If you bought a new Mac recently, you won’t have to shell out $20 to download OS X Mountain Lion when it’s released this month because it’s free for you. Instead, you can visit the “Up-to-Date” website from Apple, enter some identifying information to verify the purchase, and you’ll be rewarded with a fresh download of OS X 10.8 right from the Mac App Store.

Requirements are simple: if you bought a Mac from June 11, 2012 onward, you’re eligible for the free upgrade as long as you request it within 30 days of Mountain Lions release, or the purchase date of the Mac. Eligible Mac purchases can be from Apple or Apple Authorized Resellers.

• Visit Apple’s Up-to-Date website for more information on the free update

The important thing to remember is that you’ll have 30 days to get the free update, so if you take advantage of Amazons discounts on the 2012 MacBook Air & Pro models then you’ll want to put this on your calendar and be ready to pounce.

OS X Mountain Lion will be released this month, with most signs pointing to next week.

Want to quickly hide a file from prying eyes? Just like you can hide folders, you can hide individual files too. Here is how to do this using the command line tool chflags.

Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and use the following command syntax:

chflags nohidden /path/to/hide/file.txt

If you know the path to the file just type it yourself. If you don’t, follow the drag & drop method to automatically type the entire path within the Terminal, just be sure to drop it in after the initial command, and then hit the return key:

chflags hidden [DRAG FILE HERE]

If you’re confused at all watch the quick video below that demonstrates the command being used with drag and drop:

Note these files will be hidden to everyone unless if hidden files are shown in the Finder.

At any point you can unhide the file with the following chflags command:

chflags nohidden /path/to/hide/file.txt

chflags should be familiar to anyone who has used it to show the Library folder in OS X Lion or Mountain Lion. This is trouble-free alternative approach to the setfiles method, which requires Xcode Developer Tools to be installed to use. You can also throw a period in front of a file or folder name to hide it from the Finder in OS X.

We’ve all been in an awkward situation where we wished we could get out of, whether it’s standing around the watercooler listening to Bob discuss too many details of his dermatologist appointment, sitting next to the crazy guy on the train, or you’re just on a horribly bad date that couldn’t end soon enough. Actually, the latter is probably the inspiration of this fake phone call app, and that’s why it’s called Bad Date Rescue.

Bad Date Rescue can initiate a fake call immediately, in 1 minute, 5 minutes, or on a set schedule, and the calls can appear from four different fake sources: a repetition script, a fake boss, a fake mom, or a fake neighbor, all of which have some immediate catastrophe that must be addressed right now. To make the fake call even more believable, you can edit the contacts name, ringtone, and contact picture, practically guaranteeing no one will think the entire thing is a hoax.

This is a pretty funny app and it definitely has some legitimate potential uses whether you’re out in the dating scene or just wanting to find an excuse to leave a dreaded situation.

• Get Bad Date Rescue free from the App Store

Be gone awkward social encounters, and have fun out there knowing a fictitious call is just a few taps away.

Mac OS X can sometimes throw permissions errors when trying to delete files or empty the Trash. The most common variations of the errors are usually “Operation cannot be completed because the item “File” is in use” or “because the file is locked”, sometimes you can get around this by just quitting open applications or rebooting the Mac, but if you don’t want to do either you can also forcibly remove files through the command line. We will cover two different approaches to this, the first changes a files flags to attempt to unlock the file in question, and the second is a no-nonsense force delete.

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The bookmarks bar is hidden by default in Safari on iPad, undoubtedly to save screen space and to keep the experience simple, but if you access some websites frequently or use bookmarklets like View Source often you may want to have the bookmarks bar always visible.

1. From the home screen, open Settings and tap on “Safari”
2. Find “Always Show Bookmarks Bar” under General settings and flip to ON
3. Return to Safari to find the bookmarks bar

You can edit the contents of the bookmarks bar by tapping the book icon within Safaris toolbar and choosing “Edit”. The bar itself will show the top bookmarks so you can adjust the list accordingly, or create folders to make pulldown menus of categorized bookmarks.

This is not an option on the iPhone or iPod touch (currently at least) probably because their screen sizes are much smaller.

Want to delete a text message or conversation thread from an iPhone? Maybe it’s a regretful SMS, a security risk, or just an embarrassing iMessage conversation from after you had too much to drink, whatever it is you can quickly delete an entire conversation or even selectively delete only certain parts of a message thread, whether it’s a text, iMessage, or MMS.

It’s super easy, whether it’s a single specific message you want to trash, or an entire thread and conversation.
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Designers and UI tweakers alike should get a kick out of this one: Launch Preview app, and then drag any application into the Preview Dock icon to view and explore all of that applications graphical resource files.

Inside you’ll often find extensive amounts of graphics, icons, interface elements, screenshots, assorted images, and tons of other interesting stuff. In fact, sorting through the graphic elements of certain apps is actually how a lot of people were finding the 2x images that first gave rise to the retina Mac rumors some years ago.

