iTunes 10 has been announced and will be available to download starting today via Software Update. Featuring a fancy new icon that finally ditches the CD, iTunes 10 also has a more attractive album management system and a built in social network.

iTunes 10 Ping

Perhaps the most interesting feature of iTunes 10 is Ping, the new social music discovery network from Apple. Built directly into the iTunes app, Ping allows iTunes users to follow artists and other users, get concert listings, discuss music, share your music preferences, and more. With 160 million existing iTunes users and the ability to access Ping on your Mac, PC, iPhone, and iPod Touch, Ping is looking to quickly dominate the social music scene. Ping’s feed looks a lot like Facebook and I’d expect a way to cross-publish between the two shortly. Ping will only be accessible via iTunes 10.

iTunes 10 download

To get the newest version of iTunes 10, go to either Apples iTunes download website or load up Software Update from the Apple menu, it will appear as an available download.

Apple’s iTunes download website is here, you do not need to enter your email address, you can just click on ‘Download Now’ and the download will start.

Update: Some people are reporting problems downloading iTunes 10 or that they can’t download iTunes 10. If you are having troubles downloading iTunes 10, refresh the iTunes download page and try clearing your cache. I can confirm that it is available for download.

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 use the versatile and powerful ipconfig utility, which is bundled directly with Mac OS X. We’ll show you how to set an IP address with ipconfig by retrieving one from a DHCP server, and also demonstrate how to set a specific IP address in OS X if you wish to determine a static address for a Mac.

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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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The eagerly awaited AutoCAD for Mac is due to ship again in October of this year, this is the first Mac version of AutoCAD since 1992. Alongside the upcoming Mac version will be AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad, which will allow users to share, view, and make small changes to their designs remotely.

The Mac OS X release of AutoCAD will feature a very Mac-friendly user interface with Cover Flow style file browsing, multi-touch gestures, and full cross-platform support, as well as the usual AutoCAD feature set.

AutoCAD is the leading industrial design software for 2D and 3D drafting, with over 10 million active users. Pre-orders will be available starting September 1, but the software won’t ship for another month. The Mac version will be priced the same as the Windows release at $4,000, but will be made available for free to students and teachers through an education program. AutoCAD WS for iPhone and iPad is expected to be released for free.

Anytime that you run a command through the Terminal directly by a command name like ls or dscacheutil, your Mac is looking through a series of directories for that command to exist. This list of directories is called the PATH, and it’s a carry over from the unix underpinnings of Mac OS X.

As you may have guessed, checking your PATH in Mac OS X is the same as it is in most other unix variants, so if you come from a linux or unix background you can use the same syntax to check the path and see what directories are included in the currently active path of the shell.

To check this, you just need to use the echo command at the terminal prompt like the following:

echo $PATH

Executing that command successfully will result in seeing something like the following:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

The directories listed are those that are searched for commands. So the next time someone asks you if a directory is in your path, now you know where to look and how to find out.

This can also be helpful when troubleshooting commands not being found and other related error messages to command execution, because if a bin path is not listed then it may need to be added before the shell will know where to look to execute the command in question.

If you use a Hotmail account, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now use your Hotmail account on your iPhone thanks to Microsoft enabling Exchange ActiveSync support. This allows Hotmail to push and sync email, calendar, and contacts to your iPhone.

Set up Hotmail on the iPhone

Here are the steps to setup Hotmail to sync and push to your iPhone (this works on the iPad too):

• Launch Settings
• Tap on “Mail, Contacts, Calendar”
• Tap onto “Add Account”
• Select “Microsoft Exchange”
• Enter your full Hotmail email address into both the Email and Username fields
• Leave Domain blank
• Enter your password
• Enter “Hotmail” as the Description
• Tap onto “Next”
• Now you must enter the server, use “m.hotmail.com” for the Server name then tap onto “Next”
• The iPhone will now verify that your Hotmail information is entered correctly, the next screen you’ll be able to enable Mail, Contacts, and Calendars

Hotmail is the original web mail, so it’s not surprise there’s still millions of hotmail accounts still in use today despite the competing offers from Google, Yahoo, and others. It’s a bit surprising it took Microsoft this long to get Hotmail working with the iPhone, but better late than never.

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.

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Expose is one of the most useful features of Mac OS X and it looks great too. Well, except for the window glow color, which a lot of people aren’t particularly thrilled with.

You can replace the bright neon blue hover glow with any other color simply by editing and replacing some PNG files.

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Apple and Amazon are rapidly changing the way books are consumed and read thanks to the iPhone & iPad and Kindle. The other effect of this is that it’s actually helping to ease the barriers to entry into the book publishing and sales market.

