Use this simple command to disable the feature where you MacBook wakes up when you just open the lid.

I don’t know if it’s a convenience or not but your MacBook, by default, wakes up when you just open the lid. Sometimes it’s cool to just let it wake up just by opening the lid but many times it’s a hassle.

It’s a hassle if you lug your MacBook a lot. I’m sure you must have faced it; you open your backpack to see you MacBook running screaming hot. Many times what happens is that just by the motion of your travel itself your MacBook would sense the lid being open (there could be a slight chance the lid is a tiny bit open in movement) and wakes up by itself. Since the backpack is a closed environment the machine could easily heat-up a lot quicker.

Mac OSX don’t have a simpler way of (re)setting this behavior. But it can be done with a simpler command if you know how to use Terminal.

Open up Terminal.

Use QuickSilver or Spotlight or just go into your “/Applications/Utilities” folder.

Just enter this command at the command prompt,

sudo pmset -a lidawake 0

That’s a zero at the end of the command.  Enter your password when prompted and your MacBook would not wake up from now on when the lid is just opened. Instead you have to press the “Return” key to wake it up.

If you think this has become a hassle for you and you like the convenience of the lid awake feature, no problem, just run the same command but this time use ONE instead of ZERO and that would effectively reset the feature.

I hope it helps you protect your MacBook from overheating especially when you travel with your MacBook.

By controlling the login items on your Mac you can easily boost the performance of your Mac a little bit.

Similar to other operating systems Mac OSX also starts certain applications when it starts up. By limiting the applications your Mac starts up you can gain a slight performance boost. Who else don’t want to miss that, right?

Start by launching “System Preferences” and then get into “Accounts“.

Once there click on the “Login Items” tab. Your Mac will list the applications that will be opened automatically when you log in to your Mac. Click on the “Hide” checkbox to hide the application from starting up.

Hiding doesn’t really stop the application from starting but rather would hide the application icon from showing up on the Menu bar. If you really want the application to not startup at all then you should select the application first and then use the “-” remove button to remove the application from starting up altogether. You can also add your favorite application to automatically startup using the “+” Add button.

Take a few minute to go through this list to make sure you only want the applications that you are most interested in starts up when you login to your Mac. Hope it helps you gain a little bit of performance improvement on your Mac.

Increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume more precisely with this simple trick.

When you increase or decrease your Mac’s speaker volume using the Volume Up or Down keyboard buttons, by default your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in a fixed block size.

For example, as you can see above there are the standard 16 blocks and when you increase or decrease volume each block of volume gets incremented or decremented.

If you are not comfortable with the standard block of volume increments and would rather prefer to have better control you are in luck. When you hold down the “Shift” and the “Option” keys together while you increment or decrement your Mac’s volume your Mac will increment or decrement the volume in much smaller blocks. To be precise each of the standard volume blocks will be further sliced to 4 blocks each and so you’ll get 4 increments or decrements per standard volume block. That effectively gives you a total of 64 volume control blocks instead of the standard 16 blocks.

Keep in mind that having more volume control blocks doesn’t physically increase the volume of your Mac to a super crazy level but rather you get more control of controlling your Mac’s volume.

TrashMe helps you do a complete uninstall of applications on your Mac with just a few clicks.

Earlier we have mentioned about a simple uninstall software for your Mac, AppCleaner. Along the same lines of AppCleaner comes another useful little software TrashMe.

With TrashMe you are guaranteed pretty much when you uninstall a software from your Mac you are truly removing the software from your Mac. TrashMe figures out all the related files for the software that you are trying to uninstall and after you acknowledge will trash all those files as part of the uninstallation process.

When you launch TrashMe it shows you the home screen where you can drag an application from the dock or from a folder to uninstall the application.

If you are not sure about the application and wanted to find the application you can use the “Applications” link on the sidebar.

Apart from completely uninstalling applications (softwares) TrashMe can also uninstall or remove widgets without any traces. Along the same lines you can use the “Plugins” link to uninstall or remove any installed browser plugins.

If you’ve uninstalled applications before using TrashMe to uninstall applications you can use TrashMe to remove the orphan files that you’ve must have got by uninstalling it manually.

If you ever wanted to see the history of applications that you’ve uninstalled using TrashMe it keeps a nice little history log.

