Not much is known about Mac OS X 10.7, and many in the Mac community have been operating under the assumption that we’d all get a glimpse into the future of Mac OS at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June. But that may not be so this time around, at least according to the always interesting John Gruber. Posted to DaringFireball, Gruber made a rather interesting note on Mac OS X 10.7:

A few months ago, I heard suggestions that Apple had tentative plans to release a developer beta of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC this June. That is no longer the case. Mac OS X 10.7 development continues, but with a reduced team and an unknown schedule. It’s my educated guess that there will be no 10.7 news at WWDC this year, and probably none until WWDC 2011.

Apple’s company-wide focus has since been focused intensely on one thing: iPhone OS 4.1 The number one priority at Apple is to grow mobile market share faster than Android. Anything that is not directly competitive with Android is on the back burner.

While somewhat disappointing, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised by this. The potential of dominating the mobile market share with iPhone OS powered devices and the iPad is probably a far greater opportunity for Apple than expanding the relatively small Mac desktop computing market share, especially when more and more computing is done on the go. Combine that with all the excitement surrounding iPhone OS 4 and I think it makes sense that WWDC 2010 is going to be an iPhone OS centric event as Apple is heavily focused on their mobile platform.

Does that mean we definitely won’t see anything of Mac OS X 10.7 at WWDC? No, certainly not, at this point this is a prediction at best and a rumor at worst. John Gruber is often right with his predictions, but everything with Apple is always a mystery until the last minute. Even if Apple has paired back focus on Mac OS development for the time being, keep in mind Apple is a large company with plenty of resources. They have roughly 35,000 employees, so what exactly a “reduced team” means in that context is anyone’s guess. Regardless, I’m sure Mac OS X has many exciting things in store for it’s future, whether it has been delayed by the iPhone OS or not.

The new MacBook Pro’s have barely been out a few hours and Gizmodo has already benchmarked the top of the line 15″ model that features a Core i7 processor running at 2.66Ghz, check out the graph above for the gains against the previous top-end model, the Core 2 Duo at 2.8Ghz. Even ripping a DVD with Handbrake took almost 40% less time on the new Core i7 chip. Some of the performance gain is undoubtedly the result of Turbo Boost, a feature of the Core i5 and i7 processors which take the 2.6Ghz MacBook Pro to 3.3Ghz in times of intense CPU usage. So the new Core i5/i7 MacBook Pro’s are confirmed to be blazing fast, pardon me while I mop up my drool.

After seeing these huge increases in performance, I’m a little confused as to why Apple didn’t put a Core i5 into my personal favorite MacBook Pro, the 13″ model. TechCrunch speculates that Apple chose to forgo haw computing power in favor of the extended battery life, but that seems like an odd compromise for a Pro machine. Apparently I’m not the only one who wonders about the use of an older CPU in the 13″ model, according to MacRumors, someone emailed Steve Jobs asking about it and received this response:

“We chose killer graphics plus 10 hour battery life over a very small CPU speed increase. Users will see far more performance boost from the speedy graphics.”

If the above benchmarks are any indicator of general speed increases when moving from a Core 2 Duo to the new Intel Core i5/i7 chips, I’m not so sure I agree with that statement, but I imagine some real world benchmarks on the 13″ will soon appear and we’ll have an answer. So while the 13″ models minor update has raised a few curious eyebrows, the specs of the new MacBook Pro 15″ and 17″ model are undoubtedly very powerful and quite enticing.

Anyone have an extra $2300 laying around? That MacBook Pro 15″ with a Core i7 chip and high-res screen is looking like a Mac lovers dream.

LSO’s are pesky Flash cookies that can potentially track your activity on the web long after you’ve left the site that set the cookie, and unfortunately there’s no easy way to tell what cookies track where. If you are concerned about this, your best bet is to just delete them completely.

We’ve discussed ways to manually delete flash cookies in Mac OS X before, but now there’s a little app called Kill Flash Cookies that does it for you, easily, with the most flawlessly simple GUI ever. Launch the app, press Go, and watch as it tallies up the Flash cookies that have been deleted.

Kill Flash Cookies is also cross platform compatible, so whether you’re running Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux, you’ll be able to clear the Flash cookies.

Kill Flash Cookies developer home
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“I just got a brand new MacBook, what should I do with my old Mac?”

This is a very common question I get, and I typically give one of four answers depending on who’s asking the question. I’ll go through each choice and hopefully they’ll give you some ideas:

1) Setup the old Mac next to your new one and use mouse and keyboard sharing

For power users and professionals, this is nearly always my first suggestion. Using something like Synergy or Teleport, you can share a single mouse and keyboard across multiple Macs, effectively giving you not just two screens, but two displays with full computing power behind them. Having dual displays dramatically increases productivity and with the extra processing power having two computers is kind of the best of this world. Use your older less powerful Mac for things that are not so processor intensive and more mundane, like email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc, and use your new more powerful Mac as the primary machine for your more complex tasks, be it developing, video editing, photo manipulation, whatever. Try this out, you can thank me later.