In the past an author would need to have an agent pitch books to publishers in the hopes it might get picked up, but not anymore. Now if you have a Mac and a word processor and a bit of patience, you can create your own book in the EPUB format and upload it directly to the iTunes iBookstore for sales.

OK well it’s not quite that simple (yet), but it’s not that difficult either. Just jump through a few hoops and you can get your book for sale on Apple’s online bookstore ready to be downloaded by anyone who owns an iPad or iPhone, here’s how:

Write and Publish a Book to the Apple iBook Store

First, some relatively simple requirements: you’ll need an Intel Mac running 10.5 or newer with adequate hard disk space and preferably a high speed internet connection.

1. Write the book (obvious) and get it into the iBooks compatible EPUB format (see below, it is easy to take a file and convert to EPUB format)
2. Get a unique ISBN number for each book title you plan to release. Cost is $25 per ISBN and you can fill out an ISBN application here
3. Get the following ready: a US tax ID (social security number or EIN), valid iTunes account with credit card on file
4. When all of the above is met, you can apply to be part of the iBookstore distribution network at Apple.com

How do I create an ebook in the EPUB format?

Almost any text containing document format can be converted into EPUB ebook format and there are multiple free software options available to do this. If you would like a walkthrough check out our guide on how to convert to EPUB. It covers most major source file types you’d want to convert including PDF, RTF, HTML, DOC, TXT, and more.

Thanks to a recent software update, you can also create an ePub with Pages if you already own the iWork office productivity suite from Apple.

If you’re looking for a free solution that doesn’t involve iWork/Pages and you don’t need help, just go ahead and download Calibre, it is a good choice because it will automatically create book structures like chapters, table of contents, and allow you to insert book metadata. Oh, and it’s free (open source is nice). The interface is a little strange but it gets the job done and for the wonderful price of free, we can’t complain too much.

Can I convert an existing text or word file to EPUB?

Yes, you will need to download a program that handles the ebook conversion for you. There are many free options, see above or refer to our article on how to convert to EPUB.

Can anyone help me sell my book on Apple’s iBookstore?

Yes, there are several companies that will handle many of the complexities of selling on the iBookstore for you, but you’ll still need your book ready in the EPUB format. The best way to do this is to use an Apple approved iBookstore aggregator, Apple conveniently provides a list of approved aggregators for the iBookStore. Most of these charge an upfront fee and then handle all the distribution services for you, in many cases you’ll then receive 100% of the revenue of book sales after Apple takes their iTunes Store cut. Prices vary widely so be sure to get a few quotes before agreeing to a single aggregator.

This is the old setup of Paul Stamatiou which includes a MacBook Pro 17″, and two 24″ monitors, one hooked up to the MacBook Pro and the other hooked up to a Windows 7 PC. I might be wrong but the speakers look a lot like the amazing sounding AudioEngine A5 series. Looking pretty sweet!

The long awaited Netflix app for iPhone is finally here. It’s a free download and you can sign up for a free trial membership to watch movies, but to really enjoy the perks of Netflix you’ll need to sign up for a membership which runs about $9/month.

As expected you can manager your queue and other essential Netflix tasks, but the app is especially cool because it will remember where you left a movie off, allowing you to resume watching it later from your TV, computer, or even iPad. I am a complete Netflix addict so it’s great to finally have it on the iPhone in addition to the iPad (the app also runs on the iPod touch).

You can grab Netflix for iPhone from the iTunes app store, no surprise but it is currently the #1 app on the App Store.

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.

By pasting the following small function into your .profile, you’ll be able to print random tweets from any Twitter feed:

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Photo Booth on the Mac defaults to flipping your images horizontally, this happens automatically without any user input and without it being noticed, it’s just how the camera within Photo Booth displays pictures, making it function more like a mirror rather than a traditional camera.

If you don’t images to flip like that, you can make an adjustment through the settings that will cause Photo Booth to show camera images on screen as if they were being seen from another person, rather than being flipped.

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You can now create ePub ebook files directly within Apple software thanks to a recent iWork update to the Pages app for Mac. The iWork update brings Pages to a version which includes functionality to export documents as ePub format, it’s easy to do.

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Evom is a great free Mac app that converts video to audio tracks and lets you easily download the audio of flash movies from the web to your Mac. The interface is nice and simple, you can just drag a URL or file into the app and the video will download and convert for you, giving you local file system access to the audio of a source video. One common use for tools like this is turning interesting web videos into audio tracks and podcasts, like a conference talk for example, but you can imagine other use-cases as well. Now that’s exactly what I think is perhaps the best part about this app; you can easily download video and just save the audio track as an mp3 file, letting you play it in iTunes on a Mac or PC, or copy it over to an iPhone or iPad for listening in the Music app. This is great for the aforementioned conference talk example, an interesting video, or even something like an audio lesson that you enjoy but you can’t track it down otherwise.

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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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