If you want to start developing for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, the first thing you’ll need to do is download and install the iPhone SDK. Yes, the iPhone SDK is what you will want to download even if you have no intention on developing for the iPhone itself and only the iPad, they both run the same iPhone OS operating system.

You will need your Apple user ID, this is the same login you use when you access iTunes, register an Apple product, use the Apple forums, and for other communication with Apple.

Downloading the iPhone SDK

* Go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone
* Enter your Apple login ID information and login
* Once you are logged into the iPhone Development Center, look for the ‘Downloads’ link for iPhone SDK, it is usually bundled with Xcode and will be labeled something like “Xcode 3.2.2 and iPhone SDK 3.2”, the combined download size of the iPhone SDK and Xcode is about 2.3 GB, and takes about 6.5GB of hard drive space to install.

Installing the iPhone SDK

* Once the file is finished downloading, launch the installer and follow the onscreen installation instructions. Remember that a sizable amount of disk space will be used to install Xcode and iPhone SDK.
* After the installation is complete, you will have a new directory located at the root of your Mac called ‘Developer’, inside this directory will be developer apps, tools, resources, the iPhone simulator, and more.

What’s next? Books? Sample code?

If you’re new to iPhone and iPad development, picking up a good book on the topic is a pretty good idea. Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK is a popular choice on Amazon and is a good starting point.

Another good resource is the iPhone OS reference library on Apple.com, there’s plenty of code samples and other helpful information. Apple’s iPhone Human Interface Guidelines is a helpful read too when working on an interface for your app.

If you want to save and watch many web-based movies and Flash files directly to your Mac for later offline viewing try this neat reader provided tip out. Sent in by Robert Warner, he writes this handy trick to download just about any videos directly to your Mac using only Safari and the little-used Activity Monitor feature of the app, without installing any additional software.

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Hulu for the iPad is still under development, but that doesn’t mean you can’t watch Hulu content and TV shows right now on your iPad. If you’re a fan of ABC shows like LOST, Flash Forward, Grey’s Anatomy, Modern Family, Desperate Housewives, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and whatever else is on their lineup, the official ABC Player for iPad is free [iTunes link] and works practically identically to Hulu and lets you stream any TV show to your iPad for viewing free.

Hulu for the iPad

Hulu for the iPad is rumored to be available sometime relatively soon, possibly even before the end of this month. There’s speculation that the Hulu for iPad app will actually be a paid monthly subscription service costing $9.95, which is interesting considering one of the Hulu partners, ABC, has the aforementioned freely available ABC Player available on the iPad.

Netflix on the iPad

Another option for watching video content on your iPad right now is the freely available Netflix app [iTunes link] but that requires a separate subscription service to actually view the Netflix downloads on your iPad.

Watch Hulu content on your iPad right now

If you’re absolutely committed to watching Hulu content on your iPad, try the solution for watching Hulu on the iPhone. This method works exactly the same on the iPad and you’ll need the following:

* Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installed
* Latest version of QuickTime Player (with Screen Recording support)
* Hulu Desktop client for Mac (for easy full-screen mode)
* The audio recording utility called SoundFlower (so you can record system audio while a screencast is going on)

Basically by watching Hulu and then recording the screen and capturing audio, you can save the screencast to an iPhone/iPad compatible format and watch it on the devices. The method was intended for viewing Hulu on the iPhone but works on the iPad as well, unfortunately it’s not the most instantaneous method, but if there’s a show that’s only available on Hulu and you can’t wait for the official app, this is your best bet.
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The iPhone & iPod Touch have a bunch of built-in preset equalizer settings, which are nice and all but they don’t work for everyone. The preset EQ settings are particularly weak when you compare them to the control you have with the iTunes Equalizer.

So what’s an iPhone or iPod touch user to do? Well, you can actually override the iPhone’s preset EQ settings by hard coding the settings into songs within iTunes.

