iTunes 9.1 and forward changed the way it handles song conversions. I’m not quite sure why but Apple made it so converting a song to a different format is no longer just a matter of right-clicking and converting. Instead, with iTunes you’ll have to make an adjustment in iTunes Preferences first.

First, select the conversion format in iTunes:
* Open iTunes Preferences
* Click on “Import Settings”
* Choose the format you want to convert to by using the ‘Import Using’ menu: AAC, AIFF, Apple Lossless Encoder (MP4 or M4A), MP3, WAV
* Click ‘OK’

Now when you want to convert any song to the new format:
* Click on the song you want converted in iTunes
* Click on the ‘Advanced’ menu
* Scroll down to ‘Create MP3 Version’ (or whatever format you selected earlier)

iTunes will then convert the song to the format you selected just as it did in any prior version. If you want to make an iPhone ringtone you’ll want to use the Apple Lossless Encoder or AAC and then rename the .m4a file extension to .m4r just as before.

I’m always interested in how professionals use Mac’s in their everyday life. I couldn’t help but notice when browsing through photographer Noah Kalina‘s Flickr stream that he’s also a Mac user! Other than his photography, Noah is perhaps most famous for taking a daily picture of himself for six years and turning it into a video. He’s actually got a bunch of pictures of his MacBook Pro sitting alone in various hotel rooms as he’s traveled around.

If you’re interested in photography, take a look at some of Noah’s work via his Flickr stream (note that there is some NSFW content).

Adobe just can’t get a break with Flash on the Mac. Before you get too excited about the Flash Gala plugin, you might want to look at these performance results from Engadget. The new MacBook Pro with a Core i7 processor performed quite well with the beta Gala plugin, with CPU utilization going down anywhere from 30%-50%, but it’s brother with a Core i5 processor performed significantly worse than using the Flash player without hardware decoding, with processor utilization going up 20%.

What gives? Well, it’s basically beta software and Apple just recently opened access to the hardware, so there’s obviously a lot of room for optimization to be had. For the time being though, if you like running dodgy development builds and have a Mac with a GeForce 9400M, 320M, or 330M GPU, you can check out the beta plugin at Adobe Labs. Personally, we’d wait a while.

I don’t know about anyone else but I’d love to know Steve Jobs thoughts on this particular benchmark since he is such a fan of Flash, just for comic value alone.

Well, Steam for Mac was supposed to be available in April, but with the month nearly over they missed that release target and have now set an official release date of May 12. According to JoyStiq, Steam sent them the following short message:

“Valve today announced the public release of Steam for the Mac is May 12. Please stay tuned for more information.”

That’s it then, two weeks from now Mac users will finally have Steam. A two week delay isn’t too bad right? Let’s hope it doesn’t turn into two months.

If you have any interest in playing Team Fortress 2, CounterStrike, and the other Steam games, be sure to check out the system requirements for Steam in Mac OS X. Basically, you’ll want a newer Mac (think 2008 and newer) to run it well.

Do you have a collection of images and photos that you’d like to become a screen saver on the Mac? This offers a simple and nice way to customize a screen saver to include only your own images and pictures, and it’s quite easy to accomplish in macOS and Mac OS X.

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Gas Mask is a simple hosts file manager that sits in your menubar and allows you to easily edit and switch between multiple hosts files. With support for syntax highlighting, Growl, and hotkey hosts switching, it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to deal with multiple hosts files on a Mac. Gas Mask is a freely available download,open source and donationware

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If you ever wanted to know exactly what Steve Jobs thinks about Flash, you’ve got your chance. Apple’s CEO has released a lengthy letter detailing why Apple does not allow Flash on it’s iPhone, iPod, and iPad devices. Calling Flash part of the “past” and “PC era”, he addresses six major points as to why Apple is leaving Flash behind, they are:

* openness of the platforms
* the ‘full web’ and video experience
* reliability, security, and battery performance
* battery life of devices
* touch user-input
* the pain of third-party developer tools

The entire 1671 word essay in it’s entirety is repeated below:
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ShrinkIt is a handy little app that greatly reduces the file size of Illustrator generated PDF’s. Created as an internal tool, the developers over at Panic realized that PDF files saved from Adobe Illustrator were loaded with loads of extra nonsense metadata, even patterns, preview bitmaps, swatches, creating enormous PDF file sizes when they should be much smaller. The solution? Process the Adobe bloatfile through Apple’s PDF processor. You can do this yourself through Preview, but it’s a pain to open and re-save tons of PDF files, thus the creation of ShrinkIt. Now you can drag and drop your Illustrator PDF’s into ShrinkIt and you’ll save a whole lot of space (the original file is always kept, just renamed).

ShrinkIt is for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard only.

ShrinkIt developer home
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Blizzard has just announced via Twitter that the official StarCraft 2 Beta client for Mac is now available. At the moment, the beta is only available for testing on North American servers but that is expected to expand soon.

Many game stores are offering free StarCraft 2 Beta keys with the pre-order of StarCraft 2, including GameStop.com and Amazon.com. Both Amazon and GameStop will email you the beta key within 5 days of your pre-order purchase.

Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference is set for June 7-11 this year, and many desktop Mac developers are shaking their heads wondering where the love is. The tagline for this years WWDC conference is “The center of the app universe” and Apple’s Design Awards are curiously lacking a Mac OS X category, instead favoring iPhone and iPad apps from the App Store. The Mac development community was quick to notice this and have been voicing their opinions, as TUAW gathers a few poignant quotes from frustrated developers:

“Eliminating the Apple Design Awards for desktop applications in 2010 is premature and an insult to the thousands of programmers who devote their days to making the Mac desktop a fun and productive environment.” – Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch

“…the lack of a Mac ADA when there is still great Mac software being made is a bit of a slap in the face. Whether it’s intentional or not, Apple is saying that the Mac is not an important platform compared to the iPhone and iPad.” – Justin Williams of Second Gear Software

Perhaps there is a lack of Mac attention because Mac OS X 10.7 has been delayed due to Apple’s focus on iPhone OS? Maybe there is some truth to the rumors of a desktop Mac App Store? Or is Apple planning a major announcement regarding the future of Mac OS at WWDC? With no clear answers, the Mac community is left to speculate. Whatever the reasons, many loyal Mac users and developers remain disappointed as this years event takes a clear turn away from the Mac desktop and into the mobile world.

If you’re a Mac user who is into gaming, you’ll probably be thrilled to know that Steam is available on the Mac OS ecosystem. But before you go jumping for joy for Steam on the Mac, you might want to make sure the Mac you have supports Steam.

Here’s what we know about the basic minimum system requirements for the Mac Steam client:

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Ping is an essential utility for network administrators, but it’s also pretty handy to check if websites are online, how your internet connection is working, if you are experiencing lag or packet loss on a network connection, or to determine if a network resource is available.

Mac users can access and use ping to target any domain or IP address.

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Apple’s first tablet of sorts, the Newton, was introduced 17 years ago in 1993 but didn’t catch on. People weren’t ready for it, and the technology wasn’t as fancy or awe inspiring as when you fast-forward the iPad of today. Interesting how they’re so similar though, isn’t it? CheerfulSW summarizes the two devices as so:

1998: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The Newton.

2010: A revolutionary, lovable Apple PDA with little squareish icons, on-screen keyboard, common icons across the bottom, single-tasking, and the best compact keyboard of the decade, complete with an ungainly but functional fold-out case. The iPad.

When I see things like this I can’t help but wonder where the Mac, iPad, and iPhone are going to be years from now, as Apple continues to refine the user experience. Will the two platforms eventually merge?

If you’re interested in the iPad, the Newton, usability, and design, check out CheerfulSW’s enjoyable read on the iPad being a “work of obvious”.

If you are running a dual-display setup, you can easily adjust the primary display monitor in Mac OS X. When would you want to do this? For example, if you have a MacBook Pro 13″ hooked up to a larger external display, and you want the external display with it’s higher resolution to become the primary display, and your MacBook Pro with it’s smaller resolution to become the secondary display. This is just a matter of settings adjustments and it only takes a minute to configure, though it’s not particularly obvious at first glance.

Let’s walk through how to set the primary screens on a multi-display Mac setup.

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NTFS Mounter is a simple utility that sits in your menubar and lets you select NTFS volumes to mount and write to. Interestingly enough, Mac OS X has been able to mount NTFS volumes with read and write support as of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, although this is not officially supported or sanctioned by Apple. The app is just a simple interface to Mac OS X’s now built-in ability to do this. And yes, that means NTFS Mounter is Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard only.

I tried out NTFS Mounter and it worked as advertised, making it a total cinch to mount Windows NTFS volumes and write to them. The app itself is really easy to use, although it’s a bit quirky with the cat icons, cat sitting in your menubar, and cat interface (and yes the above cat image is the apps official logo). Beyond that I do wonder about the functionality itself. Since Apple doesn’t officially support the ability to write to NTFS, is there some inherent trouble or instability with doing so from Mac OS X? If it’s a feature why not brag about it, right? Nonetheless, the app works fine and I didn’t have any problems.

NTFS Mounter is a free download, so check it out if you’re interested.

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Every Mac has a variety of optional boot functions that can be used to intervene during the Mac OS X system startup. These are typically in the form of a single keys held down, or a press of keystrokes and hotkeys, used to issue a command and thereby adjust the booting behavior of Mac OS X. The effects of holding the different keys on boot are varied, and each can be desirable for a wide variety of applications.

The booting keys available to Macs upon Mac OS X system start are listed below.

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“I use Visio frequently at work in an all Windows environment, but I really don’t want to have to install Parallels or Boot Camp on my new MacBook just to run Visio. Is there some kind of alternative like Visio for Mac OS X?”

This is a great question, and I think you’ll be quite pleased to hear there’s an excellent Visio alternative that runs natively in Mac OS X, it’s called OmniGraffle. Omnigraffle is a excellent application that lets you quickly draw beautiful charts and diagrams that are perfect for presentations, project specs, website mockups, page layouts, documentation, or any other visual communication need.
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Now here’s a contrast, a unibody aluminum MacBook with a blast from the past… a PowerBook Duo 270c! The PowerBook Duo series was just about the most stylish and snazzy laptop you could get in the early to mid 1990’s, but over a decade later it just can’t compete with a unibody MacBook.

[ via Flickr ]