Dan wrote in with the following: “I have a MacBook Pro and I want to make it even faster, what’s the best hard drive upgrade for the MacBook Pro?”

This is a great question, and the answer will vary depending on your budget. I’m going to recommend a few options at different price points, all of which make excellent and speedy MacBook Pro hard disk upgrades.

MacBook Pro Hard Drive Upgrades

Upgrading the hard drive on your MacBook Pro is pretty easy and it’s a great way to breathe new life into an older machine, or turn a new machine into a blistering fast workhorse. It’s pretty impressive what a new hard drive can do for your systems performance, so without further ado here are my recommendations for the best drives:
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The eagerly awaited AutoCAD for Mac is due to ship again in October of this year, this is the first Mac version of AutoCAD since 1992. Alongside the upcoming Mac version will be AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad, which will allow users to share, view, and make small changes to their designs remotely.

The Mac OS X release of AutoCAD will feature a very Mac-friendly user interface with Cover Flow style file browsing, multi-touch gestures, and full cross-platform support, as well as the usual AutoCAD feature set.

AutoCAD is the leading industrial design software for 2D and 3D drafting, with over 10 million active users. Pre-orders will be available starting September 1, but the software won’t ship for another month. The Mac version will be priced the same as the Windows release at $4,000, but will be made available for free to students and teachers through an education program. AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad is expected to be released for free.

Anytime that you run a command through the Terminal directly by a command name like ls or dscacheutil, your Mac is looking through a series of directories for that command to exist. This list of directories is called the PATH, and it’s a carry over from the unix underpinnings of Mac OS X. As you may have guessed, checking your PATH in Mac OS X is the same as it is in most other unix variants:

echo $PATH

Executing that command, you’ll see something like:
$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin


The directories listed are those that are searched for commands. So the next time someone asks you if a directory is in your path, now you know where to look.

If you use a Hotmail account, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now use your Hotmail account on your iPhone thanks to Microsoft enabling Exchange ActiveSync support. This allows Hotmail to push and sync email, calendar, and contacts to your iPhone.

Set up Hotmail on the iPhone

Here are the steps to setup Hotmail to sync and push to your iPhone (this works on the iPad too):

• Launch Settings
• Tap on “Mail, Contacts, Calendar”
• Tap onto “Add Account”
• Select “Microsoft Exchange”
• Enter your full Hotmail email address into both the Email and Username fields
• Leave Domain blank
• Enter your password
• Enter “Hotmail” as the Description
• Tap onto “Next”
• Now you must enter the server, use “m.hotmail.com” for the Server name then tap onto “Next”
• The iPhone will now verify that your Hotmail information is entered correctly, the next screen you’ll be able to enable Mail, Contacts, and Calendars

Hotmail is the original web mail, so it’s not surprise there’s still millions of hotmail accounts still in use today despite the competing offers from Google, Yahoo, and others. It’s a bit surprising it took Microsoft this long to get Hotmail working with the iPhone, but better late than never.

If you have MP3′s that are skipping, sounding weird, or that a media player like iTunes won’t open, sometimes you just need to run them through an MP3 validator app to check and repair the files. A great free MP3 checker is called MP3 Scan+Repair, it’s got an easy drag and drop interface that will repair MP3′s quickly.

Repairing MP3 Files

• Download the MP3 Validator here
• Launch the app and then drag MP3 files into the interface for them to be automatically checked.
• When an error is detected in an MP3 file, a little icon will appear next to the name in the app
• To initiate the repair, click on the hammer icon to repair the file
• Note that you might want to make a backup before repairing the MP3 since it does overwrite the original file.
• The repaired MP3 will appear in the same location as the original corrupt MP3

The process is pretty quick and you can repair a bunch of songs at once, it fixed one of my stubborn MP3′s immediately and now it plays and opens fine with iTunes.

I’ve never really figured out exactly why some MP3 files will become corrupted and then need to be repaired, but it’s nice to come across a free app that handles the repairs quickly. In my experience MP3 corruption usually happens when downloading music from new music sites and blogs, so perhaps the file becomes corrupted in the transfer process.

If you don’t want to download any additional software you can try some other methods. I’ve found creative workarounds in the past when iTunes won’t play a song that involves importing the file into QuickTime and exporting it as a movie track before reimporting into iTunes… this works fine but it’s a bit of work just to play an MP3.

Expose is one of the most useful features of Mac OS X and it looks great too. Well, except for the window glow color, which a lot of people aren’t particularly thrilled with. You can replace the bright neon blue hover glow with any other color simply by editing and replacing some PNG files.

First pick your color from the links below (or edit the PNG files to suit yourself), then:

* Navigate to /System/Libary/CoreServices/
* Find the Dock.app file and right-click on it, then click “Show Package Contents”
* Within Dock.app, navigate to Contents/Resources
* Find the files called expose-window-selection-small.png and expose-window-selection-big.png
* Backup these files!
* Replace those files with the two of different colors from the downloaded zip files below
* Now restart the Dock by typing: killall Dock

Expose will now display the hover glow color based on the file set that you chose. If you want to switch it back to the default blue, simply repeat the process but use the blue backup files.

