After several hundred times of logging into your Mac you may be tired of looking at the same old login screen. Maybe you’d like to have a customized login screen for your school or employer’s workstations.

Forget the $10 programs that automate the process, we’ll show you how to customize the login screen entirely on your own, for free. It’s not as difficult as you might think, and it’s a fun way to personalize your Mac a bit more. Be sure to check out the screenshot below for an example of the results.

This tutorial details how customize the login screen on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4, Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6, Mac OS X Leopard 10.5, and more.

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iAlertU is a free alarm system for Intel Mac laptops and works like this: you activate the alarm via your remote or a menu, and if your Mac is moved or disturbed the screen starts flashing and a blaring an alarm sound. How does it do this? It uses your Mac’s built in SMS sensor to detect any movement of your Mac. If you spend a lot of time in libraries, coffee shops, or any public place, this app could really come in handy. While iAlertU is a really fun and creative program, be aware that it is beta software and therefore subject to some issues.

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If there are only two general usability tips that every Mac laptop owner must know about, these very well could be it. First, how to simulate a right click with your trackpad, and second, scrolling through documents much like is done with a scrollwheel.

I have long assumed these were common knowledge, but I’ve heard enough complaints and wishes and had to demonstrate them to enough people to prove otherwise. So if you don’t know about these two trackpad features, then you do now, and once you start using them, it’s impossible to go without. These work on just about every semi-modern Mac laptop made, whether it’s a G4 PowerBook, an Core i7 MacBook Pro Retina, or a MacBook Air. As long as the Mac laptop has a trackpad, you’re good.
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Apple spends a lot of time fine tuning our favorite products, resulting in stellar looking hardware and software, particularly visible in Mac OS X. It’s not hard to impress your friends and colleagues with the appearance, fluidity, and many great features we all enjoy. But if you’re in the mood to brag and be flashy, here is a list of five fun tips to show off some of the eye candy that’s built right into OS X.

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In our “Ten OS X Command Line utilities you might not know about” article, we briefly mentioned FinkCommander, a GUI frontend to the ‘fink’ command line utility. It is the easiest way we know of to explore the wonderful world of free Unix software on the Mac. We think it is such a useful app that we decided to pay some special attention to it.

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The popular Mac programming website CocoaDevCentral has put together two great online tutorials for learning Cocoa (Apple’s object-oriented programming environment). These tutorials are geared towards total programming newbies, and are a fun way to get your feet wet with Mac software development. On the software side, all you’ll need is Mac OS X 10.4 (or later) and Xcode installed. So if you have the tools, the patience, the curiosity, and willingness to learn, this is a great place to start!

Learn Cocoa – Part 1
Learn Cocoa – Part 2

If you’re a sucker for system stats and monitoring widgets, then CoreDuoTemp is for you. This little app stays quietly put in your menu bar displaying some useful stats including CPU usage, the current operating speed of your processor, and the current temperature of your Intel CPU. Of course this means you have to have an Intel Mac to get usage out of CoreDuoTemp. I have found it a necessity to have some kind of CPU monitor open at all times since certain Mac OS X applications tend to spaz out and make the processor run out of control. CoreDuoTemp is inconspicuous and lightweight, and thus far my monitoring app of choice.

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Ok, I admit, I’m easily distracted while on my Mac. I’ll intend to do something productive, but then my favorite webpage will refresh or an instant message will pop up and I’ll get sidetracked reading an article or chatting. It happens to the best of us.

If you are worried about desktop distractions, you can thank Freeverse software for their app called Think, which allows you to select a specific application and then forces a darkened screen over the background tasks.

Productivity saver? Maybe. Cool app? Yup.

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The title says it all, you can send and receive SMS text messages through AIM, Messages, or iChat by following these simple instructions. If you are so inclined, there is even a simple bash script allowing you to interface with iChat through the command line for such purposes. This is a great tip, and apparently the ability to send SMS messages through the AIM protocol has been around a while, and it still works today as long as you have AIM setup.

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Want to change the name of your Mac computer? You can change the identified computer name of a Mac easily from the Mac OS system settings. This not only changes the Macs computer name, but it also changes what the name of the Mac is as identified by other users on a network, and by default it will adjust the name shown at the command line prompt in Mac OS too.