There are 2 advantages that I could see TrashMe has over AppCleaner, the ability to show the complete history of what has been uninstalled through TrashMe. And also the multi-language support. TrashMe currently support English, French, German, Spanish, Chinese, Italian and more.

Download TrashMe for all your uninstallation needs on your Mac.

Diagnose system issues that are not explicitly visible with these built-in Mac OSX system tools.

Mac’s are famous for its stability. It won’t crash as often as Windows do. It doesn’t have a BSOD (Blue-Screen-Of-Death). But at times it might run into issues with the third-party software that you install. Most of the time Mac OSX tends to not bother you with pop-ups after pop-ups. But rather it writes to system logs and continues to do its job the best it can.

So, if you suspect your system of not performing as it used to or if you see a software or an operating system feature not working as expected there are tools that Mac OSX comes with that can help you get some understanding of the issue behind.

The first tool that you should turn to if you run into system issues is the Console tool. Console is a system tool that helps you view system and application logs in a more readable way. You can access Console from “Applications” > “Utilities”. Once launched Console shows you log files that are found in the system. You can view the messages that are directed to the Console, the System Log or any of the application/service related logs. If you suspect a program of causing the instability then you can choose to view only the application’s log which would be a lot simpler to look at than the full message list.

If you can’t find a log in the list on the left side you can also open a log file to view with Console by going into the “File” > “Open” menu. You’ll be shown the Log folder under your Library folder. Choose the log file that you’d like to diagnose.

Console would be the first tool that you should turn to if you see any instability with your Mac OSX. But at times, the system might not be really unstable but rather little sluggish or you notice a lot of disk activity and such and you suspect something going on. The quick way to find out would be to use the “Activity Monitor“.

Activity Monitor is kind of like the “Task Manager” in the Windows world. It tells you some information about the processes that are running in your system along with the overall CPU, memory and disk usage. The information the Activity Monitor provides would be sufficient enough for you to clarify some of the basic suspicions that you have about your Mac OSX. You can also use Activity Monitor to kill a process that you suspect is causing your system to use its CPU to the fullest. If killing a process is too dangerous to you then you can also suspend a Mac OSX process temporarily until you find the root cause.

Console and Activity Monitor are two great tools that should be in your arsenal when you are out in the field to diagnose your Mac OSX system issues on your own.

Use this simple trick to stop your Mac from dimming the display automatically.

I keep getting emails from Demo Geek readers about one major annoyance with Mac’s, the display gets dimmed automatically after couple of minutes, way before the screensaver kicks-in. Of course, this feature is there to conserve power but on many instances we don’t want the display to dim automatically as we might be reading or watching something so there might not be any keyboard/mouse activity. So how do prevent our Mac’s from dimming the display automatically?

If you don’t mind running a little freeware like Caffeine that takes care of preventing your Mac from dimming the screen, by all means, go for it. With Caffeine you can even turn on and turn off this behavior which is kind of nice.

But if you do mind running a freeware just for this purpose you can use your Mac’s built-in settings to turn off this behavior.

Go to “System Preferences” > “Energy Saver“. Click on the “Power Adapter” tab. Scroll down to locate the “Automatically reduce the display brightness before display sleep” option and uncheck it.

You can do the same on the “Battery” tab as well but it would make more sense to leave the checkbox checked on the Battery tab because you do really want to conserve power as much as possible when you are operating with the battery. So I would leave that decision to you.

That’s all it would take to stop your Mac from automatically dimming the display. Use whatever method is convenient to you.

Remove only specific items from the Recent Items menu on Mac OSX with this simple trick.

Mac OSX (as other main-stream operating systems do) keeps track of the recent items that you have used so you can get back to them easily. It shows you 10 of the most recently used applications, documents and servers by default. You can configure it to show different number of items if you want to see more or less.

To do that go into “System Preferences” > “Appearance“. You can see a “Number of Recent Items” with choices for Applications, Documents and Servers. Adjust the numbers accordingly to your preference.

At times we don’t want the recently used items to show up, for privacy reasons, especially if your Mac can be used by persons other than you. To clear the items you can use the “Clear Menu” option on your Apple menu. That will take care of clearing the entire list. But what if we wanted to keep all the recent applications but wanted to clear only the documents?

Well, it quite simple to clear only a certain group of items from the list. Just go back into the “Appearance” settings and on the “Number of Recent Items” set “None” to the category you want to clear. All the entries on that category will be cleared now. Reset it back to the number of items you want to show up on the list if you want to keep track of your recently used items again.

