Want to open the Finder and your standard desktop Mac OS X windows from LaunchPad? You can, but you have to drag the Finder application into LaunchPad. Here’s how to do this:

• From the Mac OS X desktop, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up “Go To Folder” and enter the following path:

/System/Library/CoreServices/

• Within /CoreServices/ locate and drag “Finder.app” to the LaunchPad icon in the Dock

Now LaunchPad will show the standard Finder icon, which if clicked on will open up your default Finder window choice, which is typically “All My Files” in OS X Lion.

This tip comes from @mrgan on Twitter, you can follow us there too.

A common complaint about free app giveaways is that they’re often constrained to the USA based iOS App Store, in other words if you’re outside of the US you don’t get in on deals like the recent Rage HD giveaway and the ongoing myriad of other free app offers. This is a bummer for anyone outside of the USA, but thankfully, it’s somewhat easy to alleviate.

How to Access and Download US-based iOS App Store Offers from Outside the USA

The core solution here is to just create an alternate iTunes account that is based in the USA. If you’re going to follow this solution and juggle multiple iTunes accounts, this menubar utility makes switching between them easy and is highly recommended.

Before you get started, you’ll need two things:

• Register another free email account, Gmail is free, quick, and easy
• Any valid US address – use your cousins, uncles, Apple’s, Google’s, etc

Got that? Let’s get started.

• Open the App Store from an iPhone or iPad, and from the “Featured” section scroll down to the bottom and select “Sign Out”
• Now while signed out, locate a free app to download in the App Store, anything in the ‘free download’ section should work
• Try and download the free app, and then select “Create Apple ID” when asked
• Follow the instructions to create a secondary iTunes account, be sure to select United States as the country
• At the credit card and payments screen, select “None” and continue – if you have any problem with this step read our guide on how to create an iTunes account without a credit card
• After you have registered the US iTunes account, verify and activate the account by checking your freshly created email account from the first step

Now you should have complete access to the US iTunes and App Store, which lets you download any of the free apps only available to US-based users. Yes, this technique should also work for the Mac App Store.

Additionally, if you want to access paid US App Store downloads, you can always buy a iTunes gift card and redeem the code on the credit-card free iTunes account to have a balance that is then able to purchase apps as usual.

If you missed out on the $99 HP TouchPad deals that seem to have the entire tech web in a frenzy, don’t forget that you can experience WebOS for free right now on Mac OS X, just by using the SDK’s emulator. You’ll need to download VirtualBox and then the WebOS SDK which comes as a preconfigured virtual machine, but then you can toy around in WebOS and get a feel for the (possibly defunct) touch OS.

Here’s what you’ll need to get started:

• Download VirtualBox 4.0.12 for OS X (direct download link)
• Download Palm WebOS SDK (direct download link)

Installing the actual emulator is simple, even more so if you have any experience running virtual machines. Just download and run the WebOS SDK installer and when it’s finished the emulator will appear in /Applications ready for you to play around with.

It’s that simple, but if you need any more assistance you can read more on developer.palm.com.

Heads up to @mattgemmell on Twitter for the idea.

Wonder what differences between iOS vs Android users are? What about their personality traits and preferences in things like fashion, food, media consumption, technology, and politics? Or how about general life experience and spending habits?

Stereotypes abound in this giant iOS vs Android user profile infographic, and it covers a wide variety of data that spells out the differences between the average iOS user and Android user. Whether you believe the data or not, it’s an interesting look at the smartphone and tablet OS wars.

Full infographic below (it’s huge):
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Whether you made a Lion recovery drive with Apple’s Lion Recovery Disk Assistant Tool and you’re booting from that or you’re just relying on the Recovery HD partition, this technique works.

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Is autocorrect in Mac OS X driving you nuts? We’ve received a fair amount of complaints regarding Mac OS X spelling autocorrect feature erroneously correcting things like British English words to American English words, and changing the spelling of some words like “colour” to “color” and so on. The reason for this is a language priority setting that should be set beyond just specifying a generic language, and you can set a region specific form of English (or Spanish, Portuguese, etc) that will alleviate this behavior.

