The best thing about a sour economy are the price wars that benefit consumers, and in this case Amazon has dropped the price of 10.6 Snow Leopard 14% to $24.99, this is both good and bad news. Good news because Mac users can save 14% over Apple’s retail price, bad news because it’s $0.01 under the ‘free shipping for orders over $25’ limit – doh! You can always pad your order with something random like A Christmas Carol for $1, or better yet pick up a useful companion book like Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual. The price was also dropped 10% on the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack for 5 users down to $43.99. Sweet!

Update:Amazon has adjusted the price to $25, so it now qualifies for free shipping again.

We all know Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is the next major version of Mac OS to be released in 2009, and we know some of the features too. But going further, the UK’s Register Hardware has a nice multipage preview of Snow Leopard, pointing out some changes, refinements, and new features.

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I have an external drive partitioned in various ways, one of the partitions is formatted to FAT32 and I don’t need access to all the time. So how do I keep that from showing up needlessly when I plug the drive in? Using the command line to create an /etc/fstab entry and a bash script, you can do precisely this, thanks to a tip I found on MacOSXHints.com that worked perfectly for this problem. While not overly complicated, it’s definitely a bit more advanced than your standard Mac trick so if you aren’t comfortable with the Terminal proceed with caution. Read more at:
MacOSXHints.com – 10.5: Mount a partition or volume on demand

It’s official, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available this Friday, August 28. Confirmed by Apple’s online store, the August 28 ship date is right in line with some earlier predictions. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is basically a finely tuned and optimized version of Mac OS X, it is noticeably faster than 10.5 and is a very worthwhile upgrade to all Mac users, especially given the price. You can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon.com for $29 and it will ship free to you as soon as Amazon has it in stock. Other options for purchase are the Mac Box Set for $169 which includes 10.6 Snow Leopard, iWork, and iLife, and the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack for up to 5 users.

Apple’s QuickTime is the go-to Mac OS X app for video playback, but there’s more to QuickTime Player than meets the eye. You can rewind and fast-forward movies, increase the audio level beyond the slider limit, and even scrub frame by frame through the movie like you can in Final Cut Pro! Check out these 15 useful and largely hidden keyboard shortcuts for QuickTime Player, they are sure to improve your QuickTime movie viewing experience… and you’ll probably learn something new!

For what it’s worth, these tricks should work in all versions of QuickTime. If you notice any changes or differences in modern vs older versions, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

Let’s get started learning some awesome Quicktime key tricks:
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The fastest way to email a picture to someone in Mac OS X is also one of the easiest, and it should be very familiar to most Mac users in that it’s action is remarkably simple.

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The iPhone doesn’t have an Undo button, which is something that many of us have wondered about and wished for for quite some time. But that doesn’t mean you can’t perform an undo or redo task on your iPhone, but what you do is perform a shaking motion with the iPhone or iPod touch in any place where you have inputted text or made an action you wish to undo or redo.

There doesn’t seem to be a favor for which direction you motion the phone, side to side or up and down works about the same, clearly a result of the devices built-in motion detection abilities.
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Do you need to limit your internet speed for testing? Maybe put a cap on your transfer and download speeds for simulation of slower connections? SpeedLimit is an open source project that allows you to do that.

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Microsoft officially stopped developing Internet Explorer for Mac’s a few years ago, but you can still download and run Internet Explorer on your Mac using either an older version of the software or a few different tools. We’ll cover how to run Internet Explorer under Mac OS X using a tool called WineBottler, which allows you to run windows apps like IE6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac. Now I don’t know anyone that wants to run Internet Explorer 6 for personal use, but if you’re doing any kind of development work for the web, you likely are required to check for IE6 compatibility. Many Mac users install Windows in VMWare or Parallels to get the ability to check their work in IE, but that’s not needed thanks to WineBottler. WineBottler is dependent on Wine to be able to run Internet Explorer 6, IE7, or even IE8 on your Mac and it’s included in the WineBottler download package.

Run Internet Explorer 6 in Mac OS X with WineBottler

Developer home
Download the latest version of WineBottler

You may have noticed that WineBottler was previously named IEs4OSX, but its functionality remains the same: you can still run Internet Explorer 6, IE7, or even IE8 in Mac OS X by using it.

Update: You can also get Internet Explorer 7, IE 8, and IE9 running in Windows virtual machines for free that work in Mac OS X.

If you’re like me you tend to have 10,000 windows open at once on your Mac while you work and multitask, thanks to Expose this is not a particular problem in Mac OS X. But, there comes a time when you don’t want to use Expose to either clear the screen or select a specific window, you just want to move some of the background clutter around, to access the Desktop or something of that sort. Easily done! Hold the Command key and select a Window titlebar in the background to move it around elsewhere and clear up space, now you can access that JPG on your desktop easily without having to hide all windows!

