host a website, and use an iDisk for online file storage.

The Price Is NOT Right

Considering the great ideas behind it, I can’t help but wonder why MobileMe receives far less attention than it should. Even from Mac users.

Maybe the main reason for this not-so-successful marketing attempt is the fact that MobileMe is not a free service. After the 60 days free trial, users should spare US$ 99 for a yearly subscription fee.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong about offering a paid service. The problem is, with everything that is available today online (and offline), you could assemble your own MobileMe-like features for free. And free is hard to beat.

Here are some options that you could use to have the similar features of MobileMe without having to open your wallet.

Matching the offers

Let’s break down MobileMe’s offers and then look at ways to match them.

1. Sync your contacts and calendars

With the help of GoogleSync, you could sync your Mac’s contacts and calendars to your smartphone.

The first thing you should do is to enable Address Book’s and iCal’s ability to synchronize with Google Mail and Google Calendar. Open Address Book and go to its Preferences (Command + Comma). Click Accounts, and give a checkbox to the “Synchronize with Google” option box and click “Configure”

Fill in your Google Account’s data and click OK.

Do the same with your calendar(s). Open iCal and go to the Preferences. Click Account and click Add.

Choose Google on the Account Type, fill in your Google account data and click “Create“.

Your Google account will appear and you could edit the information if you want to.

The next step would be to configure your smartphone to synchronize to your Google account using Google Sync. The supported devices are iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile.

You can find the complete instructions on how to do this on the Google Sync page. Just choose the type of smartphone you have and click on the respective instructions.

Don’t forget to backup your data before and after the process. You can’t be too careful.

2. Access information online

If you set everything up right in the previous step, your information will automatically be available online through Google Mail and Google Calendar. So, no problem here.

3. Share photos and movies

You could use various online services like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums to share your photos and many other video sharing services like YouTube for movies. Alternatively, you could build your own Wordpress photo gallery for this purpose.

4. Website hosting

This is also something that you could build yourself. We’ve discussed about several places where you could host your site for free, a method to create your own self-hosted Wordpress blog, and create and publish your iWeb sites.

5. Online Storage

MobileMe provide its users with 20GB worth of online storage, but there are already many free online storage providers out there that offer even bigger (or nearly as much) storage space.

Unmatched offers

There are of course features of MobileMe that are irreplaceable, such as the ability to find a lost iPhone and secure it. The integration between all of the features is also a plus point for MobileMe.

After listening to a free audiobook entitled “Free” by Chris Anderson, I think Apple should change its marketing tactics for MobileMe to make the service more successful. Maybe the basic features of MobileMe should be available for free while users are given options to upgrade the services for a fee. But that is just my personal opinion.

Have you tried MobileMe? Do you know other free (and maybe better) alternatives?  Please share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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That’s why I don’t need the expensive heavy-duty image editor with steep learning curve. On the other side, I can’t use the free but too-simple image editor alternatives either. Unfortunately, the available choices out there mostly fall into one of that two categories.

The Free Image Editor For Humans

After the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect image editor for my usage (free and powerful enough but user friendly), I found Acorn, which I personally think is the closest to my requirements.

This app, which is dubbed as “the image editor for humans“, is actually a powerful, free image editor with enough bells and whistles to satisfy even the professionals. Acorn is available in the free feature-limited version, and pro version. The first installation will give you 14 days free trial of the pro version, then you can register it or the app will be downgraded to the free version. Nevertheless, everyday users will find the free version more than enough to cater to their needs.

There’s no better way to understand what Acorn is capable of than to take it for a spin. So let’s see how this cutie caters to my needs.

Light Edit The Images

Here are some examples on how I use Acorn.

1. Resizing and Cropping

Let’s say that I’ve just captured a screenshot of an app, but the size exceeds the maximum pixels allowed by my editor. To resize it, I open the image using Acorn and go to the Image –> Resize Image menu (or hit Command + Alt + I)

Then I write down the required size, check the “Keep aspect ratio” box so that the image will stay in the correct proportion, and click OK.