As you can see above, only the Documents list is cleared out and the Applications list still shows the list of recently used applications.

Even though it’s a simple tip, it might come in handy when in need. I hope you find it useful.

Follow these simple steps to configure your Mac to connect to an external monitor.

Given the affordable price of external monitors these days people are moving towards connecting their MacBooks to an external monitor so they can see things in a bigger, better scale. Hooking up an external monitor to your Mac is very easy. Just buy the right connectors and connect the monitor to your MacBook and you are ready to go. There are very minimal changes that you’d need to make if you need some fine control over extending your screen real estate to the external monitor and such.

Cables needed

MacBook uses Mini-DisplayPort to connect to an external monitor. Mini-DisplayPorts are smaller in size to comfortably fit on the MacBook side panels but need a special cable to establish a connection with your external monitor. You’d need either of these 2 connectors.

Mini-DisplayPort to DVI Adapter – If you have a monitor that supports DVI connections then your best bet would be to make use of the DVI port as it gives better display quality. It costs $29.00 at the Apple Store.

Mini-DisplayPort to VGA Adapter – If your monitor doesn’t support a DVI connection then you don’t have a choice but to tap into the default VGA ports. Apple Store has this cable for $29.00.

Different ways of using the external monitor

Once you connect the cable to bridge the monitor and your MacBook the first thing you would notice is that now you have 2 displays, the MacBook display and the external monitor display. There are 3 ways to go with using the displays.

One way is to use the external monitor as a mirrored display, which means whatever you see in your MacBook display will get replicated on to the bigger monitor display. This would be the default setting if you don’t want to mess with fine-tuning the display settings.

Second way would be use the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display. Imagine that as one really wide MacBook display. You can move windows to the external wide space and see it all in one shot even if you have Spaces enabled. This would be the best way to make use of that monitor investment.

Finally, you can also use your external monitor as the only display source and turn off the MacBook display completely. This would be particularly useful to those of you who are very used to the one-display-to-rule-all model.

Now, we’ll see how Mac OSX settings can be tweaked to use one of these display models.

Use the external monitor as a mirrored display

This would be the default setting if you don’t do anything to your Display settings. As soon as your Mac senses there are multiple displays you can go into “System Preferences” > “Display“. You’ll be able to see 2 display preferences dialog, one for your prime MacBook display and one for the external monitor. You can use the settings in these dialogs to adjust the screen resolution, color intensity and if you have a monitor that can be swiveled (rotated) you can tell Mac OSX to rotate the display to a certain angle for that particular display.

The main setting to note to get the (default) mirrored display is to go into the “Arrangement” tab. Once you are in there you should be able to see the “Mirror Displays” checkbox. Check the box (checked by default) to have what’s displayed on the MacBook display to be replicated to the external monitor.

Use the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display

As you’ve seen above, the real trick in making the external display either as a mirrored display or an extension to your current display is a matter of checking/unchecking the “Mirror Displays” checkbox at the “Arrangement” tab on Display Preferences. Uncheck (clear) the “Mirror Displays” box to make the external monitor as an extension to your MacBook display.

Now, by default, your external monitor would act as a secondary display. What that means is that you’d be working on your MacBook as the prime display and drag windows to the external monitor. All your menus and dock will show up on your MacBook display. Human eye is used to the bigger-smaller display model than the other way around. So we’d definitely prefer our external monitor as the main display and use the MacBook display as a secondary display to keep an eye on certain tasks like email, chat, Twitter etc.

To do that all you have to do is drag the bigger display (which is your monitor display) as the first display on the above dialog. Your menu bar will stick with the smaller display and you want the menu bar and the dock to come to your primary display which is the monitor display. No problem, just drag the menu bar to the bigger primary display and you are all set.

Use the external monitor as the only display

This would be convenient for those of you who are used to one-display model. This is a bit tricky as there are no explicit ways to turn off your MacBook’s display and keep it open. You might need an external keyboard and an external mouse because we’d need to keep the lid closed on your MacBook to achieve this.

Once you connect the external monitor to your MacBook follow the instructions as if like mirroring the external display (check the “Mirror Displays” checkbox). Once done, close the lid on your MacBook. It will go into the Sleep mode.