Some applications will only show you icon files under a .icns dropdown, but generally the larger the app the more GUI resources will be included. Particularly fun apps to explore are Apple’s creations, which are usually packed with high quality images. Or if you want to see an epic load of system resources including the high quality Mac hardware icons, drag the entire /System/CoreServices/ folder into Preview to load up about 6000 graphic elements that form the user experience of Mac OS X itself.

This is kind of like browsing through picture resources with ResEdit back in the days of Classic Mac OS. Let us know if you find anything particularly worthwhile.

Thanks to Andy for sending in the tip from MacWorld

Need to convert a DMG disk image file to a CDR or ISO disk image format? Don’t bother downloading any third party tools, all you need for conversion is built right into Mac OS X and you don’t even have to go the command line route for most cases.

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Have you ever noticed that iPhone video gets recorded according to the orientation of the device? If you haven’t noticed that yet, pay attention to it now, because you’ll create significantly better videos if you just rotate the iPhone into horizontal orientation before hitting that record video button.

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WMV files typically are played in Windows Media Player, but Mac users don’t have that app. Not to worry though, there are plenty of solutions to play WMV video right in Mac OS X and you can go ahead and forget about WMP because the Mac apps are better and more versatile anyway. Without further ado, here are three different ways to play WMV movies on a Mac, each are free downloads:

#1: MPlayerX

MPlayerX closely resembles the Quick Time user interface but that’s about where the similarities end, because MPlayerX will play just about any video thrown at it with flying colors. WMV files are no exception, but because it supports so many other popular (mkv, divx, etc) and obscure formats, MPlayer is debatably one of the best free video players available for the Mac platform.

#2: VLC

VLC is the classic swiss army knife for video files, it will play virtually any video format, it’s cross-platform compatible, it’s quick, and it’s free. VLC’s other benefit is that it works fine with obscure audio formats, and if you’re wanting to stream a video from one computer to another you can easily do that too. If you want the video codec support of MPlayerX but with even more features aimed at advanced users, VLC is a great choice.

#3: FlipForMac Components

Last but not least is Flip4Mac, which is a set of video components that install into OS X that allow Quick Time to play WMV files directly. It’s a perfectly reasonable solution, but because it’s limited to WMV and WMA formats it’s just overall less useful than going with a free app like VLC or MPlayerX. My view is that if you’re going to be downloading a new app to play videos, get one that is multifunctional and that will play everything, that way you won’t have to go hunting around again when you encounter some other video file down the road. One potentially huge bonus that Flip provides though is the ability to convert the wmv videos to .mov format, letting you play them on an iPad, iPod, or iPhone, or any other Mac, without the need for them to download anything.

Not sure which to get? It’s probably safest to go with MPlayerX, it’s dirt simple to use, installs through the Mac App Store, and plays so many different movie formats that you’ll likely never have to download another video player again.

Not long ago we showed you how to announce when a command line task was finished by using the ‘say’ command, but because it speaks aloud it may be inappropriate to use in a quiet environment. A much more subtle notification takes advantage of Terminal apps new usage of the BEL alert, which in OS X Lion onward pushes a red notification badge to the Dock icon rather than sounding the awful hardware beep.

Adding a notification alert to a completed command is simple, just append “&& tput bel” to the end of a command. For example, to throw the notification alert when the make command is finished running it would look like the following:

make install && tput bel

When finished running, the default system alert will sound, the Terminal dock icon will bounce with a new red notification badge added.

If you want to see it in action in OS X, try it with ping and then go away from the Terminal app:

ping -c 5 www.google.com && tput bel

This can be much better than the “say” alert because it remains useful even when the computer is muted, and it’s more versatile than the Growl notification method since it does not require any additional software to be installed to function. It works in OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion.

Thanks to Austin L. for sending this in!

Diptic is an app for iPhone and iPad that makes creating diptych and triptych photo collages easier than ever. With a ton of layouts, filters, basic editing tools, and customizations, you can quickly build a visual story using either freshly taken photos or pictures stored in your iPhone camera roll. When you’re finished, Diptic let’s you send the collage directly to Facebook, Instagram, Camera+, Tumblr, Twitter, and a variety of other services, so you can share your creation with the world. This is a fun app and if you’ve ever wondered how people were making quick diptychs while on the go, this very well could be the answer.

Usually costing $0.99, Diptic is the App Store free app of the week, get it while you can:

• Get Diptic free this week from the iOS App Store

This app fits right in with the camera tips we’ve been posting lately to help you take better pictures with the iPhone. Grab it while it’s free and have some fun.

The third beta of iOS 6 has been released to developers running compatible iPhone, iPad, and iPod hardware. The new build is 10A5355d and contains many bug fixes and improvements over beta 2, pushing the newest version of iOS closer to it’s public debut later in the year.