Alternatively, I can use Crop to choose part of the image in the desired size. I go to the Image –> Crop menu (Command + Alt + K) and drag the edges. Cropping will not blur the image like resizing, but will not work if you need to show the complete picture.

2. Converting Images

I personally prefer PNG for my images because this format gives better quality, but sometimes the size will be too big for a blog post. In the blogging world, file size translates to traffic bandwidth and results in hosting costs.

So I compromise the quality to size by converting the PNG to JPG. I go to the File –> Save As menu (Command + Shift + S),

Choose the format and quality (for JPG only), and click OK.

3. Cover some secrets

Sometimes I have images that contains some personal information like an email address or user account. I could just place a solid rectangle above it to censor the information, but Acorn lets me do it elegantly.

First I choose “Flood Fill” from the drawing toolbox,

Then I would place the mouse cursor over the area that I want to cover while holding the “Alt” key. The “Bucket” will turn into “Droplet”.  If you click on that area, Acorn will adjust the “outline” color to match that area. Do the same for the “fill” color.

Next, I choose Shape –> Rectangular from the Drawing tools, and draw a rectangle over the area that I want to cover.

The result is as if there’s nothing written there. Compare the original image and the one that I’ve edited below.

Explore Away

The examples that I’ve given here are just a fraction of what Acorn can do. It’s impossible to discuss everything here. So I suggest that you explore the free image editor and use it according to your needs.

Have you used Acorn? Can you recommend other free alternative but powerful image editors?  Please share using the comments below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I try to organize myself by using to-do lists but planning only brings me one step closer to finishing my work. Persistence and determination are the key to getting things done. Unfortunately, I have very little of those. I was born that way, I’m afraid.

While writing the first two paragraphs, I checked my mail several times, fired up Safari, updated my Twitter and browsed Facebook. See, I told you I was a multi-tasker.

But deadlines are deadlines. If you have a project due Tuesday — then there’s no choice but to complete it by Tuesday. Sure, you can try to push the deadline but there’s still one!

To help with the situation and motivate me to clear the work that are currently pending, I’ve come up with 6 great (and free!) tools, categorized into 3 groups.

Distraction busters

Yup, that’s right. Productivity’s number one enemy is distraction. The enemy is sly and cunning. It is a master of disguise and sneaks up on you when you least expect it — in the form of an email, an IM message or beeps and alerts from other applications.

To deal with distraction, I’ve come up with not one, not two but three applications. These apps will only allow you to work on one app at a time and hide the rest. Out of sight, out of mind.

The first one probably needs no introduction. It’s Think by Freeverse. This simple little app helps you concentrate by providing an overlay that blocks out everything but the active application. If the opacity of the overlay isn’t set to the maximum, the underlying apps are still in view but can’t be clicked on.

To switch between applications, Think provides an illumination panel which displays a list of programs that are currently active — just click on any to bring that to focus.

The next distraction buster is Isolator. Isolator is pretty similar to Think but it’s much more configurable. In addition to an overlay, you can choose from several different effects — blur, bloom, crystals and desaturate. Unlike Think, you can also easily switch between apps by clicking through the overlay. Isolator will automatically re-render the overlay so that the topmost application is unaffected.

While using Isolator and Think, I found that the Dock was still in view and a little distracting. To hide the Dock, press Command + Option + D.

Finally, the last weapon in my arsenal to deal with distraction is Spirited Away. This app has been around for a while and most Mac users will have already heard of it. Nevertheless, that doesn’t make it any less useful. On the contrary, Spirited Away complements Isolator and Think!

What Spirited Away does is very simple — it hides inactive applications after a certain period of time. This minimizes clutter and removes distracting windows from view. It also provides you with an Exclude list; in case you want to always keep certain applications in view.

Distraction — busted!