* Set and save your custom iTunes Equalizer settings as a preset
* Select all the songs within iTunes that you want these EQ settings applied to
* Right-Click on a song title, click “Get Info”
* Click the “Options” tab
* Click on the pull-down menu next to “Equalizer Preset” and select the iTunes Equalizer preset value you saved earlier
* Click “OK” and wait, this will take a while as all the songs are now having the custom EQ settings applied to them
* When these songs are synced with your iPhone/iPod Touch, they will now have the custom equalizer settings

So if the default iPhone and iPod Touch equalizer presets aren’t enough for you, try this out, it works! Try out these best iTunes equalizer settings too.

[ screenshot via Jim Cloudman ]

What is known as “Print Screen” in the Windows world is called screen captures or screen shots in Mac OS X. You’ve probably noticed there is no ‘Print Screen’ button on a Mac keyboard, this is to both simplify the keyboard and also because it’s just unnecessary. On the Mac, instead of hitting a “Print Screen” button, you’ll hit one of several keyboard combination shortcuts to perform a specific action, depending on the exact screen capture action you want taken. This is both easier and much more powerful, given that there are ultimately six unique options to perform variations of the screen print on Mac.
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It’s official: Steam for Mac is now available to download and there’s a lot of games available through the client, check the list at the bottom of this post for all of them.

To have an even greater incentive to download Steam, Portal is free to download until May 24th. Portal is a unique puzzle game where you teleport yourself around with a portal gun to solve puzzles, it’s kind of hard to explain and it’s best played to understand. So make sure your Mac fits the Steam system requirements and check it out, it’s free, why not?

Update: here’s the full list of games available right now for Mac Steam, courtesy of Brian D:
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I’ve always preferred the way the original MacBook and MacBook Pro’s handled the function keys, in particularly the way F9, F10, and F11 are used to enter into Expose and Mission Control.

For a while now the function keys have changed, they default to playing music, adjusting keyboard backlighting, and adjusting volume levels, I like these features but I would rather press the ‘fn’ key to access those since I have grown used to the older way of hitting F10 to enter Expose.

Thankfully this is easily adjustable in Mac OS X, and you can switch Mac function keys to work as standard function keys if you’d like too.

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Property List files, or more commonly known as plist files, are basically Mac application specific preference files. They contain information and settings for various applications and are usually in the easily identifiable format of com.developer.Application.plist and located within the /Library/Preferences/ directories at the system and user level.

If you simply want to view a plist file, you can give it a glance with Quick Look, but what if you want to edit a plist file on the Mac? To properly edit and modify plist files in Mac OS X, you’ll want to get a dedicated app to do so, and fortunately Apple offers one such application which allows for easy safe editing and saving of plist files.

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You can make save a lot of clutter from showing in the Dock of Mac OS X by making applications minimize into their own Dock icon. What this means is that if you minimize an app, rather than having the little thumbnail stay on the right side of the Mac Dock, it will minimize directly into the apps icon instead. Fairly self explanatory and useful, right?

Here’s how to enable this handy little tidy Dock feature, it works in just about every version of Mac OS.

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NameChanger is a free app solution to quickly and easily batch rename files in Mac OS X. It has all the features you’d expect in a batch renaming app, and you can replace occurrences of text in filenames, use wildcards, append text or characters, add dates, make files sequential, and even remove characters, just select your options and you’ll see a live preview as to what the new names will be.

Using it is very easy, you can import files from the app, or use the standard drag-drop support feature. Adjust your parameters for renaming the file(s), and when you’re satisfied with the output of how you want the files to be renamed, all you need to do is click a button and away you go, the files are renamed quickly. There’s even a live preview of the changed names so you can be sure you get things right before initiating the changes.
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You can create a folder that is hidden from the default Finder GUI view by taking advantage of Mac OS X’s unix underpinnings. That probably sounds a lot more complex than it is however, and it turns out it’s actually really easy to make a completely hidden folder on the Mac.

This walkthrough details how to both make the hidden folder, and then how to access it yourself in Mac OS.

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If you want to discover the last time a specific command was used without actually executing it, follow this format at the command line:

!sudo:p

The above example will print back the last usage of the ‘sudo’ command without actually executing it, which is very useful in some situations (like the situation below, where the last time the sudo command was used was deleting everything recursively!). You will see the last used command printed directly below:

$ !sudo:p
sudo rm -rf /var/logs/*

This works with anything, even incomplete commands. Can’t remember that obscure command you used last week, but you know it started with a t? No problem!

