Quoting Apple’s press release statement, Snow Leopard is set to ship this Friday, August 28th.
CUPERTINO, California—August 24, 2009—Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X v10.6 Snow Leopard™ will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard® users for $29.
With pre-orders being accepted it’s just …read more

One of my favorite web sites, Smashing Magazine features an article by Kitty Florido that lists 25 free productivity apps for the Mac. I’ll be honest, I thought that most of the stuff I had on my Mac was already ok but after seeing these apps, I’m inclined to install most of them.
Of the apps listed, the most recent one I tried even before I read the article was Name Changer. That’s a simple yet useful application for me. I process photos from my digital camera through Light Room but when I export them, I still need to rename some …read more

We all know that Apple and Macs are the uber-secure computing environment of choice for anyone that’s interested in computing securely? PC’s on the other hand are like pre-schoolers in a daycare full of sick kids. They’re going to catch whatever virus and bug floating around the room before you can even realize you’re all out of graham crackers and Kool-aid. I mean finding a non-perfect Mac is like seeing a unicorn in your backyard isn’t it? That is the case right?
Perhaps not so much anymore. Viruses may have a notch on their Apple belt now that researchers with Symantec …read more

I stumbled upon this simple yet great sketching or scribbling tool. I was following a link to a software for twittering when I saw Scribbles in the same web site. Ironically, Tweetie, the software I was itching to try was yet to be launched. I ended up downloading and trying out Scribbles.
Scribbles won’t be challenging software like Sketchbook Pro but for amateur sketchers or doodlers, it’s ok. The interface is simple and intuitive. There’s not much clutter to distract you. There’s good eye candy when you play with the various tools. Some great features include an infinite canvass, 3D interface …read more

Overall, though, Mac OS X beats Windows. There, I’ve said it. And lightning hasn’t struck me yet.

These words came straight from Preston Gralla, a Contributing Editor to Computerworld.com. He’s a Windows expert with a lot of articles and books about PCs and Windows under his belt. So you know this isn’t just some PC user. This guy KNOWS windows. Yet, at the end of the day he admits after having spent 2 weeks with the Mac OS X, he says it is better than Windows.
Mr. Gralla was given a MacBook Air to try out Mac OS X with. He used …read more

I was helping setup a new MacBook for a friend of mine today. During the setup process OS X asked her to create an account and to assign a password to it. Everything went well and we were able to setup the Mac in no time at all.
However, when we were updating the OS and the computer asked for a password, it would not work. It kept saying that the password was wrong. Uh-Oh….
Good thing that there’s a reset utility found in the installation disc that ships with your Mac. For the times that you forgot your account password, …read more

[via TG Daily]
Apple is poised to release it’s latest version of OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard. While it won’t have any new whiz-bang features, it will still be a major upgrade as it focus greatly on performance improvements.
Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system which in theory will support up to 16TB or RAM. The OS will also take advantage of two new technologies, Grand Central and Open CL who will make significant improvements in speed and performance.
This is not to say that the technologies will make apps that much faster out of the box. Significant speed improvements will …read more

You know Macs are getting serious attention when computer science colleges start to offer courses on it. The University of Utah started offering courses on “Mac OS X Deployment v10.5″.
This courses teaches IT professionals how to deploy Mac systems on an enterprise level. This is especially useful for people administering large Mac labs or offices.
This signals the acceptance of the Mac platform in the business environment.
A great sign indeed.
Read the complete story from CNET here.

While technically it’s not a Mac topic, I decide to blog about this because it does run on Macs.
Google just added video capabilities to it’s chat software. From within Gmail you can now talk face to face with your friends and family from across the globe. The browser based video chat requires installation of additional software which is downloadable from Google.
I tried it on my Mac and chatted with my dad using his Windows laptop. The quality was good. I’m amazed that it worked so well.
For those who don’t have a video cam, voice chat is a great option …read more

Most new switchers to Mac that I know ask me this question, “How do I defrag on a Mac?”.
Defrag on a Mac is known as optimization. Files on your hard drive can become fragmented over time. Due to the way OS X is built, there’s little need to optimize your HD. As such it hasn’t been really a practice for Mac users to do this. However if you’re really OC about these things, you can use apps such as Onyx to help you with your maintenance.
Here’s a good read from Apple’s support site regarding optimization.