Now, awake your MacBook from sleep using the external keyboard or the mouse. Your MacBook will sense that its display is not turned on and so will direct all the outputs to your external monitor. Since the lid is closed all the time it would be smart thing to have your MacBook lifted up a little bit for proper ventilation. From now on, you can use the keyboard and the mouse to put your Mac to sleep and to awake it from sleep.

I hope this is comprehensive enough to give you an understanding of the many ways you can connect an external monitor to your MacBook. If you have any questions/comments on this topic please ask/share over at comments.

Mac’s Parental Controls gives you better control over your kids computer and internet activities.

Earlier we have mentioned about how you can make use of the parental control capability of Windows (Vista) systems to keep an eye on your kids computer activities. We’ve even mentioned about how to use your iPhone’s parental controls to restrict iPhone usage for your kids. It wouldn’t be fair if we don’t demonstrate the better parental control capabilities of your Mac (if you use one).

Before we start to implement parental controls on your Mac let’s imagine an ideal setup of your Mac. Let’s assume that you have one kid who uses your Mac to whom you wanted to restrict the computer usage. It doesn’t matter if your kid uses your Mac or uses his/her own. You’d need 2 user accounts to implement parental controls. One for you, as being an Administrator of your Mac so you can set things up. The other account for your kid, as being a Standard user. If you have this setup already, you are all set to move on to implement parental controls – you can skip the next paragraph.

If you haven’t done that yet then use System Preferences > Accounts to create separate user accounts for each user of your Mac. Use the “+” button at the bottom of the dialog to create new user accounts. Create as many as you need. Make sure to create those user accounts as “Standard” accounts.

Once you’ve established user accounts for each of your kid then you can configure each user account to have a different level of parental control settings. You being an Administrator of the computer you have all the power to configure and fine-tune those parental control settings to fit to your need. To your surprise, unlike Windows, Mac provides exceptional support for parental controls that’s pretty simple to implement. Let’s get started.

Get back to the Accounts dialog (under System Preferences) and choose your kid’s user account. On the right-side of the dialog you should be able to see parental control options. Check the “Enable Parental Controls” option box and then click on the “Open Parental Controls…” button.

That will open up the Parental Controls dialog. As you can see above there are 5 different tabs that you have to jump through to fully setup parental controls for your Mac. You don’t have to do all 5 tabs but the more the better the control you’d get. Start by settings things up at the “System” tab. It allows you to force your kid to use Simple Finder than the regular one. It also allows you to only allow selected applications from the list. Also, you can choose to allow your kid to administer printers, burn CDs/DVDs or change their account password. Choose the options that fit your need.

At the “Content” tab you should be able to control the usage of dictionaries and websites. You can hide profanity in Dictionary so your Mac limits access to certain words in the dictionary. This is more important, you can also restrict the websites your kid would visit. Choose one of the three options that fit your need. If you just want your kid to only access certain websites you can add those websites to the list and your kid won’t be able to access any other websites.

On the “Mail & iChat” tab you can limit the usage of Mail app along with iChat if you wish. If you wanted to enforce a much stricter rule when it comes to email you can also restrict to whom your kid can email. On the backdoor if your kid tries to send emails to people not on the list you can key-in an email address where you can be notified of such an attempt.

Moving on to the “Time Limits” tab, this tab let you enforce time limits on your kid’s computer usage. You can set time limits for weekdays and weekends along with bedtime settings for school nights and weekends.

The final tab to configure, “Logs” let you setup what kind of activities you want it logged so that you can get a feel of what’s going on with your kid’s computer activities. It let you access log entries for the websites visited, websites blocked, applications that are used and iChat session information.

As you can sense by now parental controls on Mac is very strong and simple to implement. It has a feel of giving you full control over your kid’s computer activities if you configure it properly and use it strictly. I hope this shed some light on what you can do with the Mac’s Parental Controls. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please share it on comments.

Desktop Icon Previews can squeeze some computing juice out of your Mac.

Macs are pretty good at utilizing the system resources to give a better performance than their Windows counterparts. But if you squeeze your Mac to the maximum extend possible then you can only expect a sluggish performance. When you run into a scenario where every bit of your Mac’s computing power counts then you need to take into account every small little tweak which can yield your Mac some computing power.

Once such tiny tweak that can yield some computing power is to turn off icon previews. This would be particularly helpful if you use your Mac desktop a lot to store files for review. The more the cluttered your Mac desktop is the better this tweak will yield results. Turning off icon preview is lot simpler than you thought.

