Anytime I find myself doing a repetitive task, it is crucial that I discover small tricks and workarounds to make my daily routine as efficient as possible. I have long been a Linux user, so naturally I lean towards opening up the Terminal and using the familiar bash shell environment that I have mastered on many different operating systems. I’m really happy that Apple decided to build Mac OS X on top of a Unix, as it immediately opened the door for any Unix user to jump right in and feel at home within the Macintosh community. Ok – well, maybe not feel “at home”, but it is quite comforting to be navigating my MacBook Pro’s filesystem with my keyboard. Enough of that, lets get into my latest use of the command line in Mac OS X.

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Want to manually adjust the backlighting on your MacBook Pro keyboard? You can do that easier than you might think. With the push of a few buttons, you can turn the brightness of the keyboard backlighting up, or you can turn the brightness of the keyboard backlighting down (or even off). The secret is simply to know which keyboard buttons to press to control keyboard backlighting and to adjust it manually.

On MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and MacBook with backlit keyboards, you will use F5 and F6 to turn keyboard backlighting brightness up or down.

• Use F5 to turn the backlit keyboard brightness down

• Use F6 to turn the backlit keyboard illumination brightness up

These two keys are at the top of the keyboard on Macs that support the feature. This includes all new model MacBook Air and MacBook Pro machines, though older Macs may not have the dedicated keys and may require using the “Function” (FN) key to initiate the changes yourself.

How to Stop the Mac from Automatically Adjusting Keyboard Backlighting

If you want the Mac laptop to stop automatically adjusting keyboard backlighting intensity on it’s own, you can turn off that setting:

1. Go to System Preferences from the  Apple menu, selecting the “Keyboard” preference panel
2. Find and uncheck the box for “Automatically illuminate keyboard in low light” to gain full manual controls

Once upon a time Mac laptop users didn’t have these direct controls, and had to rely on third party software for similar functionality of turning up or down the backlighting brightness.

Third party utilities are no longer needed to gain manual adjustments for the MacBook keyboard illumination, as it is now built natively into Mac OS X on all supported Macs, including the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Accordingly, this article has been updated to support the new built-in methods to control backlight keyboards, though we retained the original method with LabTick for posterity and for those who would prefer to use the menu bar item.

Below is the older approach that continues to work for Macs that do not have the manual support keys, or for users who would prefer to use the third party utility for Snow Leopard to control the key brightness:
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Mac users may find it helpful to automatically launch an application upon system start of Mac OS X. Basically this means as soon as the Mac is done booting, the approved auto-launch apps will open themselves once the user has logged into the Mac and the Mac OS desktop has displayed. You can add as many apps as you want to the automatic launch list, but it’s best to use this feature prudently so you don’t needlessly slow down the boot time of the computer.

We will show you how to launch applications on system start of MacOS X, and also how to remove Mac apps from the automatic launch list.

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Does your Mac not support Front Row? Have you been drooling green in envy as your friends flip through their media collections? Drool no more, there is a solution to get Front Row running on your Mac! Front Row Enabler is a simple app that patches Mac OS X and allows the installation of Front Row on technically unsupported Macs.

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Ever wished you could have multiple Mac OS X Docks at the same time? Maybe you want one at the left and right and bottom of your screen? Then DockFun is for you for those of you who’ve wished you could have more than one Dock in Mac OS X.

The other day I became annoyed with how many icons I was starting to accumulate in my Mac OS X Dock (the Application Launcher we pretty much all rely on). I thought to myself, geez it would be really handy to be able to switch between a couple of predefined Docks. A few googles later and I stumbled upon a killer-app, DockFun!