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Reading App Store reviews and opinions from a variety of websites only does so much, if you really want to know what an app is like, you have to use it yourself. Some apps offer light versions as free downloads on the App Store, but what about the others? What if you’re on the fence about upgrading to OS X Lion?

The easiest way to try out any Apple software is by just visiting an Apple Store and sitting down with one of their Macs. They’re bundled with a ton of apps at the stores so you can try out things like Mac OS X Lion, the entire iLife and iWork suites, Final Cut Pro X, Aperture, even a bunch of third party apps and games.

Beyond Macs, you can do the same with iPads, iPods, and iPhones, and Apple Stores typically load up their iOS gear with a wide variety of apps and games to experience. I’ve even heard stories of customers requesting to use and try certain apps, and Apple Store employees downloading the app for that trial purpose.

I saw this suggested on Lifehacker a while back, and initially though it was kind of dumb and obvious tip, but now I have found myself recommending to family and friends to go and try out some of the new apps in person, the same way they might check out new Apple hardware before buying. If you live near an Apple Store, why not? It beats trying to negotiate the App Store refund process, which doesn’t reimburse apps you just don’t like anyway.

Emoji are extremely popular picture characters and emoticons that are an integral part of Japanese tech culture and communication, and now that they are included in modern versions of OS X, the Emoji character set is available to everyone on a Mac regardless of your localization settings.

Emoji are quickly taking the world by storm with their inclusion on the iPhone and iPad keyboards as well, and using them on the Mac is a fun way to emphasize dialog and messaging between people. Some of the characters are pretty funny so even if you have no intention on using them they’re fun to browse through.

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I’m not sure this qualifies for a traditional Mac setup post but it’s neat enough that it has to be posted. You’re looking at a Mac Pro with an old school VT220 connected to it functioning as a terminal, as you can see it’s working just fine too, running the ‘top’ command to show off the Mac Pro’s stats.

If this strikes your fancy, you can read more about how to set one up yourself on Jstn.cc

Just for fun, here’s the workstation minus the VT220 terminal, with just a Mac Pro, Cinema Display, and an iPad. It looks a bit lonely without the VT220:

And a closeup of the Vt220:
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Rage is a first person shooter for iOS where you blast your way through mutants in some post-apocalyptic disaster, it’s fairly similar to classics Doom and Quake, and that’s because ID Software created them all.

Both versions of the game, Rage and Rage HD, are available free for a limited time, with the HD version bringing higher resolution graphics and textures to iPhone 4, the latest iPod touch, and the iPad and iPad 2.

• Rage HD on the App Store

If you’re an iOS gamer, download it now for some weekend fun. Video of some gameplay action below.

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Apple has released iOS 5 beta 6 for developers to access through either OTA updates on the iOS device itself, or through the iOS Dev Center. Supported hardware continues to be all versions of iPad and iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and the last two generations of iPod touch.

OTA updates are by the easiest method to get beta 6, accessed from tapping to Settings > General > Software Update, but you can also download iOS 5b6 IPSW files directly on the iOS dev Center. Alongside the 6th beta of iOS 5 comes iTunes 10.5 beta 6, which is necessary to install the latest iOS beta from IPSW, Xcode 4.2 preview 6, and a new iOS beta for Apple TV2.

The final version of iOS 5 will be released in the Fall, likely alongside the iPhone 5 in October, or possibly slightly earlier if the pre-order rumors are accurate.

Tired of tweaking OS X Lion on your own with all the defaults write commands? Don’t want to manually change iCals leather look back to aluminum? What about older tips like turning the Dock into 2D? Lion Tweaks to the rescue!

This little free app is an extremely easy GUI front-end to a ton of the customizations and tips that we’ve covered here on OSXDaily before, but since they can be activated from a central location at the click of a button, it’s very simple for even the most novice of users to change the way OS X Lion looks.

You can download LionTweaks right now for free (direct download link) or visit the developers website, it’s freeware but the dev is asking for donations.

