Here’s a Mac heartbreaker: a motorcycle enthusiast went for a ride carrying his MacBook Pro 13″ in a backpack, unfortunately the zipper holding the MacBook Pro in place failed going a reported 195mph (315km/h)!
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If you use the command line frequently, chances are you may have some bad command line habits. IBM’s DeveloperWorks site has posted 10 good UNIX usage habit tips, some of them are just pretty handy tricks in general and if you’re new to the Mac OS X Terminal, you’ll probably learn something since practically all of them work within the Mac OS X command line. Here’s one of my personal favorites since it hit home with my command line activities:

* Change the path to unpack something into rather than moving the archive file itself, in this example by using the -C flag with the tar command:

tar xvf -C path/to/unpack newarc.tar.gz

I’m certainly guilty of moving archives around, but that’s partially because I like to keep all of them in a central location. But if you’re going to just delete the archive anyway, there’s no point in moving the archive file around just to unpack it. Save yourself the keystrokes.

Here’s the full list of tips in the IBM DeveloperWorks article:

* Make directory trees in a single swipe
* Change the path; do not move the archive
* Combine your commands with control operators
* Quote variables with caution
* Use escape sequences to manage long input
* Group your commands together in a list
* Use xargs outside of find
* Know when grep should do the counting — and when it should step aside
* Match certain fields in output, not just lines
* Stop piping cats

Check them out: IBM DeveloperWorks: Learn 10 good UNIX usage habits

Apple looks like they’ll be jumping full force into the touch screen market sometime in the future. An uncovered patent application shows an iMac Touch that runs both Mac OS X and iOS, which seamlessly switches between the two operating systems depending on how the screen is orientated.

In this image, the iMac screen is tilted upright to be used as a traditional Mac with a keyboard. In this orientation the iMac runs Mac OS X and would appear as any other iMac.

Here’s where things get interesting:

This image shows the same iMac slanted down, and when orientated horizontally the iMac looks to seamlessly switch to running the touch based iOS. Amazing! The patent application also describes touchable areas on the screen that would activate iOS, suggesting that iOS will run on a layer atop Mac OS X, almost like a super powerful touch version of Dashboard.

The patent also describes similar OS switching functionality on a laptop. This is fresh off the heals of the MacBook Touch patent discovery that clearly demonstrates an Apple laptop with a high resolution touch screen.

If you’ve been were wondering what Apple plans to do with the future of their hardware and dual operating systems, this should give you some great insight. Mac OS X and iOS look to be integrated on the same hardware when applicable, allowing a user to either use the simplified touch GUI or the more powerful and traditional computing environment of Mac OS X. Will we see these features in Mac OS X 10.7 and iOS 5? Time will tell!

Head over to Patently Apple for more pictures and a good walkthrough of the patent. How many years off are these features and hardware? Who knows. Will we ever see touchscreen Macs that switch between OS on the fly? It’s as good as a patent and rumor at this point, but hopefully! This is really exciting stuff.

Gitbox is a pretty nice GUI to the Git version control system. All the features you’d expect are there: quickly see branches, history, working directory status, then easily commit, pull, merge, and push files with minimal effort. I first used Gitbox as a Preview version a while ago and enjoyed it, you’ll need both Xcode and Git installed to be able to run the app yourself.

Here’s what the Gitbox developer lists as the features:

Check Out Everything. You may check out a local branch, tag and even a remote branch with a single dropdown button. From now on you don’t have to remember the obscure branch-tracking command or edit .git/config. Select the remote branch, type a local name for it and you’re done.

Up To Date. Gitbox updates working directory status each time you focus the window. When in background, it periodically fetches data from the selected remote branch and displays unmerged commits in the history. The status of the working directory, local and remote branches are always up to date.

Rich History. History shows all commits on both local and remote branches. Non-pushed commits are green. Non-pulled commits are grey. You can also select another local branch in a “Remote branch” menu to merge it into the current one.

Clean Design. There are no palettes or additional windows cluttering the screen. Your repository fits nicely inside a single window with a few buttons. Use the Main Menu for infrequent operations such as adding a new repository URL or stashing away changes.

Super Fast. We all love the command line for the speed. But it is not very smart. Say, you move a file from one folder to another: in the Terminal you would have to “git rm” the old path (the file is gone, so no tab-completion) and “git add” the new path. And it becomes a real pain when you happen to rename multiple files. But in Gitbox you just click the checkbox. Status is updated instantly, you don’t have to type “git status” ever again.