Get to your Mac desktop and right-click and choose “Show View Options” from the context menu (Command-J, if you are a keyboard maestro!).

Uncheck the “Show icon preview” option which will essentially turn off icon previews on any icons on your desktop. Your Mac don’t have to draw a preview image of those icons anymore which would yield some processing power to your Mac.

Learn how to configure iPhoto to use your preferred external image editor for editing pictures.

iPhoto is a great application to keep your pictures well organized on your Mac. Facial tagging is extremely helpful in organizing pictures based on familiar faces. But there might be cases where you must have paid for a third-party picture editing application that you’d prefer to use to edit your pictures.

You can configure iPhoto to use external applications to be used as picture editors. What that means is that you can still use iPhoto to view pictures but when you feel like editing a picture you can use your favorite application from iPhoto to manipulate photos. Configuring iPhoto to use external image editing applications is very easy,

Go to iPhoto “Preferences” and then on the “General” tab. By default, the “Edit Photo” option will have “In main window” chosen.

Change that to use “In application…” and choose the application that you want to use to edit pictures. Dismiss all open dialogs and you are all set to use your favorite photo editing application from iPhoto to edit pictures.

These widgets certainly add more value to your Mac OSX Dashboard.

One of the many differences that Mac OSX has compared to other operating systems is its Dashboard. Those widgets on the dashboard make your Mac a lot more fun and useful. And the handiness involved in accessing (just hit F4 key) those widgets makes it even more handy.

Here are some of the widgets that we think are useful and fun to use,

Thesaurus

Thesaurus widget uses words.bighugelabs.com to retrieve the synonyms and antonyms of the words that you type-in on the widget. Clicking on any of the words on the result will do a search again on the word. It is really an useful widget to quickly find some information about a word.

World First Currency Converter

This widget displays the most recent foreign currency exchange rate for world’s leading currencies.

Mac Tips and Tricks

Ever need to quickly check on a Mac tip? This widget can come in handy to reveal some quick tips and tricks on the various Mac topics.

Earth

If you find Google Earth is a bit overwhelming or costly to run on your Mac then this widget can give you some nice live updated satellite imageries of our wonderful earth.

Language Translator

This widget can translate between 41 different languages. The cool thing about this widget is that it can detect the source language. That’s pretty neat.

iStat Nano

A beautiful system monitor widget that tiny in name but bundled with quite a lot of features to give information about CPU usage, memory usage, hard drive space, bandwidth usage, temperatures, fan speeds, battery usage, uptime and the top 5 processes.

Mighty Monitor

This widget monitors your Apple Wireless keyboard and the Wireless Mighty Mouse and displays the remaining battery power on those devices in a nice color-coded meter.

Screenshot Plus

If you keep forgetting the shortcut to capture screenshots on your Mac then this widget can come in handy to let you easily take screenshot right from the comfort of your Dashboard.

The Weather Channel

Pulls weather information from the reliable Weather Channel and displays full-detailed weather information for the selected location. Very handy to quickly check weather information.

Countdown

Just set the date and time of an event that you want to count down, this widget would display a nice counter that shows the countdown to the date and time.

Wikipedia

Who is not addicted to Wikipedia, right? This widget brings the world’s most famous encyclopedia to your Mac Dashboard. You can even view and edit the Wikipedia entries right from your Dashboard.

YouTube

This widget helps you search and watch Featured, Most Discussed, Most Recent, Most Viewed, Top Favorites and Top Rated Videos right from your Dashboard.

Hotmail + Messenger

Check your Hotmail emails and use MSN Messenger right from the same widget.

Tea Timer

One major disadvantage of the information age is that we keep forgetting things we want to get done. Tea Timer is a nice widget to keep yourself reminded of some of the important things that you wanted to do. This widget can remind you with an alarm sound, play a voice message or can use Growl to notify you. Can’t get any better than this!

Advanced Scientific Calculator

Ever need to quickly do some weird math? Advanced Scientific Calculator widget can help you solve algebra, trigonometry, and engineering math problems very easily.

VelaClock Deluxe

A highly customizable widget that displays world clocks along with very detailed time information.

Twit-Update

Not running those self-updating Twitter apps? No problem. Twit-Update helps you send status updates to Twitter directly from your Mac Dashboard.

Woot.com

Lazy to check Woot.com everyday? Keep an eye on what’s special at Woot.com right from your Dashboard with this simple widget.