Pomodoro Timers

What the heck is a pomodoro timer, you ask. Literally translated, pomodoro means tomato but no, they’re not what you think.

The “pomodoro technique” is a time management strategy. In a nutshell, it involves working for 25 minutes and taking a 5 minute break — that’s one “pomodoro”. There’s a whole website dedicated to teaching the technique as well as an ebook which you can download for free. Once you master the pomodoro technique, you’ll notice that your tasks get done pretty quickly. The golden rule when working with pomodoros — don’t break it. Once you start a session, make damn sure that you complete it.

In order to provide some assistance while you’re adapting the pomodoro technique, I have the pleasure of introducing two fantastic apps.

The first is Focus Booster. It’s an Adobe AIR app that looks sleek and awesome. Focus Booster places itself above all windows so you will be able to view it even though Isolator or Think is running. You might want to add it to Spirited Away’s exclude list to keep it in view all the time.

Each time Focus Booster starts, it will run as long as one pomodoro i.e. a 25-minute work session followed by a 5-minute break. You’ll have to manually initiate a new session if required.

The second app to help you work with the pomodoro technique is well, Pomodoro. This menu bar app is simple yet at the same time, powerful. Start a session and it will ask you what you’re aiming to achieve. I entered “Finish Article” and the timer started with a Growl notification.

When I said that Pomodoro was powerful, I wasn’t joking. It can automatically restart the timer, display a Growl notification when a preset interval has passed, integrate your Twitter account and automatically tweet your pomodoro sessions, and run a script whenever a session starts, ends or anytime in between.

I find that having a work timer displayed on my screen provides me with a rather good representation of the amount of time I’ve spent on a particular task. Knowing that, I can speed up or slow down my work accordingly.

Self Control

If you’re addicted to the internet, Facebook, Twitter and other social networks; there’s nothing to stop you from constantly launching the browser and surfing. “Just 5 minutes,” that’s what you keep telling yourself. Before you know it, over an hour has passed and you still haven’t gotten any work done. In these situations, only Self Control can prevent you from straying.

Self Control is a Mac application (doesn’t that clear up a lot of confusion?) that will block the internet access to any sites in its blacklist for a preset period of time.

Once it has been started, nothing can circumvent the blocked access. Restarting your Mac will not help, neither will deleting the application. You will just have to wait for the timer to run out. I’ve painted a rather bleak picture with the last two sentences, Self Control is actually all for your benefit. It forces you to concentrate on work. Even if you wanted to stray, you can’t!

So there we go. Six apps that can work in tandem to complement each other, helping you to focus on work and eliminate distraction. Here they are once again:

Think – Link
Isolator – Link
Spirited Away - Link
Focus Booster – Link
Pomodoro – Link
Self Control – Link

Do you use any of these “focus” apps? Has it made a difference in your workflow? Did you know what the Pomodoro Technique was? If you use other apps that has helped you focus on the task at hand, please do share them with us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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The growth of technology contributes so much to the vocabulary expansion of modern people’s language. I still remember the first time I read ‘google’ as a verb. It was a sentence in one Sunday newspaper article explaining about how one technology journalist found materials for his writing.

We have hordes of newly invented words from the technological world entering the dictionary all the time. One of them is “podcast“. One dictionary defines podcast as:

An audio broadcast available as an MP3 file that you can play on a portable music player, such as an iPod, or on a computer.

The thing that didn’t even exist a decade ago, now can be found almost everywhere with almost any topic imaginable ranging from small talks, light jokes, breaking news, tutorials, to university lectures by well-known professors.

Podcasting

Some people never know about the production side of how to create a podcast. Some don’t even want to know, because they think about all of the difficulties that lurk behind it. But actually, creating podcasts can be fun. And any Mac user armed with Garageband could learn how to create a professional-quality podcast as easy as creating a ringtone for iPhone.

Open Garageband and pick “Podcast” from the New Project and click “Choose”.