If you’re looking for a Git GUi client for Mac OS X, check out Gitbox.

Often overlooked, the terminal can be used to accomplish all sorts of fun stuff. Something that you may find handy, is the ability to Tweet using built in Mac OS X command line utilities. Now of course this is not a full featured Twitter client by any means, but if you are looking for potential geek “cred” this is a fun trick to demonstrate.

Copy and paste the entire text in the grey boxes. When you paste it in your Terminal.app, it will show up as one single line.

To display a list of tweets (replace osxdaily with a twitter username of your choice):
curl -s http://twitter.com/osxdaily | grep '' | cut -d">" -f2 | cut -d"<" -f1

To update your twitter status:
curl -u your_user:your_password -d status='This is My update' https://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

That's it! Imagine all of the fun automation possibilities !

If you’re using a Windows 7 machine, why not make it look like Mac OS X? This task is made very easy with a theme/skin set called the Snow Transformation Pack, it turns your Windows 7 theme into a very convincing near complete Mac OS X interface including icons, wallpapers, the Dock, sounds, dialogue boxes, login screen, window skin, and more.

The Snow Transformation pack is freeware and available to download here

Of course if you’re this obsessed with Mac OS, you should probably just buy a Mac and save yourself from the burden of Windows 7 and trying to skin it to look like a Mac, right?
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If there was one command I would really complain about not being on Mac OS X, it would be “watch”. Watch is one of those great pieces of software that is tiny and completely out of the way, but when needed it will be a life saver.
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Apple may be working on a MacBook Touch, and will integrate high resolution touch screens into future Apple hardware, according to a recently discovered Apple patent. The information is pretty straightforward, as Patently Apple puts it “There’s no wishy-washy lingo about it” since the patent specifically names a MacBook, MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air:

one of the prime target products for such a new display is a touchscreen based MacBook as shown below in patent FIG.3. Later in the patent under patent point 46, Apple clarifies that FIG. 3 could be a MacBook, MacBook Pro and/or MacBook Air.

The patent also suggests that the MacBook and MacBook Pro will soon have the same high-resolution IPS display that is featured on the iPad, iPhone 4, and the latest iMac. Upgrading the screens seems like a no brainer to me, but it’s the touch screen and it’s applications that make this news. Perhaps even more interesting than just a MacBook Touch (yes I just made up this name), the patent also indicates that the touchscreen technology could apply to a television and gaming system.

Of course this is all speculative and should certainly be branded as a rumor for now, but it sounds like Apple has a lot up there sleeves! You have to imagine something like this is quite a ways off from release (if ever) considering the current versions of Mac OS X are not nearly as touch friendly as iOS. Maybe we’ll start to see touch features in Mac OS X 10.7?

If you’re a patent geek or you just want to see the full scoop, head over to Patently Apple where you can see all the details, some more drawings, and all the abstract patent application details.

Here’s a Mac setup I wouldn’t mind to have: a 13″ MacBook, 24″ iMac, a couple of iPod’s, and an iPad.

[ via Flickr ]

Do you want to know what song is playing? Don’t be left wondering, you can find out for sure thanks to an awesome app called Shazam. The app first came to the iPhone some time ago and has made it easier than ever to discover what song is playing regardless of where you are. It works flawlessly in loud bars, clubs, restaurants, stores, cars, just about anywhere music is playing, it handles background noise remarkably well and is nearly always able to identify music. Once a song is identified, Shazam will provide links to buy it via iTunes or watch the related music video from YouTube.

Shazam – the “what song is playing” app

I figured the days of wondering hopelessly what that catchy song playing is were largely over due to this app. Honestly I thought everyone knew what Shazam was by now, it’s been featured in iPhone commercials and has been in the App Store top downloads for a long time.

Despite it’s ubiquitous promotion and popularity, I still have people asking me frequently how to find out what music is playing. I just recently used it to figure out what song is playing in the new iPad commercial after a few people asked me about it, everyone is always amazed that I can quickly come up with an answer. I then told them to just download the app and they were pretty amazed that apps like this exist.

Shazam has both free and paid versions available to download for iPhone, iPad, Android, Nokia, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile phones. The free version works the same as the paid version but has limitations on how many songs you can ‘shazam’ in a month, while the paid version offers you unlimited music discovery. You can download the free version for iPhone and iPad via the iTunes App Store.

It’s definitely a must-have app for any smartphone, you should check out the free version first and if you end up using it often go ahead and upgrade, you’ll be amazed how often you’ll be pulling out your phone to discover new music. Highly recommended.