Did you know that you can use Quick Look to zoom in on items within Expose? This is an awesome trick sent in by one of our readers:

“While in Exposé in Snow Leopard, press the space bar while mousing over a window. You’ll get an actual-size preview of the window. You can read all of the text, view the progress of an installation, track a download, and more from a quick glance without ever actually switching applications.”

Try it out yourself: enter into Expose and then hover over a window and hit the spacebar to enlarge it as a full sized preview. This is really cool and very useful. Enjoy!

Thanks to David H for sending this in!

The quickest way to set your IP address from the command line is to issue the following command in the Terminal:
sudo ipconfig set en1 DHCP
This will renew your DHCP lease and you will be issued a new IP address from the DHCP server. FYI: en1 is generally wireless/airport, en0 is generally ethernet.

You can check that the IP is set by getting your current IP address from the command line with:
ipconfig getifaddr en1
Doing this before and after will insure you have a new IP.

You can specify an IP address to set via the command line with the following:
sudo ipconfig set en1 INFORM 192.168.0.150

You can also get a new IP address from a DHCP server by bringing down the interface and starting it back up again:
sudo ifconfig en1 down ; sudo ifconfig en1 up

Note: for whatever reason, when you are setting the IP address manually via the command line the Mac OS X Network Preferences doesn’t necessarily catch up to the changes. Do not be surprised if the Network preference pane is telling you that you “Airport does not have an IP address and cannot connect to the Internet.” when in fact, you do have one and you are online. You can verify that you are connected to the LAN or internet by using the ping command.

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.

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 ]

Photo Booth defaults to flipping your images horizontally, making it function more like a mirror rather than a camera. You can easily adjust this setting though:

• Pull down the “Edit” menu
• Select “Auto Flip New Photos”

You can also flip pictures on a per-image basis by using the same Edit menu and selecting “Flip Photo” after you have selected in within Photo Booth’s photo viewer timeline.

You can now create ePub ebook files directly within Apple software thanks to a recent iWork update to the Pages app. The iWork update brings Pages to version 4.0.4 and includes functionality to export documents as ePub format, to do so you will just use the Share menu and select “Export” with EPub now being a selectable output format.

You can get the iWork and Pages update through the Software Update control panel. This is highly recommended for Mac authors and content creators if you’re looking to ever publish something in the ePub format. ePub is the standard for the iBooks store on iTunes and the preferred ebook format for iPad, iPhone, and many other digital readers.

This is a great addition to Pages because before you would have to convert to epub using a third party tool, which works fine but ultimately it’s always better to be able to directly export to a format rather than convert.

If you don’t already own iWork, it’s a pretty decent office productivity package that rivals the Microsoft Office suite with a good word processor, spreadsheets, and presentation app. You can buy iWork on Amazon for $49 which is about 40% cheaper than the Apple Store. My only complaint is that the spreadsheet app isn’t quite as powerful as Excel.

Evom is a great free app that converts video and lets you easily download any flash movies from the web. The interface is dead simple, just drag a URL or file into the app and the video will download or convert for you.

Downloading YouTube songs with Evom

Now here’s what I think is the best part about the app: you can easily download any YouTube video and just save the audio track as an mp3, letting you play it in iTunes. This is great when you find a video with a song that you love but you can’t track it down otherwise, which is often the case with more obscure music.

Here’s how to download and convert a YouTube video to a song:

• Drag the YouTube video URL into Evom
• Select ‘iTunes’ and click on ‘Save as audio only (mp3)’
• Click on “Convert”

Evom will then download the video from YouTube, and then extract and convert the audio to MP3 format and automatically import it into iTunes.

Yes, you can download YouTube videos to your Mac with just Safari, but Evom is nice because it will also convert the video file for you to a format that is compatible with iTunes and thus your iPhone, iPad, or whatever.

Evom is actually much more than just a way to download YouTube videos and songs, it will convert and save most video formats you throw at it. It’s a great app, simple to use, and free.

You can download Evom here, highly recommended!

Line numbers are so useful to have in a good text editor that I’m surprised they aren’t enabled by default in TextWrangler. Regardless, they’re easy to display so here are two different ways to show line numbers in a text file. The first is through the View menu:

• In TextWrangler, open the View Menu
• Navigate to the “Text Display” submenu
• Select “Show Line Numbers

Change take effect immediately and you can hide the line numbers by just selecting the option again. You can also set the line numbers within the TextWrangler preferences:
Read more »

What is mouse acceleration?
Mouse acceleration is something most Mac users don’t think twice about, many aren’t aware it even exists. By default the mouse drivers count the movement of your mouse and depending on your sensitivity settings, the cursor will then move across the screen by a similar and consistent distance. Mouse acceleration is basically a threshold setting on top of this, so when the mouse is moved past a certain point or at a certain speed, the cursor itself moves more quickly and goes further, thus accelerating the movement speed and rate of the mouse cursor.

How to disable or adjust mouse acceleration

There are several ways to disable or adjust the mouse acceleration curve in Mac OS X, here are 3 easy ways to turn it off or tweak the curve:

Disable mouse acceleration with defaults – the following defaults write command will disable the mouse acceleration curve in Mac OS X. This is entered into the Terminal once and can be reversed or adjusted by changing the -1 at the end. You generally must log out for the change to take effect:
defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

Disable Mac OS X mouse acceleration via the command line – this easy to use script will completely disable mouse acceleration in Mac OS X. Settings are reversible by rebooting the machine. This is a favorite for Windows gamers.

Mouse Acceleration preference pane – you can manually adjust or disable the mouse acceleration via this preference pane in Mac OS X, this is handy if you want to manually adjust the curve rather than just disable it.

If you are looking for just instant changes and turning it off, I would recommend the command line methods, if you want precise control over the acceleration curve the preference pane is very useful.

Why do people dislike mouse acceleration?
Many new Mac users aren’t used to mouse acceleration, or the higher curve that Mac OS X’s acceleration provides compared to Windows. Mouse acceleration can cause a loss of cursor precision, particularly when trying to draw with the cursor in certain applications, or more commonly in gaming. The most common mouse acceleration complaints come from the gaming world, where the acceleration curve can lead to unanticipated mouse movements in games like Team Fortress 2 and Starcraft 2.

Personally I don’t mind mouse acceleration at all, but I have used Macs for a long time so the curve does not feel foreign to me. Many Mac switchers from the Windows world come to Mac OS X and find the cursor feels funny and more responsive, these are generally the people who would want to tweak the curve or disable the feature. For the record, mouse acceleration does exist in Windows it’s just at a different threshold and sensitivity.