Mac OS X Snow Leopard can be upgraded directly to OS X Mountain Lion, assuming the final release maintains the same capacity as the currently available developer previews. To perform the direct upgrade as it stands today, users will need to have created an OS X Mountain Lion USB installer from which to boot off of and upgrade with, though there is a possibility that a Snow Leopard Mac will also have access to Mountain Lion directly from the Mac App Store.

We have received many questions about this in our inboxes and comments and figure with the OS X Mountain Lion release date set for summer it’s a good time to answer it based on currently available information. It’s important to note this upgrade path is based off of the current developer previews of Mountain Lion and upgrade eligibility could change before the public release, it’s also possible that Apple won’t officially support upgrading from Mac OS X 10.6 to 10.8 and this could remain an unofficial and unsupported feature.

A fair amount of OS X Snow Leopard users have held off on upgrading to OS X Lion, but with the release of Mountain Lion around the corner it’s quite likely a lot of OS X 10.6.8 holdouts will jump directly to OS X 10.8 if it is possible. Mountain Lion does have stricter system requirements than it’s predecessor, however, and some owners of older Mac hardware could wind up with Lion being the last supported version of OS X on their machines.

We will update with additional information on the various Mac upgrade paths to OS X Mountain Lion as further details become available.

By using Mac OS X Smart Folders, anyone can quickly access all files they were working on yesterday without caring about where they were stored or what folders they reside in. There are two ways to set this up, the first will utilize a quick modification to “All My Files” and the second will be more inclusive by creating a custom Smart Folder.

Method 1) Access Yesterdays Files & Work with All My Files

This is the easiest approach, all you need to do is modify how an existing folder arranges files:

1. Open “All My Files” from the OS X Finder, unless set otherwise this is the default new finder window
2. Click on the “Arrange” button and choose “Date Modified”
3. Scroll down to find “Yesterday” in the list, these are all your files from yesterday

Alternatively, you can select “Date Last Opened” from the Arrange menu, though the moment you open a file it will move from Yesterday to Today in All My Files.

Method 2) Find Yesterdays Files & Work with a Smart Folder

The second approach uses a new Smart Folder to find all files that were modified within the past day, so if you modify a file from yesterday sometime today it will remain accessible in the same smart folder. This is a bit smarter than the All My Files method above, and it will also include user preference and library files, modified plists, iTunes playlists, downloads, and any other file that has been modified by the user within a day.

1. From the OS X Finder, hit Command+Option+N to create a new Smart Folder
2. Click on “All My Files” at the top to limit the search to files owned by the active user
3. Click the (+) button to add a new search parameter and choose “Last modified date” and set is to “within last” and enter “1 days”



4. Finally, click the “Save” button and name the search “Recent Work” or something similar, and select “Add To Sidebar” for easy future access from Finder windows

The newly created smart folder is now accessible from any Finder window, just look for the gear icon next to “Recent Work” in the sidebar and click on it to open a constantly updated folder of all files modified within the past day.

There are a variety of ways to further improve these Smart Folders, but to keep this article relatively simple we’ll limit it to a single search parameter for now.

By appending the say command to the end of another command, Mac OS X will vocally announce when the initial task has finished running successfully. For example, to have OS X announce that a particular script has finished running the command could be:

python backup.py && say "jobs done"

The important part is the “&& say” portion, which can also be customized with other voices from Mac OS X’s text to speech options by using the -v flag followed by a voice name, like so:

dscacheutil -flushcache && say -v Alex your cache has been cleared sir

This is perfect for running scripts, making svn/git commits, compiling code, and other tasks that can take an indeterminate amount of time to complete and where it’s easy to become distracted by facebook^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H other work.

This great tip was posted by @niels on Twitter, follow @osxdaily there too to get our latest posts and updates.

For the power users out there who prefer to leave their hands on the keyboard as much as possible, you’ll be pleased to know that the Dock in Mac OS X can be used exclusively from the keyboard with full functionality. With just the keys, you can navigate around Dock items and apps, access the right-click menu, launch apps, force quit apps, hide others, and more.

• Control+Function+F3 (Function+F3 on older Macs) to summon the Dock with keyboard navigation enabled, works even if the Dock is hidden by default
• Left & Right Arrow keys to move within the Dock items
• Up Arrow key to pull open the Dock items menu, the same as right-click
• Return key to launch the currently selected app
• Use keyboard letters to jump to apps by first letter of the app name
• Hold Option key while navigating to, then hit the Up Arrow key to access Force Quit
• Command+Return to reveal the Dock item in the Finder
• Command+Option+Return to hide all other apps and windows except for the selected Dock item

You must use the initial Function+F3 command to enable the keyboard navigation in the Dock each time you want to use the keyboard shortcuts, otherwise the remaining keyboard commands will not work as intended.

To be even faster, these tips are great to combine with removing the Dock show and hide delay and having a speedier Dock animation.

Rich text format doesn’t always translate well to the web and it often gets garbled through emails sent across platforms. The simplest solution is to convert the RTF to plain text and then either transfer the resulting txt file or paste the content it into an email or otherwise. Here’s how you can do that quickly and freely in Mac OS X using none other than the built-in TextEdit app:

• Launch TextEdit from within the /Applications/ directory and open a new blank document
• Paste the rich text you want converted to plain text into the blank document
• Pull down the “Format” menu and choose “Make Plain Text”, or just hit Command+Shift+T
• Click “OK” and then re-save the file into a txt document

You can also open an RTF document into TextEdit and perform the conversion directly on the file, saving the resulting file as a TXT document. The same conversions can also be achieved from the temrinal by using the textutil command.

