If you want to beef up the security on your Mac, you can try enabling the built-in firewall.

Enabling the Firewall in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

* Open “System Preferences” from the Apple menu
* Click on the ‘Security’ icon
* Click on the ‘Firewall’ tab
* In the corner of this window, you’ll see a lock icon, click on that and enter the administrator password
* Now click on the ‘Start’ button to activate the firewall

Yes, it’s that simple.

If you want to allow certain ports, applications, or network connections, you can enter the ‘Advanced’ tab and adjust the settings as necessary. The Mac OS X firewall is quite secure by default and will block nearly all incoming connections (again, unless specified otherwise). It’s my opinion that if you’re behind a router with it’s own firewall, and on a trusted network, you probably don’t need to use the Mac firewall at all. For small home and school networks you should be fine, but for larger, untrusted, or exposed networks, using the firewall may be a prudent idea, even if the likelihood of an attack on your Mac is extremely low in comparison to a Windows machine.

It’s worth mentioning that since Mac OS X 10.6, the Firewall service has been placed under the “Security” systems preference as opposed to ‘Sharing’ as it was in prior versions of Mac OS X.

While everyone continues to wait for an official Hulu app for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad/whatever, you can beat them to the punch and get Hulu content on your iPhone now for free, using Snow Leopard!

This is a pretty crafty approach and it requires several things:
* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed
* Latest version of QuickTime Player (with Screen Recording support)
* Hulu Desktop client for Mac (for easy full-screen mode)
* The audio recording utility called SoundFlower (so you can record system audio while a screencast is going on)

In case you hadn’t guessed it yet, after you’ve met the above installation requirements, you basically just set your audio output device to SoundFlower, launch the Hulu app and get your show queued up, then from within QuickTime Player you start a new screen recording and start playing the Hulu show… afterwards simply go through the saved screencast and trim out the desktop stuff you don’t want, and then save the file as iPhone format… crafty huh?

You can see the full walkthrough at SampleTheWeb: How to use Snow Leopard to Record Hulu Content on your iPhone [ screenshot borrowed from SampleTheWeb ]

When you go to change the file extension in Mac OS X you will get a dialog box notifying you that by changing a file type it may open in another application. Chances are if you are changing the file extension deliberately, you did this intentionally. You can quickly accept this file type extension change by hitting Command+U when the dialogue box pops up.

This appears to be Snow Leopard only, but I do not have access to an older Mac OS X to test.

With Mac OS X Snow Leopard you can input Chinese Characters directly into the trackpad! This is an extremely cool feature but requires a newer Mac with a multitouch trackpad.

Enable Chinese Character Input in Mac OS X

* Launch System Preferences
* Select the Languages and Text pane
* Click the “Input Sources” tab across the top
* Scroll down to either “Chinese – Simplified” or “Chinese – Traditional”
* After enabled, you can show the trackpad handwriting surface in two ways:
* Either Hit Control+Shift+Space to bring up the Handwriting Input Surface (or whatever else you changed it to in prior screen)
* OR you can select the International keyboards menu bar item and select “Show Trackpad Handwriting” to bring up the Chinese Character Input screen

When the trackpad handwriting feature is enabled, the mouse is disabled for scrolling around and the trackpad itself becomes a writing surface allowing you to draw and input Chinese characters directly into it. The strokes are then monitored and you will be offered different character choices depending on what strokes you enter. Very cool!

[ above image borrowed from Apple.com ]

If you Option-Click the Airport Menu you can get extended information about the wireless network you are connected to (and the ones you’re not as well), including Channel information, MAC address of the access point, signal strength, and the transmission rate. This is Snow Leopard only, if you haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet and your Mac is compatible, it’s highly recommended.

Thanks to reader Jim Thorpe for the tip and screenshot!

This works in many versions of Mac OS X I’m pretty sure this only works in Snow Leopard, you can right-click/control-click on many App icons in the Dock to do things like:

* Create a New Window in Safari
* Create a New TextEdit Document
* Launch a New Remote Connection in Terminal
* Shuffle iTunes Songs
* Open a new Chat in iChat
* Set your Away Message in iChat

and so much more, right from the Dock! This is a very handy feature that I find myself using more and more, try it out with other apps and see what you get. Some of this may work in Leopard but I no longer have a Leopard machine to test this on, perhaps one of our other writers or readers can double check. Thank you readers for confirming this works in many versions of Mac OS X!

We’ve long been fans of the Dell Mini 10v for Hackintosh purposes, it’s small, quick, attractive, and can be obtained for surprisingly cheap in the $200 range. It looks like the rest of the blogworld is catching on to this little beast of a MacHack Netbook, Gizmodo has an excellent write up on installing Snow Leopard on the Dell Mini 10v, it’s definitely worth checking out. I’d highly recommend buying a refurbished unit from the Dell outlet to save yourself some serious cash (a friend got one for $189!), so check out our guide to a cheap Mac Netbook with the Dell Mini 10v, and then follow the Gizmodo guide to get it all up and running with Snow Leopard. For $200 you can’t go wrong!