If you really want to lock down your Mac from other users, you can set an Open Firmware (PPC) or EFI (Intel) password that will require a firmware level password immediately upon system boot, prior to Mac OS X being loaded. This is somewhat of an advanced trick and if you accidentally mess something up in OpenFirmware or EFI you could have some serious issues with your Mac.

If you’re interested in pursuing the boot level password protection though, here are two helpful links.
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I was driving myself up the wall recently trying to figure out why the Mac Preview.app would not save my image rotations when I exported a picture from Preview in OS X, so in looking for a solution I stumbled onto our friend MurphyMac‘s site and found a solution!

Basically after you have rotated the JPG image in Preview to your desired orientation do the following:

• Go to Save and click on “Use Exif Orientation Tag” to insure that your image rotation will be preserved

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The Mac Rumor mill is churning out all sorts of juicy tidbits on Apple’s latest operating system update, known as Snow Leopard. MacRumors has said that 10.6 build 10a432 has gone Golden Master, and Daring Fireball has a short cryptic post saying that 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as early as Friday, August 28! Also of interest is AppleInsider’s suggestion that OS X 10.6’s disc art will feature a Snow Leopard, literally (shown in accompanying image). And according to ArsTechnica, the install process for 10.6 has been dramatically improved over past versions as well, making for a more simplified, slimmer, and substantially faster upgrade.

Snow Leopard is coming to Mac users at a surprisingly cheap price, you can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon.com for $29 and it will ship for free as soon as it arrives. Mac users rejoice, a fantastic system update awaits us all very soon!

GeekTool is a fun system preference utility for Mac that allows you to really customize your desktop. You can dump log files, system status messages, graphs, CPU usage, and all sorts of things right onto your desktop background. Basically if you can run it in the Terminal, you can have it appear on your desktop. Check out the screenshot below, and if you’re a customization geek absolutely download GeekTool yourself. Be sure to read the excellent walkthrough on MacLife linked below that shows how to setup GeekTool to really make your mac desktop customized too. If you want weather information displayed on your desktop, LifeHacker has you covered, so read on.

Download GeekTool
Developer home
Excellent GeekTool Walkthrough @ MacLife: Customize your desktop with GeekTool
LifeHacker: Put Weather Conditions on your Desktop Using GeekTool
MurphyMac: Get Google Calender on your Desktop using GeekTool

It seems like people either love or hate Spotlight, if you love it then ignore this tip, but if you hate Spotlight and want to turn Spotlight off in 10.5 here’s your new favorite post. You can completely disable Spotlight in OS X 10.5 by moving a few system files (or you could delete them but that is strongly not recommended for various reasons). Here are the files you should move, be sure to place them in another location for backup in case you want to enable Spotlight again.

Disable Spotlight

Move these two files to another safe location and then reboot your mac

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

If you want to re-enable Spotlight just move those files back to their original location, reboot, and Spotlight will work again. Please backup the files, if you delete them you will not be able to re-enable Spotlight without a system reinstall!

If you ever want to hide a file or folder, you can quickly make it invisible with a command line utility called setfile. This is a really cool tip that should be particularly useful to those who share their mac with other people.

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The Mac menu bar contains icons for things like the status indicators and toggles of various apps, including a clock, date, time, battery, wi-fi status, sound and volume levels, displays, Time Machine backup status, user account, Spotlight, a Notifications toggle, and much more. There’s a lot of data and status details in those menu bar items of Mac OS X, and you can generally choose to order them or rearrange icons however you want.

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Here’s something that’s bound to be popular. The University of Washington is offering a Certificate program in iPhone Development, the coursework covers Cocoa too but there’s plenty of Cocoa development programs out there so it’s really the iPhone development that makes it stand out. For now the program is only offered at the University of Washington Seattle campus, but ArsTechnica reports that an online offering will be available next year.

Here’s the program description, directly from UW:

Learn the language, framework, processes, and skills to develop quality applications for Apple’s iPhone. Become familiar with Objective-C and begin developing applications in the Cocoa framework, using the iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit). Gain the tools to design, build, and test your applications, and to effectively market them through the App Store. Expand your knowledge to include more advanced Cocoa programming skills.

University of Washington: Certificate in iPhone Development

If you are interested in iPhone Development and aren’t interested in paying for a certificate program, a great place to start is Apple.com’s very own iPhone Developer site, iPhone Dev Center and by picking up a good book, we recommend Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK available from Amazon.com