!t:p
might print something like this:
time grep -c and rewin.sh

It’s important to note the :p modifier at the end of the command is what is responsible for printing out the command rather than executing it, which is the default behavior for the bash history command ! so if you had just typed !p it would execute the last time a command beginning with ‘p’ was executed, but !p:p will print out the command minus the execution.

I know what you’re thinking, you’re asking yourself “What would Steve Jobs head look like if it was carved out of mozzarella cheese?” right?

Well, here is your answer, from The Cooks Den.

Amazing huh? Someone carved that out of cheese, who would have known that is possible?

Ok, so we like Steve Jobs, and we like mozzarella cheese, so maybe this works out just fine?

I don’t know about you, but it kind of makes me want pizza, and a new Mac.

The resemblence is pretty good, huh?

Anyone good at carving cheese? I don’t even know where to begin.

What would happen if you tried to use the iPad as a skateboard? Well this is the internet, so of course someone asked that question, built an iPad skateboard, and then attempted to ride it, all while filming. File this under the stupid entertainment category, and thanks to 9to5mac for discovering the video. Spoiler: the iPad doesn’t survive.

Would you like to manually choose which graphics card is in use on a MacBook Pro? You can now keep track of which GPU is in use and then manually switch between the two graphics cards included within the MacBook Pro series, thanks to a third party utility called gfxCardStatus. It’s a free app and to be able to switch GPU on the fly all you need to do is download a utility called gfxCardStatus, we’ll show you how it works.

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Can you find a more awesome Mac setup? Check out these machines and their stats, they’re sure to make you envious:

Mac Pro
* Intel Xeon W3540 2.93Ghz Quad Core
* 6GB DDR3 1067 ECC RAM
* ATi Radeon HD 4870
* 1TB OS X
* 640GB Windows 7 64bit
* Dual 23″ Apple Cinema HD Displays

MacBook Pro 15″
* Intel Core 2 Duo 2.53Ghz
* 4GB DDR3 RAM
* nVidia GeForce 9400M / 9600GT 512MB
* 320GB 7,200 Western Digital Black HDD

And of course there’s a set of speakers, a couple external hard drives, and iPod, and an iPhone.

This might just be one of best Mac setups I’ve seen. I certainly wouldn’t mind having that hardware on my desk!

[ via DeviantArt ]

“The operation can’t be completed because an unexpected error occured (error code 0).”

You’re likely to see this error when you are attempting to copy files to an external hard drive that is formatted as FAT. FAT32 is a Windows file system that can be read and written to by Mac OS X.

The problem with FAT32 format is that they can not hold file sizes larger than 4GB, so if you are trying to copy a file that is larger than 4GB to a FAT32 formatted drive you will immediately be presented with the ‘error code 0’ message.

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Where in the US are the highest concentrations of Apple users? A report on Fortune shows us. Here are the top ten US markets for Apple:

* San Francisco / Silicon Valley / Bay Area, CA – Residents are 49% more likely than the average American to be Apple users, no surprise with Apple’s headquarters just down the road in Cupertino.
* Boston, MA – Nearly 1/3 of adults in the Boston area have an iPod, iPhone, or Mac.
* San Diego, CA – 31.8% of the areas residents are Mac users
* New York, NY – 4.9 million Mac users
* Washington, DC – residents are 39% more likely to use a Mac, iPod, or Apple
* Chicago, IL – 2.1 million Apple users
* Denver, CO – 29% of the population are Apple users
* Monterey / Salinas, CA – 28% of the population own or use Apple products
* Santa Barbara / Santa Maria / San Luis Obispo, CA – this beachy region of southern California boasts a nearly 28% Apple user rate
* Las Vegas, NV – 27.9% of adults use an Apple product

Looking at the map is pretty interesting, you can really see the concentration of Apple users is highest around large cities, which is no surprise considering most of the Apple Stores are based in metropolitan areas. California is truly an Apple state, I don’t think I have ever visited a coffee shop or cafe in the Bay Area and not seen a sea of glowing Mac logos. The same is certainly true for many universities, where Mac’s dominate classrooms and campuses.