GV Connect

Use this widget to call or send SMS messages to your contacts using your Google Voice number directly from your Dashboard.

DoBeDo

A simple task management widget to get things done in a simpler way.

Wesabe

Keep an eye on your Wesabe account information from your Mac Dashboard. This widget uses Mac’s KeyChain to protect your sensitive password.

Toodledo

Get all your Toodledo updates right on your Mac Dashboard with this simple widget. This does what it means.

Google Apps

Quickly get to all your favorite Google Apps with this Application Launcher like widget.

Remember The Milk

If you use Remember The Milk as your task manager you can use this widget to get to all your tasks quickly from your Dashboard.

Google Calendar Plus

Access your Google Calendar events from the Dashboard with this simple gadget. It allows you to import as many calendars as you have.

BaseCamp

Conveniently access your BaseCamp projects directly from your Mac Dashboard.

Ta-Da List

If you’ve been using Ta-Da List then you can use this widget to access your list right from your Dashboard.

Delivery Status

Keep track of your package deliveries with this all-in-one package tracker widget.

eBay Watcher

Use this widget to monitor your favorite auction items at eBay. It updates the bidding information automatically without you doing any manual refresh.

Google News

Get all your favorite Google News stories to your Dashboard with this useful widget.

iPhone Apps

Get notified of new Apple iPhone apps from the AppStore with this dashboard widget.

iTinyURL

Use this simple widget to shrink the lengthier URLs into tiny URLs using the TinyURL service.

Color Theory

Find the right color for your website using this simple to use widget that’s always handily available right on your Dashboard.

Vonage Address Book Dialer

Use this widget to call anyone in your telephone address book using your Vonage phone line.

Twitter Trends

Keep an eye on the top trending topics on Twitter with this simple widget.

I hope you find some of these widgets useful and I’m sure there might be some I missed. If you find a widget being useful to you that’s not on the list please share with us.

In this article let’s see how we can make use of the "Recent Items" menu shortcut and also how to make a stack item just for the recently used applications so it can be easily accessed.

Almost all of the latest operating systems have a means to keep track of the recently used items, be it either applications, documents, files or other file types, they have some way to easily get back to those recently used stuffs.

When it comes to Mac OSX it has a feature built into the menu bar itself with which you can get to the recently used items. It neatly organizes the recently used items by Applications and Documents. If you are comfortable clicking on the menu bar to get to the recently used applications and documents then you don’t have to follow the next step to enhance this a little bit more.

One of the best features of Mac OSX Snow Leopard is the Dock Stacks. It gave us a great way to see the stack of things in a nice visual way than the boring menu layout. Follow these steps below if you’d like to bring the recently used applications to your Dock Stack instead.

Open up Terminal and type-in,

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others array-add ‘{"tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }’

Once done, enter the following command to restart the dock,

kill all Dock

Make sure to begin the "Dock" word in capital letter.

You should now be able to see a new stack icon created on your Dock with convenient access to your recently used applications on your Mac OSX.

I hope you find this article useful. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please share with us in comments.

Tags: Mac OSX Leopard, How To

In this “Mac Security” post let’s see how we can secure our Mac OSX by setting a screen saver password.

If there is a remote possibility that your computer could be used by anyone other than you without your permission then it would always be a good idea to soft-lock your computer before you step out.

But many times it might not be possible and on those circumstances it would, at least, be a good idea to keep your Mac secure by enabling password protection on screen saver so when your Mac wakes up from screen saver it will ask for password, effectively preventing unauthorized users from using it.

It’s very simple to set a screen saver password in Mac OSX.

Launch “System Preferences” and click on the “Desktop & Screen saver” option.

On the “Desktop & Screen Saver” options dialog click on the “Screen Saver” tab and then choose a screen saver of your choice, in this case the fabulous “RSS Visualizer”. Optionally, adjust the screen saver start time by sliding the slider at the bottom of the page accordingly. Quick Tip: The shorter the time period the better it is for your Mac screen.

Once done, close out the “Desktop & Screen Saver” dialog by clicking on the “Show All” button at the top of the dialog.

Once back on the “System Preferences” page click on the “Security” option.

On the Security preferences page click on the “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver” option. If you have “automatic login” enabled you’ll be prompted to disable it as it would conflict with the “Require password” feature. Go ahead and disable it if prompted. Exit from System Preferences.

That’s all you have to do to secure your Mac with a screen saver password. It is a very simple trick that can save you some peace-of-mind when you are away from your computer.

