The popular first-person shooter/action game Half-Life 2 is now available for Mac OS X. At the moment it costs $6.99, which is 30% off the regular $10 price. The expansions of Half-Life 2: Episodes One and Two are also available to download for $5.99 each.

System requirements for running Half Life 2 on your Mac are pretty similar to other Steam games:
* Mac OS X 10.5.8 or 10.6.3 or later
* 1GB of RAM
* NVidia GeForce 8, ATI X1600, or better
* Mouse, keyboard, internet connection

You can check out Half-Life 2 at the Steam store and download it from the Steam client. If you’re a fan of the Half-Life 2 series and Team Fortress 2, it’s worth getting the Orange Box set which includes the expansions and Portal, although TF2 isn’t released for the Mac yet (Steam says “Coming soon”).

You can instantly open anything in fullscreen Quick Look mode by selecting the item and then hitting the Command+Option+Y keys. If you select multiple files and enter into fullscreen mode, it’s easy to navigate between them by using the arrow keys. You can then exit full screen mode by hitting the escape key.

As a few commenters pointed out, you can also just hit Option+Spacebar to get the same effect.

Whether you’re an active or aspiring iPhone or iPad developer, you’ll really appreciate these nice PSD files from design agency Teehan+Lax. They contain well organized layered images of essential GUI elements of the iPhone OS, sized accordingly to the iPad and iPhone (depending on which PSD file you get, of course). Using these documents with Photoshop you can just open one of the PSD’s and arrange elements around to make a quick GUI mockup for your app idea. There’s also an Adobe Illustrator sketch file for iPhone elements if Photoshop isn’t your thing.

I’d highly recommend downloading all three of these files, they really help to quickly create layouts and mockups for iPhone and iPad app GUI’s. The SDK’s Interface Builder app may be foreign to you or your GUI designer, but these files will be a lot closer to the typical Adobe comfort zone.

Download iPad GUI PSD now

Download iPhone GUI PSD now

Download iPhone Sketch Elements AI now

And if you’re a iPhone OS developer, don’t forget to check out Apple’s official Human Interface Guidelines and Teehan+Lax’s blog either.

MagicPrefs is an amazing free utility for Mac that dramatically improves the functionality of your multi-touch Magic Mouse. Other than allowing for increased control over the touch sensitivity and tracking speed, you get practically full access to the multi-touch capabilities of the device.

With MagicPrefs you can bind various gestures, swipes, pinches, and taps to different functions.
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iTunes can adjust the volume levels of your music for you, so that each song is closer to one another in volume output. This is a great feature, and it has always peeved me that some songs will play louder than others, and a playlist can quickly go from one moderately loud song to one that is either extremely quiet, or over-amped and crackly sounding.

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Cyberduck is a great free FTP client for Mac OS X, but on my portable Mac’s 13″ screen the Growl popup notifications really drive me crazy as they appear on each server connection and transfer completion. Oddly enough, if you look around in the Cyberduck preferences, you won’t find an option to disable the Growl notifications, and this has to be done through the command line instead.

To disable the popup Growl notifications in Cyberduck, type the following command:

defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck growl.enable false

You can reverse this and get the Growl popup notifications back by typing:

defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck growl.enable true

Continue to enjoy Cyberduck, with or without Growl notifications!

Update: As several readers pointed out, you can also just disable Growl notifications within the System Preferences on a per app basis.

Dateline is a nice little utility that places a transparent linear calendar on your Mac desktop. It’s pretty customizable so if you want the dates to be horizontal or vertical, or the text color or their background colors to be different it’s just an easy couple of tweaks away. Perhaps the best part about Dateline though is that it integrates with iCal, so double-clicking on a date will launch iCal and show you your calendar for that day. It’s free, it’s lightweight, and it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.

Dateline developer home
Download now

A reader sent us in these goofy comic exchanges between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they have no basis in reality obviously but they’re pretty funny. Here’s three of my favorites:

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The ambient light sensor on the newer Unibody MacBook Pro (all models: 13″, 15″, 17″) is located directly next to the iSight camera at the top of the display. You can verify the location by holding your hand over the area to the left of the iSight camera and watch as your screen dims and the keyboard lights brighten.

The location of the ambient light sensor on the pre-unibody older MacBook Pro’s (all models: 15″ and 17″) is located inside the grills of the speakers near the keyboard. Again you can verify this by holding your hands over the speaker grills and watch as the screen backlighting adjusts based on the change in the ambient lighting.

If you’d like, you can stop the MacBook Pro screen from dimming by adjusting various System Preferences.

From the vintage speakers to the beautiful iMac, something about this setup just speaks to me. I don’t know of any other computer hardware that actually accents a room into something more beautiful, rather than just “oh, there’s a computer” – or maybe I just love Macs?

[ via Flickr ]

Want to save a document or web page as a PDF file, but you don’t own Adobe Acrobat? No problem, you can print documents, webpages, or nearly anything as a PDF, this means it creates a PDF file directly in Mac OS X using a built-in feature, without the need for any additional software or apps. In fact, this trick works with almost any Mac app, and basically if you can print a document or file through the normal “Print” functions, then that means you can also turn that into a PDF document through this method.