Looking at what Lion Tweaks does is almost like reviewing our tip archives, with all of the tips below directly within the app and ready to use at the click of a yes/no button:
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If you disabled spelling auto-correct in Mac OS X but find yourself still being autocorrected as you type various words in Safari, that’s because the new versions of Safari has a separate spelling and grammar engine than the core OS. Admittedly, that’s a little confusing to have an app use it’s own unique spelling correction functionality, but fortunately you can control the feature independently if it’s bothering you.

Done with Safari’s auto-correct function? This is how to turn it off on the Mac:
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As if there was any doubt that Apple is the innovator here, here’s an amusing graphic showing the design of tablets before and after the launch of the iPad.

Similar graphics exist comparing the iPhone and smartphones too, DaringFireball links to a few comparing the before-and-after iPhone changes to Android phones. Entertaining find from Gruber.

Skitch, a simple image editor for Mac OS X, is now available free from the Mac App Store. Skitch calls itself an image swiss army knife, but you can think of it like Preview on steroids, with your standard basic image editing features of rotating, cropping, flipping, in addition to various screen grabbing features and the ability to annotate images with pen, text, shape, and arrow tools. The official feature list is:

• Screen grab your desktop, web browser or apps
• Annotate with pen, text, shapes and arrows
• Instantly upload to skitch.com, Flickr, FTP & .me
• Resize, crop, rotate & flip images
• Capture full length (longer than your screen) websites
• Take photos with your built in webcam
• Open and save in many different image formats
• Archive and re-use images from your Skitch history

Of course the other side to Skitch is that you can instantly upload and share images to Skitch.com directly through the app, which makes sharing pictures extremely easy.

Download Skitch for free from the Mac App Store

In case you were wondering, Skitch used to be $9.99 but is now free because it was bought out by Evernote, which is a great note taking and syncing utility.

In modern versions of Mac OS X, the ability to resize any window from any corner or side of is possible; just grab onto it, and when your cursor turns into the little double-sided arrow, start dragging. That’s a great addition in and of itself, but the resizing feature gets even better when some modifier keys are applied, which can further help adjust and direct resizing of windows in OS X.

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Prior to Mac OS X 10.7, you used to be able to click on the “Mac OS X” text to display additional system information about the Mac, showing things like IP Address, OS X version and build number, and the machines Hostname. Apple pulled that ability out of Mac OS X Lion, but you can get part of it back with a defaults write command.

• Launch the Terminal and enter the following command:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo HostName

• At the login screen, click on the Clock to see the system info at the login screen

You will need to enter the admin password when asked, and the setting will be in place the next time you access the Mac OS X Lion login screen. Remember, you have to click on the Clock for the hostname and version info to be visible on the login screen. The text will appear alongside the other menubar items.

Clicking to display the text is similar to past versions of Mac OS X, but clicking on the clock is somewhat unintuitive. Ideally, you could show this data in the same way you can add a message to the Lion login screen, but there are currently no known methods to do that unless you want to just manually add the hostname and version number yourself. There are more options regarding the Lion login window in the Server version of the OS, so maybe some of those will be able to move over to the Client version too.

Ahhhh the user Library folder has disappeared again! If you already installed Mac OS X 10.7.1 update, you may have noticed that your user library directory is hidden, again, returning it to the default invisible state that Lion wants. Mildly annoying, but it should be expected that system updates will revert things to how Apple intends. Anyway, here’s a quick refresher on how to show the user library folder again in OS X 10.7.1 (or any other version of OS X)

Launch the Terminal and enter the following command:
chflags nohidden ~/Library

Changes take effect immediately and your user library folder will be shown in the user home directory.

The temporary quick methods to access user library in OS X Lion still work too if you don’t want ~/Library to be visible all the time. Those include:

1. Holding down Option and clicking on the “Go” menu to show “Library” as a choice
2. Hitting Command+Shift+G and typing ~/Library/

Realistically, if you don’t have any business mucking about in your Library files, caches, preferences, and app data, you probably don’t need the Library folder visible, which is obviously why Apple is hiding it by default in Lion.

Thanks to Albert for pointing this out.