AppFresh keeps all your applications fresh on your computer with automatic software updates.

These days all the major operating systems take care of keeping them up to date with updates and patches without much human intervention or with minimal human intervention.

Whereas, when it comes to third party software updates you have to be on top of it and many of the softwares can only inform you about an available update when you actually use the software.

If you use a Mac then you are blessed with a cute little free application, AppFresh, that keeps track of all your software updates in one place. AppFresh scans your computer to find out about all the softwares that you have installed on your computer and tells you if those softwares are up-to-date or not. If there is a software update available then it will list it out along with an option to update the software without you launching the software yourself to update to the latest version.

It is, in fact, very straight-forward to use AppFresh. Just download and launch AppFresh.

You’ll be greeted with a authorization dialog asking you to grant AppFresh permission to automatically update the softwares that it considers safe. It moves the old versions to Trash so in case if you need to recover you have a way to get it back. Also, it would be a good idea to have a clean backup of your system available somewhere in case something goes wrong. Click on the Next button.

You’ll be presented with an IUseThis Integration dialog. IUseThis is an online service that allows you to have a backup of the list of applications on your computer with the version information. This would be particularly handy if/when you have to re-image your computer and you don’t know what different softwares that you had before it went bad. With IUseThis you can retrieve the list of applications installed on your computer and if/when integrated with AppFresh you can just run AppFresh to install the latest version of all the softwares that you had on your computer.

Choose a username and password to create an account with IUseThis.com. Check the “Add AppFresh to my profile” checkbox to integrate AppFresh with IUseThis. Keep in mind that integrating IUseThis is an optional step and so if you prefer not to integrate then don’t enter a username and password and click on the “Finish” button.

AppFresh will now scan for all the installed software on your computer.

Once it finishes scanning you should be able to see AppFresh main window where it lists all the applications installed on your computer along with a status description of if an update is available or not.

As you can see on the left sidebar you can narrow down on the updates by Applications, Plugins, Widgets, Preference Panes and System Updates or by vendors. This helps if you have quite a lot of applications installed so you can narrow down easily.

If you look at the middle pane you should be able to see the list of applications and there are 3 buttons on top which you can use to check for updates, update all applications, delete an app update.

Once you select an application on the middle pane you should be able to see more information about the app on the right sidebar which includes the latest release information which is pretty handy.

If you choose an application and right click (Control click) the context menu pops up and provides choices to exclude an app from showing up on the list, skip an update and of course a choice to install the selected update.

Once you choose to update an application AppFresh will do its best to locate and install the update without you doing much. But in cases where it can’t locate a proper update it will pop open a window for you to choose the link where it can get the update. It’s very simple and straight-forward.

Once you click on the appropriate link AppFresh will take care of the rest to install the update.

When the updates finish you should be able to see what applications got updated along with the version numbers and a status message of how the update go.

Overall AppFresh is a wonderfully crafted applications that blends very nicely with the Mac look-and-feel along with performing the job quite consistently. Surely AppFresh can keep all your Mac applications up to date.

Give it a try and I’m sure you’ll like it. Download AppFresh.

Do you know of any equivalent app for Windows? I would certainly love to get my hands on a similar app for Windows! Please let us know.

Technorati Tags:
Mac, Mac OSX, AppFresh, Mac Software Update

Suspend a resource consuming process on Mac OSX with this simple command.

There are applications that are buggy enough that they go beyond their resource quota and make the operating system look like a culprit. One way of dealing with these issues is to end the misbehaving program, in effect, killing the process. But there are some instances where killing the process is not a reality.

For example, the Firefox browser. With its multi-tab feature it is quite possible that we end up opening far too many tabs and that seems to consume more memory and battery and other resources. When that happens we might think of killing the process but if you use Mac OSX you can suspend the process instead so once you are done with any other work on your computer you can resume the process and continue your work.

You’ll be surprised to see how easy it is to suspend a process in Mac OSX.

For example, to suspend Firefox, open-up Terminal and type-in

killall -STOP firefox-bin

Once suspended you should be able to see the Firefox process being marked in RED with the status of “Not Responding”.

Suspended processes won’t be allocated any CPU cycles and so indirectly will use less resources including battery. You might be seeing the memory still allocated the same on the above screenshot but when there is a demand for more memory then Mac OSX will swap those inactive memory pages.