You will have to tell the app where you want to save the project.

There are three pre-set tracks ready: Male Voice, Female Voice, and Jingles; and basically, all you have to do is drag and drop the jingles to accompany your voice.

Let’s start with the fun part: exploring the jingles. Click the Loop Browser and choose Podcast Sound View. You’ll have tons of ready-made jingles, stingers and sound effects that you can use by dragging and dropping them to the “Jingles” track.

While I can safely say I understand what jingles and sound effects are, I still don’t know what stingers are. My best guess is (CMIIW) that they are things that you put before, during or after a short talk in order to emphasize it.

You can add as many Jingles track as you need. The easiest way to do so is by duplicating it (Track –> Duplicate or Command + D).

And then, the voice recording. Click on the track (Male or Female Voice) and click on the record button below.

There are many factors that determine the quality of the recording, but two of the most essential are the quality of the microphone and the recording environment. So, invest in a good microphone and do your podcasting in a place with minimum distractions.

Don’t forget to put a face to your podcast. You could use a picture from the iPhoto library for this purpose. Open the media browser from the right pane and choose “Photos”. Browse around to find the one that you like (or the one that you’ve prepared before), drag and drop it to the empty Episode Artwork box.

To change the name, just click on the “podcast track” bar above

and write down the title on the information pane on the left.

Broadcasting

Broadcasting comes right after the podcast production process. Garageband provides you with several alternatives in the Share menu. You could send the podcasts to iTunes (before submitting them to iTunes Music Store), to iWeb, or save it (hard drive, USB or any other kind of storages).

We have discussed a little about building websites using iWeb. Adding Garageband-made Podcasts to enhance iWeb-made sites is as easy as clicking a menu.

You could get more information on submitting your podcast to iTunes Music Store on this page.

Garageband is one of the tools that can help you create great quality of podcasts easily and at the same time having fun doing it. While there are still so many things that we can discuss about Podcasting using Garageband, I hope this short article could help you to get started in the Podcasting world.

Have you tried podcasting? Do you know other podcasting tools? Share using the comment below.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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I was very proud to own the gadget that cost me a few months of my salary, because only a few people could afford cellphones in those days, and not all cellphones from that era could play monophonic ringtones. Most could only beep.

Now, the ringtone technology has gone way beyond monophonic. Polyphonic is also outdated. Even cheap China-made phones used by the street fruit and vegetable sellers – who walk the damp narrow alleys of poor third-world countries – can use MP3 songs as the ringtones.

While you could buy ringtones for your cellphones if you want to, creating one feels more rewarding. As a bonus, you could show off to friends and relatives your unique ringtones that nobody else has. And if you use an iPhone, your path to being able to create one of your own ringtones is very clear.

Grabbing goods from Garageband

Maybe there are many Mac users who are not aware that they have a tool to create their own quick and unique iPhone ringtones: Garageband. This easy to use music creation software comes free with every purchase of a Mac unit as part of the iLife suite.

To create your own ringtone using the latest version of Garageband – v ‘09, you just have to choose the “iPhone Ringtone” menu from the start up screen, then choose either Example Ringtone (to use and edit pre-made sample), Loops (to use and build a new one using Apple Loops) and Voice (to user your own voice as the ringtone).

The next step would be giving a name to this project and choosing the place to save it. Unless you speak music language, I suggest that you not meddle with the song adjustments (tempo, signature, and key). And actually you don’t need to because we wouldn’t deal with complicated song building anyway.

For those who chose Example Ringtone, you’ll see the 17 second sample. Click the play button to listen to it. Should you want to use it, you could export it as a ringtone (more on this later).

The same thing applies if you choose Loops. But here you could enhance your tone by adding more loops from the loop library on the right pane.

Recording your own voice

Voice option will give you two pre-configured tracks: Male basic and Female basic so you don’t have to adjust anything to optimize the recording.