You can change the name of a Mac at any time and for any reason. Changing the computer name of a Mac is really quite simple, and the setting location is within the file sharing portion of system preferences, whether you use file sharing or not. Let’s walk through this easy process to change the name of a Macintosh, you will find it’s the same in all versions of Mac OS X.

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Spotlight is probably the greatest feature to hit the Mac OS in years, once you get used to using it, going to a PC without it feels hopelessly inadequate. I use Spotlight for everything from launching applications, retrieving pictures, searching for old emails, literally just about everything. If you aren’t using Spotlight, you’re missing out. If you are using Spotlight, every now and again, the Spotlight menu mysteriously stops working (apparently this is more common since some OS X updates), and we’re going to give you a few methods to troubleshoot Spotlight and get it back in full working order.

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The Unofficial Apple Weblog is confirming older reports from MacRumors that the upcoming version of iChat (to be bundled with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) will include voicemail features. The MacRumors report from December of 2006 says that users will be allowed to create a video greeting to serve as an answering machine message of sorts. A couple screenshots have surfaced of this feature, with TUAW posting the most recent, reproduced below. Of course like all Apple related rumors you should take this with a grain of salt. Concocted screenshots and fake imagery have long been part of the Mac rumor mill, and although these look legitimate, we just won’t know until the release of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, scheduled for later this Spring.

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If you’ve ever wondered how to extract flash videos (or any others) from a website, here’s a good way to do it using Safari and the command line download tool ‘curl’.

Here’s the description from Chris Martin:

“So say you come across a video online that is so great you would really like to save a copy locally to watch over and over again (assuming you are allowed to). For sites such as youTube and the other majors this might not be a problem… there are numerous tools available to grab content. However, some sites don’t work with the commonly available tools, or maybe you would just rather use tools that are already included in OSX, well here’s how.”

Essentially what you do is view the page source, then locate the .swf or .flv file in the source code of the webpages HTML.

Then, once you have the source URL from the HTML, you can plug that into the curl command to download the file for example (this is not a live flash file its just sample syntax) this would download a flv file this way:

curl -O http://samplewebsite/sample.flv

The file would download like any other.

If you want more a bit more details about this, you can check out the easy to follow how-to on his site:

Howto: Extract Flash Videos from the Web with curl

Pretty cool trick, huh?

Do you like geeking around with paths and jumping about the file system with the Go To trick in Mac OS X, but you come from a background in unix? You’re in luck, because OSXDaily reader Shane submitted this great tip relating to an alternate method of accessing Go To Folder in dialog windows you encounter, here’s how it works direct from the inbox:

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Here is a great little app that works exactly as advertised, creating icons instantly with just a matter of dragging and dropping an image file on the program. Whether you want to create icons for personal usage, desktop customization, or you’re a developer and you need an icon for the latest shiny cocoa software you are working on, img2icns works flawlessly. It doesn’t get any simpler than this, and the app is totally free.

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UNO is a nice interface enhancer for the Mac. Mac OS X looks great, no arguments there, but if you ever get tired of the various themes of Brushed Metal, iTunes, and Aqua, then you might consider unifying the appearance with UNO. Installation is simple, and you’ll be given three choices for various aspects of your Mac’s appearance. My personal favorite is the simple UNO interface which features a simple, clean, and modern look. It is worth nothing that UNO is free but donationware, so there are no shareware fees and unlock codes to worry about.
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If you have a Mac with broadband, and you want to remotely administer your Mac or someone else’s, you should be using Apple’s Remote Desktop. Remote Desktop is basically just VNC with a fancier and more user friendly name, and it works great for its intended purpose.

Setting up a VNC server enables you to connect to your home or office Mac from any computer running a VNC client, meaning you can access and use your Mac desktop from Windows, Linux, or even another Mac. Likewise, you can connect to other peoples Macs too.

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Want to email a picture to someone from a Mac, but the photo is too large? Did you know you can quickly resize photos and pictures directly in the Mail app for Mac OS X? That’s right, you can resize attached pictures right in the Mail application without having to leave to resize through another app like Preview or Photoshop, instead you can handle the entire photo resizing process directly in the Mail app instead.

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