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

I’ve been on a bit of a retro and minimalism kick lately, preferring simplified apps that take me back to the good old days of BBS’s and 2400bps modems (ok maybe not the modems), and when I saw that GLTerminal has a new release I was pleased since I can finally run it in a modern version of OS X. It’s basically just a Terminal replacement that uses GL to create the appearance of an oldschool terminal, complete with monitor curvature and all. Everything else works as it should, so if you’re looking for a fullscreen old school alternative for Terminal, or just want something fun to work in for a while, try out GLTerminal.

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If you’re a Comcast customer and you’ve entered in an incorrect URL or had a server time out recently, you’ve probably been extremely annoyed when you discovered you were being redirected to a page filled with Comcast ads. Comically, this obnoxious DNS redirect is named the ‘Comcast Domain Helper service’, and was forced on you whether you wanted it or not.

Remove Comcast DNS redirect

Things you’ll need to stop Comcast from redirecting your improper URL’s:

1) Your main Comcast account User ID / email address

2) Your cable modems MAC address

3) Visit the Comcast “Domain Helper” opt-out URL

In typical Comcast style, they altered your service without your consent, and you have to actually opt-out of the DNS hijacking service, thankfully you can do it online. Good grief.

Got an older version of Mac OS X that you want to use Gmail with? While newer versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X allow for simple integration of using Google accounts with a Mac, older versions of Mac OS X don’t necessarily have these capabilities.

But not to worry, you can still use Gmail on older OS X versions with the Mail app on Mac, you just have to know how to set it up!

This is a question you may see from time to time, particularly with people who have older hardware and OS X versions. In this situation, a friend of mine asked me how to setup the Mac OS X Mail.app to use Gmail and just when I was about to write up a detailed how-to for her, I came across an excellent guide on one of OS X Daily’s very own readers sites.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, check out Khürt Williams excellent walk-through, complete with screenshots:

IslandInTheNet.com – How to setup Mail app to use Gmail

Thanks Khürt!

Of course with newer versions of Mac OS X you can simply add the Gmail email account directly to the Mail app or through System Preferences, but the techniques described here apply to older versions of Mac OS X and OS X.

The iPhone, iPhone accessories, and iPhone ringtones are all the rage right now, so why not make your own iPhone ringtone? With a Mac or Windows PC it’s pretty straightforward using iTunes, follow these 10 steps and you can easily create your own iPhone Ringtone from whatever song you want. Note that songs with DRM will not usually work, meaning things purchased from the iTunes Music Store will probably not be able to turn into ringtones if they have DRM protection.

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This is a particularly handy trick for when you have limited screen real estate and want to fit more of a windows display on screen. A perfect example of this are the Hackintosh owners out there that are working with small netbook screen resolutions and some windows just don’t display properly, or won’t even fit on the screen. Instead of changing the actual screen resolution and losing screen real estate, you can scale all windows within OS X up or down by using the Terminal:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 0.8

This will render all displayed elements at 80% of their original size

killall Finder

To set back to the default simply change the Scale Factor to 1.0 like so:

defaults write -g AppleDisplayScaleFactor 1.0

If you want to make things larger and easier to see, scale up to 1.2 or more, just play around until you find what works best for you. Remember to kill the Finder after each change in order to make changes take place.

Note: Virtually scaling up and down GUI elements can lead to some quirky appearance issues with certain apps, so test scale factors to find what works best for you and your apps.

We don’t want it to happen, but there may come a day in all Mac owners lives that their warranty expires, and that date is related to your original date of purchase, give or take the time for any additional AppleCare warranty service you have purchased in addition.

So how do you check your Macs warranty information online? Follow these steps to find your devices serial number, then check for warranty status on the Apple Website.

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Paintbrush is a Microsoft Paint clone of sorts for Mac OS X, it’s an absolute joy to use in it’s simplicity and we are pleased that a new version is available with even more MS Paint type functions for your Mac. And we mean it, this thing is awesome at simple pixel drawing and is sure to remind you of what it was like to use the paint program way back when.

If you’re missing Microsoft Paint for your Mac then Paintbrush will scratch your itch just fine! Check out the screenshots to see just how MSPaint like this app really is, and be sure to download it now.
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If you’ve ever needed to troubleshoot a network or internet connection, you know how frustrating it can be (particularly when you’re on techsupport with various broadband providers). This quick tip can make the job a little easier on yourself by retrieving all relevant DHCP information, like DHCP server IP, client, subnet mask, router, DNS servers, everything – directly from the command line.

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I like Safari but find myself in Firefox nearly always because of a multitude of reasons. One thing I’ve long missed though is the ability to view PDF’s within the browser within Firefox, which Safari does wonderfully. If you’re tired of Firefox launching the Preview app (or even worse if you’re settings are different: Acrobat), then try this great little Firefox extension, which will pop open the PDF file into a new browser tab. Note this requires Firefox 3

Firefox Mac PDF homepage
Download Firefox Mac PDF now

In some trickier network situations, your computer may be assigned an IP but need an entirely different IP address to access certain network resources. You might be wondering, how on earth do you have two IP addresses at once on the same Mac? The answer; Create an IP Alias!

Using an IP alias allows your Mac to have more than one IP address at the same time, this can allow you to have multiple IP addresses that reference the same machine.

While this is fairly advanced topic, you will find that creating an IP alias is easy to do with the powerful Mac OS X command line utility ifconfig.

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Using your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, and you need to know the meaning of a word, and quick?

That’s easy. Just bust open Spotlight with Command + Spacebar on the Mac or iPad, or pulling down from the Home Screen on iPhone, and type in the word you want to get the definition for.

One of the top results will always be the dictionary definition of the word you entered, coming right out of Apple’s built-in Dictionary file.

This feature goes back a long while too, so as long as your Mac, iPhone, or iPad, has Spotlight, you’ll have the ability to use the software dictionary that is included with the operating system.

Remember, you can even edit the dictionary on your Mac too, if you find that a particular word is not defined as you see fit, or not defined at all. Maybe you’re inventing new words, who knows? But it sure is useful to be able to modify the dictionary if you need to, and to be able to add words to spellcheck too.

I’ve been bored with the standard Mac OS X boot up screen and it’s grey Apple logo, and a few times I have scoured around trying to change it manually to no avail. Today though, I stumbled into a post on my friends blog that makes changing the Mac OS X boot image a snap with a nice little program fittingly called BootXChanger.

With this free little app you can change the image to basically anything you want as long as the background color is the same shade of grey. The image to the right shows this done with a replaced colorful Apple logo if you want the retro look, it’s easy to get that or whatever else, or if you want to design your own little boot logo that’s fine too.

• BootXChanger homepage

Using the app is super simple, it just requires dragging and dropping another image over the existing one. Then save and reboot to see the difference. Nothing special, but kind of a fun way to customize a Mac a bit more.

Keep in mind this app is limited to OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6, so newer Macs running OS X Lion and OS X 10.9 Mavericks probably aren’t going to be able to use it.