There are many other voice configurations available from the track info pane on the right.

You’ll also have an alloted 20 second loop to use, but you could adjust this by dragging the end of the yellow loop bar to the time position that you’d like.

Actually, the one that we call the ringtone could be anything from a standard song to a spoken word. If you have a deep broadcaster voice, for example, you can just speak out your own ringtone. But Voice option is also a good place to start if you could sing (or not) and want to record a mini-choir of yourself as the ringtone. Garageband allows its users to create songs from many tracks like Voice 1, Voice 2, Voice 3 etc.

To add tracks, go to Track –> New Track menu or use Command + Option + N

Using songs from iTunes

I personally would like to choose part of an existing song from iTunes as the ringtone. So after the main Garageband window opens, I’ll just delete the existing track (Command + Delete) and choose the Media Browser from the lower right corner of the window.

Then I dragged and dropped a song from the list to the main pane.

The song was converted into Garageband track and ready to be edited.

To determine which part of the song will be converted into a ringtone, I adjusted the loop bar to the position that I prefer. This loop bar time should be 40 seconds or less.

Exporting to ringtone

To export the part of the song into the ringtone, I went to Share –> Send Ringtone to iTunes menu.

Another conversion and export process will take place and…

The ringtone will be placed under the ‘Ringtone’ folder in iTunes as a m4r file and will automatically be synchronized to iPhone the next time it connected.

Non-iPhone users could also use Garageband to create their own mp3 ringtones, but that process requires a different method and enough to be written as another article for another time.

Have you tried to use Garageband to create iPhone ringtones? Share your opinions using the comments below!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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It’s inspired by Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (MST3K) and Space Mutiny, apparently. I haven’t watched either of them so I’m clueless if the names resemble the characters from these shows. If you are an avid follower of MST3K, do try Ryder out and let us know the verdict in the comments.

This app is simple. There’s only one button which you click in order to generate a new name. But don’t let the lack of features dismay you — it’s bloody hilarious. It’s written all over the title, Ryder generates macho names. Not fancy Superhero names or Celebrity names. Macho, carnivorous, bullet-grinding names. These names (or nicknames) will deliver spine-shivering terror to your opponents, yet it’s questionably light-hearted that will make them laugh initially then cower in fear after the meaning truly sets in.

Download the app from the developer’s website. Ryder requires OS X 10.5 and higher to run. Unzip it and enjoy. I’m currently on Snow Leopard and the app works just fine.

Like I mentioned before, the app only has one button. Click on ‘Who?’ and it will generate a new name. It also provides you with a ‘Speech’ checkbox. Enable that, click on the ‘Who?’ button again and it uses Mac’s speech utility to read the name out loud. I’ve just had it read “Bolt Hardpeck” to me and it undoubtably felt like I was introduced to a macho firefighter. Alright, this is starting to emasculate me so I’ll move on.

I don’t really know how many names are stored in the generator but while using it, I did see some duplicates although they’re not really obvious. I’ll list down some of the names it generated:

• Flint Thornbody
• Zap McBlowfist
• Reef Sideiron
• Rif Slamchest
• Slab McBulkhead

Hilarious yet macho, don’t you think? The first names are really masculine and undeniably butch. The last names have a tinge of humor, mellowing the whole “I’m gonna rip your head off” effect.

Speaking of name generators, Simon wrote about something similar in his article, The 4 Funniest Online Name Generators which includes Superhero names, Pirate names, Vampire and Music Star names. Be sure to check those out as well. We’ve also covered NameMasher, an online name generator that takes two different words and mashes them to create a name like Bennifer (Ben + Jennifer).

Ryder is an open-source application. If you are a developer, you can actually download the source code, take it apart and tell us exactly how many names are in there. For the rest of us, this is all that matters: Ryder is free. Remember, it requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and higher to run. Download it here.

Do you think Ryder really generates macho names or do you have a better alternative? Tell us in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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