White – a bright white glow
Grey – a softer grey glow
White outline – a white outline as seen in the above screenshot, via CreativeBits

If you want to revert back and you didn’t save your own files, you can download the Expose outline backups here:
Expose default glow backups

[ via CreativeBits ]

Apple and Amazon are rapidly changing the way books are consumed and read thanks to the iPhone & iPad and Kindle. The other effect of this is that it’s actually helping to ease the barriers to entry into the book publishing and sales market.

In the past an author would need to have an agent pitch books to publishers in the hopes it might get picked up, but not anymore. Now if you have a Mac and a word processor and a bit of patience, you can create your own book in the EPUB format and upload it directly to the iTunes iBookstore for sales.

OK well it’s not quite that simple (yet), but it’s not that difficult either. Just jump through a few hoops and you can get your book for sale on Apple’s online bookstore ready to be downloaded by anyone who owns an iPad or iPhone, here’s how:

Write and Publish a Book to the Apple iBook Store

First, some relatively simple requirements: you’ll need an Intel Mac running 10.5 or newer with adequate hard disk space and preferably a high speed internet connection.

1. Write the book (obvious) and get it into the iBooks compatible EPUB format (see below, it is easy to take a file and convert to EPUB format)
2. Get a unique ISBN number for each book title you plan to release. Cost is $25 per ISBN and you can fill out an ISBN application here
3. Get the following ready: a US tax ID (social security number or EIN), valid iTunes account with credit card on file
4. When all of the above is met, you can apply to be part of the iBookstore distribution network at Apple.com

How do I create an ebook in the EPUB format?

Almost any text containing document format can be converted into EPUB ebook format and there are multiple free software options available to do this. If you would like a walkthrough check out our guide on how to convert to EPUB. It covers most major source file types you’d want to convert including PDF, RTF, HTML, DOC, TXT, and more.

Thanks to a recent software update, you can also create an ePub with Pages if you already own the iWork office productivity suite from Apple.

If you’re looking for a free solution that doesn’t involve iWork/Pages and you don’t need help, just go ahead and download Calibre, it is a good choice because it will automatically create book structures like chapters, table of contents, and allow you to insert book metadata. Oh, and it’s free (open source is nice). The interface is a little strange but it gets the job done and for the wonderful price of free, we can’t complain too much.

Can I convert an existing text or word file to EPUB?

Yes, you will need to download a program that handles the ebook conversion for you. There are many free options, see above or refer to our article on how to convert to EPUB.

Can anyone help me sell my book on Apple’s iBookstore?

Yes, there are several companies that will handle many of the complexities of selling on the iBookstore for you, but you’ll still need your book ready in the EPUB format. The best way to do this is to use an Apple approved iBookstore aggregator, Apple conveniently provides a list of approved aggregators for the iBookStore. Most of these charge an upfront fee and then handle all the distribution services for you, in many cases you’ll then receive 100% of the revenue of book sales after Apple takes their iTunes Store cut. Prices vary widely so be sure to get a few quotes before agreeing to a single aggregator.

The iPad is beautiful, no doubt about it, but once you’ve handled it for a while you might notice the screen gets dirty rather quickly. The worst thing about the iPad is that it shows up fingerprints and smudges so easily, this is despite the fact that the screen has an anti-oil coating on it.

Cleaning the iPad screen

The proper way to clean the iPad display is to use nothing but a soft damp cloth:

• Turn off the iPad and disconnect it from any accessories, cables, or docks
• Using a very soft and slightly damp cloth, gently wipe the iPad screen. Be sure to not allow moisture to get into the openings of the iPad
• Repeat until the iPad screen is clean again

Can I clean the iPad screen with Windex?

No, for the love of Apple please do NOT use Windex or window cleaners! This includes rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, and the like. The chemicals in window cleaners and these products can damage the oleophobic screen coating and actually make the iPad screen less responsive to touch over time. Not worth it, do not use chemical cleaners!

What can prevent the iPad screen from showing fingerprints and getting dirty?

Your best bet to keeping the iPad screen clean is to just wipe it down frequently with a soft cloth. If you get annoyed with the fingerprints though, you can use a screen protector product like the invisibleSHIELD which doubles both as a way to protect the screen from scratches and also reduces the appearance of fingerprints.

There are also anti-glare iPad screen protectors available if both the glare and the fingerprints bother you.

This is the old setup of Paul Stamatiou which includes a MacBook Pro 17″, and two 24″ monitors, one hooked up to the MacBook Pro and the other hooked up to a Windows 7 PC. I might be wrong but the speakers look a lot like the amazing sounding AudioEngine A5 series. Looking pretty sweet!

The long awaited Netflix app for iPhone is finally here. It’s a free download and you can sign up for a free trial membership to watch movies, but to really enjoy the perks of Netflix you’ll need to sign up for a membership which runs about $9/month.

As expected you can manager your queue and other essential Netflix tasks, but the app is especially cool because it will remember where you left a movie off, allowing you to resume watching it later from your TV, computer, or even iPad. I am a complete Netflix addict so it’s great to finally have it on the iPhone in addition to the iPad (the app also runs on the iPod touch).

You can grab Netflix for iPhone from the iTunes app store, no surprise but it is currently the #1 app on the App Store.