For developers already running iOS 6 beta 2, they can download the beta 3 release quickly as an over-the-air delta update, found in Settings > General > Software Update. The new builds IPSW files are also hosted on Apple’s iOS Developer Center.

Some devices are seeing beta 3 marked as beta 2, despite already having beta 2 installed. This appears to be a typo and downloading the update installs the newest version anyway.

Apple has stated that iOS 6 is due for public release this fall. It’s looking increasingly likely iOS 6 will coincide with the launch of iPhone 5, and possibly even the much rumored iPad mini.

There’s a strong love and hate relationship with the leather UI skeuomorphism that has adorned many OS X and iOS apps as of late, and if you’re in the “hate” crowd then you’ll probably be pleased to discover that a free tool called Lion Tweaks makes removing the leather appearance from the interfaces of Address Book and iCal easier than ever.

No more manually changing iCal UI files, Lion Tweaks includes two simple one-button installers to change the leather user interface back to the traditional aluminum appearance. Reversing the change back to the default leather look is just as easy.

• Get LionTweaks free from the developer (follow the little blue download link to get it free, paypal isn’t necessary)

We’ve discussed Lion Tweaks before as a helpful tool for those looking to customize Mac OS X without getting into the nitty gritty of defaults write commands. The newest version supports both OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion, and includes a variety of helpful tweaks like showing the Library folder, always showing scrollbars, and enabling AirDrop for unsupported Macs and ethernet, and many other tricks we’ve covered here before.

A smaller 7.85″ screened iPad will be announced this year and cost much less than the current $499 iPad, according to a new report from the New York Times.

The iPad mini is anticipated to arrive later this year, according to NYT’s sources. There also seems to be a suggestion that Apple is releasing the device in order to maintain control of the tablet market. Amazon Kindle, Google Nexus, and the upcoming Microsoft Surface are all significant potential tablet competitors to the iPads current dominance.

Interestingly, the Times also says that Apple originally prototyped a 7″ tablet some years ago, but shelved the smaller form factor in favor of the existing 9.7″ iPad, because the late Steve Jobs found the small tablet to be questionably useful “besides surfing the Web in the bathroom.” Recent mockups have shown the difference between a 7″ and 7.85″ display is 40% more usable screen space, however.

The report from the New York Times joins other recent reports from Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal on the topic of an “iPad Mini”, combining to provide strong credibility to the rumors.

The Photos app in iOS includes a built-in crop tool that works very well for quick edits on the go with the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. The bundled function offers a free transform options, thereby providing the ability to crop an image down to any proportion you’d like.

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If there’s one thing that modern keyboards and Macs are missing compared to old fashioned typewriters, it’s the loud typewriter sounds of yesteryear, because let’s face it, who doesn’t like an incredibly noisy keyboard? NoisyTyper is a hilarious Mac app that satisfies the need that nobody has, with different key and typing sounds for letters, spacebar, delete, scroll up and down, and even the classic ‘ding’ carriage return. Once loaded, it works across all applications, guaranteeing those sounds from last century will follow you regardless of where you type on a Mac.

You really have to watch the video embedded below to get an idea for just how noisy the app is, or download it yourself and find out the hard way.

I think this app is hilarious and while it has a retro kick to it, it would also make for an excellent prank to play on unsuspecting colleagues and roommates.

There’s a brief multi-step installation process:

• Get NoisyTyper free from Fffft.at
• Open System Preferences from the  Apple menu and click “Universal Access”, then check the box for “Enable access for assistive devices”
• Launch Noise Typer, it’ll sit not-so-quietly in the background
• Start typing and try not to laugh

Because Noisy Typer runs in the background so you’ll have to quit it by typing “qaz123” or by finding it in Activity Monitor and killing the process.

Just in case the app isn’t enough for you, there’s always the ridiculous full-on USB typewriter iMac conversion kit for the dedicated.

If you like simple and clean workstation setups, this weeks Mac desk should be right up your alley. Coming to us from Ed W., he uses his Mac mini for photo editing and word processing, and it also doubles as a media server. Hardware includes:

• Apple Cinema Display 27″
• Mac Mini – 2.6GHz Core 2 Duo 8GB RAM and 500GB HD
• Twelve South BackPack shelf attached to the Cinema Display holding 1TB External HD
• Apple wireless keyboard and trackpad joined with a Henge Clique

Not shown is an iPhone 4 16GB, used to take the picture, and you can’t see the Backpack shelf because it attaches to the back of the Cinema Displays and iMacs.

The wallpaper on the Cinema Display is from OS X Mountain Lion. If you don’t want to wait until it’s released later this month you can get that one directly or see all the wallpapers here.

Do you want to be a featured Mac setup on OSXDaily? Send in a good picture or two with a list of hardware and a brief description of what you use the Apple gear for to osxdailycom@gmail.com