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Some pretty big news today on the iPad front, two reports on AppleInsider indicate that the iPad is already a wild success. The first report states that Apple is now selling over 200,000 iPads a week in the United States alone, which is almost twice the number of 110,000 Macs sold every week in the USA. Analysts are revising sales estimates, and also predict some product cannibalization:

…Abramsky believes Apple will sell 8 million iPads in calendar year 2010. That’s up from his previous prediction of 5 million iPads in calendar 2010. The analyst believes the product will result in 25 percent cannibalization, but increase revenue to $59.7 billion…

If that’s not impressive enough, the findings of this second report might be. The iPad has an amazingly high consumer satisfaction rating of 91%

Only 2% of iPad owners say they are unsatisfied with their purchase, and I’m really not too surprised by this. Having used an iPad a fair amount myself, I have to say I am thoroughly impressed.

I truly believe the iPad is the consumer level computing device of the future – except that it’s here now. Of course, buying an iPad right now is a different story. Apple Stores are continuously sold out of the device and trying to buy it online from Apple reports a 7 to 10 day wait time. You can still purchase the iPad on Amazon but many sellers are attempting to fetch prices higher than the MSRP, and the situation on eBay and Craigslist is even worse. So if you’re in the market for an iPad, you might have to wait a little while.

I recently bought this Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter from Amazon for my MacBook Pro. It cost less than $8 including shipping, and it arrived at my house in about four days (for comparison Apple’s official adapter is $29 + shipping).

So how does a cheap third party MiniDisplayPort to DVI adapter work compared to Apple’s official adapter? Identically. A coworker has the Apple model and other than some graphic printed on the adapter itself I can’t tell a difference in either the build quality or the performance, even the packaging is really similar (see picture below). Setup is as easy as it gets, plug the device into your MacBook Pro and connect it to your monitors DVI cable, it’ll instantly work.

I’m really happy with the purchase, I saved a couple bucks with the third party cheap adapter but there’s certainly nothing wrong with Apple’s version. Considering the huge value of having a second monitor I consider this and an external display an absolute must upgrade for any MacBook or MacBook Pro owner. So what are you waiting for? Grab a good LCD monitor (be sure your MacBook supports the maximum resolution), the Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter, and enjoy the screen real estate!

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Brian asks: “I need to add line numbers to a text file. I don’t mean line numbers in the text editor, I mean adding a number next to each item inside a text file. Is this possible to automate or do I have to manually edit the file typing 1, 2, 3 and going insane?”

Yes, you can easily hardcode line numbers into a text file… we’ll show you exactly how to do it! To be completely clear, what this is going to do is add a counting line number to the left side of each new line of text, prefixing each line with the appropriate corresponding number. This hard codes it into the text file, which means it’s different from simply showing line numbers in an app like TextWrangler, VIM, or BBEdit.
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You can remove the surface scratches on the back of an iPhone case by using a mildly abrasive rub or fine sandpaper. The anti-scratch coating is actually where many of the smaller finer scratches on iPhones are shown, which makes them relatively easy to buff out with some care. Whether you are using the toothpaste or sandpaper method to repair the scratches, you will want to be careful as to not rub the anti-scratch coating off of the iPhone case.

Warning: Try these methods at your own risk! We are not responsible for you damaging your iPhone in any way, and if you are not confident in your ability to do it right, you should probably avoid the techniques altogether!
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I find myself never using the MacBook Pro’s optical drive, the only time I have used it was to boot Mac OS from a DVD to reformat and reinstall Mac OS X. Now that it’s so easy to install Mac OS using an external drive though, is having a DVD drive really a good usage of limited hardware real estate on your MacBook/Pro?

If you’re like me, you might consider repurposing the optical drive slot to accommodate another hard drive, like a really fast SSD drive. You can do this using a great product from MCE called the OptiBay, and any internal 2.5″ drive (not just SSD’s). LifeHacker just wrote up a complete walkthrough on the hardware installation process, and it’s really motivated me to do this install myself.

What you’ll need to install a hard drive or SSD into the Optical Bay of a MacBook / MacBook Pro:

* MCE OptiBay for your MacBook Pro (starts around $99)
* A superfast SSD drive, like the Intel X25 SSD, disk space and prices vary from $115 to $430
* Carbon Copy Cloner to make bootable backups
* Patience, and comfort with disassembling computer hardware

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You can adjust Gmail Notifier’s mail checking frequency interval by accessing an advanced preference in the application. In this example we will change the email check interval to 3 minutes.

* Click the Gmail Notifier menubar icon
* Hold down Command+Option keys and click on “Preferences” in the drop down menu
* Enter the following information exactly in the Key and Value boxes:

Key: AutocheckInterval
Value: 3

* Note that AutocheckInterval is case-sensitive, the second number value is the minutes between checking.
* Click the “Set” button
* Quit and re-open Gmail Notifier

By default Gmail Notifier does not have a value set for AutocheckInterval, which can lead to extended lengths of time between email checking (hours if you’re away from your computer, and regularly 30+ minutes while at your Mac). You can also just manually adjust this setting by adding the value in a Plist editor.

If you’re like me, you store a lot of information on your iPhone that you want to keep private. Accordingly, you might be interested to know that, by default, the backups made from an iOS device to iTunes are not encrypted, and can be dug through rather freely if someone was interested in doing so. Furthermore, restoring the device and seeing all your data live on another iOS device is just a matter of clicking the restore button. While this is very convenient for restoration purposes, it also could potentially pose a security and privacy risk for some individuals and situations, particularly for users who aren’t using broader password protection on their Macs and computers.

If you’d like more security with your iPhone, iPod, and iPad backups, be sure to enable the encryption feature in iTunes. This effectively locks your iOS backups made to local Mac and Windows PC’s through iTunes with a password (note that iCloud backups are protected by the iCloud Apple ID security, and thus you don’t need to individually enable passwords for them).
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