Gizmodo: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 10v into the Ultimate Snow Leopard Netbook

In Snow Leopard, you can show (or hide) hidden files in dialog boxes by hitting Command-Shift-Period, nice!

You can get detailed wireless information from the Airport menu by holding down the “Option” key when clicking the menu icon. The ability to pull the Security type and Channel directly out of the menu is a big plus for me, but the other information should certainly be useful when troubleshooting a WiFi problem too.

This is a Snow Leopard only tip, and I thought we had covered it here at OS X Daily but apparently not… so thanks to TheGraphicMac‘s post on the matter to remind me to share it with you all (the image attached to this post is from TheGraphicMac too).

The Operating System wars are still raging, and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has bested the new Windows 7 operating system in several speed tests, and a crucial battery life test, according to CNet. Windows 7 did outperform Snow Leopard in some other tests, such as gaming, where Call of Duty 4 had five extra FPS (21fps vs 26fps) in Windows 7, but that’s not too surprising considering that most game developers spend far more time optimizing performance for Windows due to it’s greater gaming market share.

If you haven’t upgraded to Snow Leopard yet, you really should. You can upgrade from Tiger (Unofficially) or Leopard flawlessly and you can buy Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for $25 at Amazon which includes free shipping. It’s well worth the $25.

[ CNet via AppleInsider ]

Apple has released a list of software that has been deemed incompatible with 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you haven’t upgraded yet it’s possible you’re afraid of application incompatibilities, and rightly so. It’s worth taking a look to see if any version of the apps you are dependent on make the list.

These apps will be moved to an “incompatible software” directory upon installation of Snow Leopard:

• Parallels Desktop, ver. 2.5 and earlier
• McAfee VirusScan, ver. 8.6
• Norton AntiVirus ver. 11.0
• Internet Cleanup 5 ver. 5.0.4
• Application Enhancer ver. 2.0.1 and earlier
• Unsanity
• AT&T Laptop Connect Card ver. 1.0.4, 1.0.5, 1.10.0
• launch2net ver, 2.13.0
• iWOW plug-in for iTunes ver. 2.0
• Missing Sync for Palm Sony CLIE Driver ver. 6.0.4
• TonePort UX8 Driver ver. 4.1.0
• ioHD Driver ver. 6.0.3
• Silicon Image SiI3132 Drivers ver. 1.5.16.0

Apple: 10.6 Incompatible Software List

This is a warning to all Snow Leopard users, be aware that a somewhat obscure Snow Leopard bug deletes ALL DATA from a user account, yikes! This will likely NOT effect you, but if you’re a Snow Leopard user you should understand the bug and the consequences. According to CNET:

“when logging into the guest account on their Mac first and then logging into their regular account, some users are finding all their data to be missing and their accounts completely reset.”

Apparently Apple is aware of this issue, and it’s not particularly widespread (suggesting it doesn’t happen all the time), but in any case Snow Leopard users should protect themselves and NOT use the Guest account for the time being! I’m sure Apple will release a bug fix rather quickly since this is gaining some mainstream press around the web.

If you’ve run into this problem and you’re freaking out, check out this page on CNET for a possible fix to restore data.

Personally, I love Snow Leopard and the only issues I’ve had are problems with Snow Leopard wireless connections.

You can use QuickLook from inside ‘Open File’ dialogue boxes in any application! Try it out yourself, go to File -> Open File and hit the Spacebar (or whatever hot-key you assigned QuickLook) on an image or text file, and like magic QuickLook opens the file in preview mode so that you can be sure you are opening the correct file! As far as I know this is new to Snow Leopard, but what a cool feature!

Here’s a cool trick I just learned. If you want to quickly change your sound input device, simply Option-Click the Sound menu at the top of your screen to enable an alternate menu pulldown list of input devices. For an audio geek like me this is a lot quicker than launching into the System Preferences and adjusting from microphone to line-in audio source. As far as I know this is new to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Enjoy!

In a move that has surprised many, Apple has decided to open source their multiprocessor task management technology known as Grand Central Dispatch. This comes as a surprise because the technology has barely gotten into the hands of customers through 10.6 Snow Leopard, and it’s widely considered to be a competitive advantage. So why would Apple release such a thing into the open source community? AppleInsider offers this possible explanation:

“Significant new outside interest in Grand Central Dispatch could result in a wider support base for building parallelism compatible with Apple’s other open technologies, such as OpenCL. The availability of the dispatcher on Linux and other Unix operating systems would also help generate demand for other command line utilities that tap into its power. That would help Apple leverage its technologies in markets where it has a minority position, such as in the enterprise and supercomputing.”

Grand Central Dispatch is not the only Apple technology to be open sourced however. The core technology behind the Safari webbrowser, known as WebKit, is also an open source project, which has led to the development of Google’s Chrome browser and other webkit-based browsers (which all tend to be lightning fast).

You can read more and poke around the source yourself at LibDispatch – Mac OS forge