If you find yourself doing this often with emails sent to and from older Windows machines, you can set the OS X Mail app to default to sending emails as plain text which can prevent a lot of the stranger characters and formatting issues from developing completely.

Sending documents and email as plain text also has the advantage of reducing total byte counts, which could be important for those with very limited internet speeds either through modems or the painfully slow 2G EDGE networks.

Though almost everyone likes a nice photo screen saver and some of the funkier options out there, I’m also big fan of minimalist screensavers that do something simple like displaying just the time. That’s exactly what we have courtesy of Apple UI designer Robert Padbury, two beautifully simple clocks, either in 12 hour or 24 hour format, no other frills.

• Download the minimalist clock screensavers free from Dribbble
• Alternate screen saver: MinimalClock at iLoveColorz

Both are extremely lightweight and easy to install, all you need to do is download the .qtz file and drop it into System Preferences’s Screen Saver window to turn them into the active screensaver.

Because they are .qtz files, they are also very easy to edit yourself in Quartz Composer should you want to change the font and text styling, background or foreground color, rotation, or whatever else, though the default styling is very nice.

If you want something similar but with the date as well as the time, a screen saver called Today offers that, though it’s not as lightweight as this one.

Update: The original Minimalist Clock was pulled from Dribble for some reason, but you can find similar screen savers like Today, Fliqlo flip clock, and MinimalClock. We will update this post if the original screen saver returns.

If you’re concerned about the file size of images you should grab ImageOptim, a free image compression tool that is drag & drop simple. Store the app in the Dock and toss a single picture or group of images onto the app and they will immediately be compressed without reducing much image quality by finding optimum compression parameters and stripping color profile information and other metadata from the files.

On average the image size savings are about 15-35%, making it a very useful tool for web designers, developers, publishers, bloggers, app developers, or anyone else that wants to reduce image file size and bandwidth requirements. ImageOptim works great for PNG, JPEG, and even GIF animation.

• Grab ImageOptim from the developer (free)

For command line users, use the “open” command to pass wildcards to ImageOptim for easy scripting and bulk image compression like so:

open -a ImageOptim.app ~/Pictures/SaveToWeb/*.jpg

There is also a separate system service available to download that lets you right-click on images to compress them directly from the OS X Finder.

Great find from @MacGeekPro on Twitter, don’t forget to follow @OSXDaily too!

The OS X task management tool Activity Monitor includes an excellent and little known feature that lets you see precisely what files, ports, and IP’s are being interacted with by any single process or application. Here is how to use it:

1. Launch Activity Monitor, found in /Applications/Utilities/
2. Double-click on the process or application name you want to see open files and ports for
3. Click the “Open Files and Ports” tab

The list is scrollable and shows full paths to all files that are being interacted with by the application/process. Much of the data will be unfamiliar to many users, with obscure system files, caches, and plists being accessed, but you’ll also find paths that are easy to identify which can be helpful in resolving system conflicts and troubleshooting certain problems. Similar filesystem access data can be provided with the command line tool opensnoop, but for most Mac users the GUI Activity Monitor will be more friendly to their needs.

Ports are identified as numbers, and you’ll also be able to see the IP’s of any active internet or network connections that have been opened by the application. The data is presented a little rough, if you want an easier to browse version of open network connections take a look at the free GUI tool PrivateEye. IP and port data can also be uncovered through the command line tool lsof if you’re more technically inclined.

Anytime I schedule anything particularly important I use iCal alerts to remind me of the event. But I really only want to receive the alarm on my iPhone which is the device I have with me all the time, rather than coming home and opening my MacBook screen to an outdated alert from earlier in the day. The solution for this is to disable all iCal alerts in Mac OS X, which will not impact the alarms on other synced iOS devices:

• From iCal, pull down the iCal menu and choose “Preferences”
• Click the “Advanced” tab and check the box next to “Turn off all alerts”

Close out of Preferences and the next time an alarm is scheduled to go off it won’t happen on the Mac. This is also a helpful setting to adjust for auxiliary Macs that have iCloud configured where you want access to the Calendar data but don’t want to be annoyed with the popup alarm.

For those of us who regularly connect to a network drive for file sharing or backups, it can be helpful to configure Mac OS X to automatically mount those shared drives.

1) Mounting the Network Drive

If you’re already familiar with mapping a network drive in Mac OS X you can skip the first part of this and go straight to System Preferences in the second section.

1. From the OS X desktop, pull down the “Go” menu and select “Connect to Server”
2. Connect to the server and mount the drive you want to automatically connect to on boot
3. Choose Guest or for a specific user check the box next to “Remember this password in my keychain”

2) Setting Up Automatic Connections to the Network Drive on Login

Once you are connected to the network drive we can set up automatic connections upon logging into the Mac:

1. Open System Preferences and click on “Users & Groups”
2. Select your user name from the list and then click the “Login Items” tab
3. Drag & drop a mounted network drive into the login items list
4. Optional: check the “Hide” box to keep the drives window from opening on each login and boot

This can be used to automatically connect to and mount SMB drives for those that need to share files with a Windows PC often, though you’ll need to enable SAMBA beforehand within File Sharing preferences.

Confirm the drive will automatically mount by logging out of the active user account and logging back in, or by rebooting the Mac.