2) Repurpose the older Mac as a media center or file server

This is a bit more complex, but if you’ve got some time on your hands it can be very rewarding to setup a file server using file sharing or a media center using something like Boxee or Plex/XBMC. If you’re setting up a media center, just remember the types of content you can playback are dependent on the Mac’s hardware capabilities, be sure to check if your Mac can play HD video if you’re looking to play high quality video files. Ready to jump in? Check out how to setup a Mac Mini as a media center.

3) Give the older Mac to a friend or family member

Maybe your kid would like a Mac in their own room, or maybe your Mom is battling viruses and malware on her clunker of a Windows PC. Fixing up a Mac and giving it to someone else is not only a nice gesture but because of their stability and ease of use, it just may reduce those family tech support calls you inevitably get because you’re the computer guy in the household.

4) Sell your old Mac

If all else fails, or you just want to recoup some of the costs of your new purchase, sell the old Mac. Mac’s retain their resale value amazingly well, far more than any other PC. Craigslist is a great way to sell just about anything you have laying around and Mac’s are no exception, but if you live in a smaller community you might not have much luck. EBay is the other option since you can ship to buyers globally, and while they take a commission of the sale, I’ve generally found that used Mac’s sell for more on eBay than they do on Craigslist. Just do a quick scan of ads on both sites to see the price you can expect to get for your used Mac.

[ above MacBook Pro image from Flickr ]

You can boot your Mac from a disk in the CD / DVD drive by inserting the disk into the drive and on system boot holding down the C key. Remember that booting from a CD or DVD is significantly slower than booting from a hard disk, so don’t worry if things are taking longer than usual to startup.

If you want to reinstall Mac OS X or run Disk Utility on your main boot drive, you’ll need to do this. Now this isn’t really an advanced tip by any means, but amusingly enough I actually forgot how to do this (I was holding D, oops) and I’m a long time Mac user!

You can precisely adjust the volume levels on a Mac by holding down the Shift+Option keys while pressing the Volume Up/Down keys, which lets you adjust the sound level by 1/4 of each notch (as opposed to a full notch).

iStumbler has long been one of my favorite tools in Mac OS X to discover available wireless networks, and the new version adds support for Snow Leopard (10.6.2 or later). Other than 10.6 support, there’s a neat new GPS location feature, and the usual support for Bluetooth and Bonjour, and various bug fixes. My only complaint is that iStumbler doesn’t find as many available wireless devices than what’s shown available in my Airport menu, but I still think it’s definitely a must-have utility for any network administrator trying to troubleshoot wireless connections or even just those with a cheeky disposition.

Download iStumbler now
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MacLife recently posted an amusing article about some interesting homemade iPad stands, well one of our readers found an even more creative homemade iPad stand… a cat. Whether or not people understand the iPad or like (dislike) the current case/stand options, these are amusing pictures. Thanks for the links Kara!

If you’re actually looking for iPad stands, apparently the Logitech Alto Express Notebook Stand works great as an iPad stand and it’s pretty cheap.

Look at the above screenshot. See how the icon fades over repeated creation of the alias? I had never noticed this before. Myself and others get a washed out appearance of the icon, while some will see a sepia tint. Try it out yourself, select anything on your Mac then hit Command+L repeatedly to create an alias of it and watch it fade… I don’t know how useful this is, mostly because I don’t know anyone that creates ten aliases of an alias, but it’s just another example of the attention to detail Apple offers in Mac OS X. Scratch that, apparently this is a bug in ColorSync that causes each icon preview to be re-adjusted by the calibrated display profile.

[ via FinerThingsInMac ]

The iPhone and iPod Touch have a built in motion sensor that lets you shake the device to shuffle music, which is a really cool feature… unless you’re running. There’s two solutions to this problem, the immediate one is to simply hit the sleep button on the top of the iPhone after you have selected music to play. This turns the display off and locks the iPhone/iPod into playing music, thus automatically preventing the random song skipping when movement is sensed. The other option is to just disable the ‘Shake to Shuffle’ feature entirely:

Disable Shake to Shuffle on iPhone / iPod Touch

* Tap on ‘Settings’
* Scroll down to and tap on ‘iPod’
* Tap the on/off switch next to “Shake to Shuffle” to disable this feature
* Exit settings and listen to music as usual

The Shake to Shuffle feature is surprisingly sensitive. I’ve had my iPhone just in my pants pocket and been casually walking around town and experienced frequent song skipping, to the point where each step I took would skip to a new song (FYI, you know it’s the song skipping shuffle when you hear a little chime and suddenly the song changes). Personally I don’t really like the feature so I just disabled it entirely, but hitting the top button works just as well for a quick fix.