I’m liking iTunes 10 but I can’t say I’m a fan of the vertical control buttons, which some are calling ‘traffic lights’ since well, it resembles traffic lights. Sure it saves space but it breaks away from the standardized UI convention. Thankfully we can change back to the classic horizontal buttons without much effort.

If you want to get the classic horizontal close/minimize/maximize buttons back in iTunes 10, type the following into the Terminal and relaunch the iTunes app:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

If you want to reverse the changes back to the newer iTunes 10 style vertical buttons, use this:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -0

Again you just need to quit and reopen iTunes 10 for the changes to take effect.

A big thanks to Paster who provided this tip in the comments on how to change the iTunes 10 icon back to the iTunes 9 icon style.

If you haven’t downloaded iTunes 10 yet, it’s a worthwhile upgrade and the Ping social music system is fun to play around with.

It seems like it was just moments ago that iTunes 10 became available to download, but already there are some complaints about the new blue button icon. 6ix Passions points out that it looks awkward in their Dock and offers a simple solution; revert back to the old iTunes 9 icon. Here’s how to get the old iTunes icon back:

• Go into your Applications folder, select iTunes.
• Right click on the file and select Show Package Contents.
• Go under the Resources folder and make a copy of iTunes.icns on your desktop (for backup purposes).
• Replace it with the old iTunes.icns file from the previous iTunes version (9 and below).
• Start or restart iTunes.

Now you’ll have the old iTunes 9 style icon back, featuring its music note layered on top of a CD. Perhaps it’s just that people don’t like change, or maybe they’re still attached to their CD’s, who knows.

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.

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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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.

If you want to check out Android OS, you can download and run a pre-configured Android OS Virtual Appliance installation within VirtualBox. You’ll need a torrent client to download the virtual machine itself, and of course Virtualbox to run it.

You can download Android OS VM here and get VirtualBox here, both are free downloads.

The Android VM was configured for an Eee-PC but runs fine inside of the VirtualBox environment. Running Android OS in a virtual machine is really helpful for anyone who wants to get their feet wet with Android development but doesn’t have an Android capable phone handy (and I’m not about to install Android on my iPhone), and it’s also nice to just play around with if you don’t have much experience with Android software.

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.

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:
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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.