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Time to visit the Apple menu and fire up Software Update. Apple has released a new Security Update, recommended for all Mac users. Owners of the eMac, iBook, iMac, PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4, and Power Mac G4 affected by the airport vulnerability should pay extra attention to this update. It fixes the Airport driver exploit, which potentially allowed the execution of unwanted code. This update also improves the security of: AirPort, ATS, CFNetwork, Finder, Font Book, Font Importer, Installer, OpenSSL, PHP, PPP, Samba, Security Framework, VPN, WebKit, gnuzip, perl

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Handbrake is a no frills easy to use open source video conversion utility, which used to be known as Instant HandBrake. HandBrake makes taking any DVD you own and placing it on your Mac/iPod/iPhone/iPad easier and more instant than ever before. And of course, I should mention that Handbrake can also convert your DVD Videos to a format Sony’s PSP can understand. When converting DVD Videos to your iPod, you can choose from the standard MPEG-4 format (perfect for pocket viewing), or if you plan on hooking your iPod up to a television, H.264 encoded video is also supported.

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Here’s a very useful key combination that allows you to instantly summon a dictionary from the web browsers in Mac OS X.

If you’re in Safari (and many other Mac OS X apps and browsers), hit control-command-D keystroke together while you hover over a word, a dictionary will pop up with that words definition!

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If you’re anything like the rest of us Mac geeks, we’re dying for the Mac OS X Leopard 10.5 release and its snazzy new features. Thankfully, we can have the technology of Spaces right now, one of Leopards coolest features, with a program called VirtueDesktops. VirtueDesktops is a virtual desktop manager that has some great features and a very attractive interface, featuring cool transitions and simple keystrokes to activate.

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If you own a Mac laptop, you’ll want this great app. CoconutBattery provides the usual current battery charge information, but that’s not what makes it cool.

Anyone that has owned a device operated by rechargeable batteries can tell you that over time the capacity diminishes. That is what makes CoconutBattery so unique, it provides detailed information on your batteries life, comparing original and current battery capacity of a MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air.

This is a very useful tool for MacBook owners, and it’s free too.

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If you’re a blogger, web developer, programmer, graphic artist, or general Mac geek, you probably regularly encounter and use PNG files. While PNG is a great format, it can be a little bloated – this is why you need the Ping app. Ping works by optimizing a variety of aspects of the PNG format (palette, compression parameters, IDAT chunks, etc.) but it does not remove any image information from the file. Just how good is this little app? We put it to the test!

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Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, OSXDaily.com thought it would be fitting to compile of list of holiday cheer spreading Mac OS X applications. Some of the apps we came across will definitely make you chuckle, while others offer a very nice, subtle addition to your Desktop for the month of December. With rising energy costs why not save some money and throw some lights up on your desktop as apposed to all over your house? Certainly at least one of these applications will quench your thirst for holiday spirit on your Macintosh!

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The Mac OS X command line interface is home to thousands of programs that the average user doesn’t know exists. Leveraging years of hard work by the GNU foundation and others in the open source community, Apple designed a wonderful OS that doesn’t “need” any use of the command line. While using the command line in Mac OS X is not necessary for the every day operation of a Macintosh, if harnessed correctly, it can save you a lot of time, and occasionally give you a laugh. I hope you enjoy these ten OS X command line utilities!

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Want to search for available wi-fi networks quickly and easily from a Mac? Have you ever been on the road with your MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iBook or PowerBook and needed to find a Wireless access point quickly to send a quick email, post an important blog entry, or check the latest news? Me too, and if you don’t have it already – you need iStumbler, because it will make this task much easier.

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Pacifist is one of those really useful apps you wish you had that you didn’t know existed. Pacifist is a shareware application that opens Mac OS X .pkg package files, .dmg disk images, and .tar, .tgz, and .tar.gz file archives and allows you to extract individual files and folders out of them. This is useful, for instance, if an application which is installed by the operating system becomes damaged and needs to be reinstalled without the hassle of reinstalling all of Mac OS X.

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If you are a Mac user and you ever have to horse around with CSS, look no further than CSSEdit. This is without a doubt the best Mac application for editing CSS, with live previews and awesome syntax grouping. Descriptions really don’t do it justice, so it’s the kind of app you just have to try out yourself – you will be amazed.

Features include:

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OS X Daily will bring you the latest in cool Mac OS X apps, Mac tips, OS X tricks, and everything else related to Apple’s awesome Mac OS X operating system!

Stay tuned for more!