Then once you are ready to resume using Firefox, type-in the following command on Terminal

killall -CONT firefox-bin

Once resumed the process will be marked as usual as indicated above. You can then continue to use the application.

Process Suspension on Mac OSX is a powerful feature if you know how to use it effectively.

Technorati Tags:
Firefox, How To, Mac, Mac OSX

Use this simple trick to get Windows All Programs menu on Mac OSX Leopard.

Ever liked the Windows’ Start menu that conveniently lists “All Programs” in a simple menu? Would like to get it on Mac OSX too? Follow this simple trick.

Drag your Applications folder on to the Mac OSX Dock. Just be extra careful not to drop the drag while in transit. Place it wherever you prefer, but a better place would be to have this as a first item after the Dock Apps Separator.

Once done, clicking on the Applications Dock Icon will present you with a scrollable menu of applications which closely mimics the “All Programs” menu of Windows.

There you have it! As simple as that.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Mac OSX, Windows

Install Internet Explorer on Mac OSX with this simple hack.

Even though we all hate Internet Explorer 6 let’s just accept the fact that it’s not going to go away anytime soon (even though there are campaigns around to kill it) and there are many websites that are still IE6 friendly and that means we have a hard time using those websites on any of the modern browsers.

Since many corporate internal websites are more of IE6 friendly this would become an annoying issue if you have to deal with those internal websites from your home using Mac.

No worries, with ies4osx you can get Internet Explorer 6 on your Mac OSX computer.

You need 2 applications to get IE6 on your Mac.

Go ahead and download Darwine from here. Mount the .dmg file and move the app to the Applications folder.

Once Darwine is installed go ahead and download ies4osx. It’s a .zip file and so you have to extract the zip file and launch ies4osx.

You’ll get a dialog where you’ll be presented with the steps involved to get Internet Explorer 6 on your Mac. Hit the “Install” button and wait and watch. You’ll get 2 “Windows’ish” dialogs. Click to proceed further.

Once everything settles down you’ll be informed that the installation is complete and you can find the browser on your Mac Desktop.

Go ahead and launch the “ies4osx” app from your desktop. Above is a sample page of DemoGeek.com on Internet Explorer 6 on Mac OSX.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Mac OSX, IE6, Internet Explorer

The next evolution of Mac OSX, Snow Leopard, is due out soon and it would be worth the upgrade given the $30 price tag. But what it’s worth?

Lifehacker have a run-down on the feature-set of what Snow Leopard offers. It’s quite comprehensive with videos featured appropriately. Here are some videos (thanks to Lifehacker) for your quick preview.

Keep in mind that this review is based on the Developer Preview of Snow Leopard that Apple handed out to the developers at WWDC 2009. Have a look at the full featured write-up of Snow Leopard (Developer Preview).

Google Quick Search Box makes searching on Mac a snap. It can be claimed as a Quicksilver or Spotlight alternative (loosely claimed)

Unlike Windows, Mac has quite a barrage of search utilities. In fact it comes with a fantastic search tool Spotlight built-in. Sometimes that’s not enough and then came Quicksilver and an army of similar tools.

Now it’s Google’s turn and they came up with Google Quick Search Box. It’s a snappy little application that’s light-weight and does the job pretty well (what else can you expect from a search giant?)

Download and install Google Quick Search Box. Once you launch it, it shows up as a little search box in the middle of the screen.

All you have to do it just start typing-in what you want to find into the box and Google Quick Search Box will instantly find matching results for your query and as standard Mac applications do it organizes the results in a way for you to easily distinguish.

If you notice at the bottom of the search results box that when you scroll over the results it tells you the path of the result item by, again, following the Mac standard breadcrumb.

Either if you’d prefer to change the color of the Google Quick Search Box so that you can see better on a cluttered screen or if you would prefer to change the keyboard shortcut to invoke Quick Search Box then you have to go into the “Preferences” dialog to adjust these settings. Particularly I found the shortcut of double-pressing the Command key a bit more convenient when I use the laptop in darkness so I don’t have to look for another key combination.

Even though it’s not Quicksilver Google’s Quick Search Box does a decent job of what it claims it can do. I would say it can be a decent Spotlight alternative. If you find it useful in any specific way please let us know in comments.

Download Google Quick Search Box.

Technorati Tags:
Google, Mac, Software, Google Quick Search Box

Safari 4 Buddy helps you tweak some of the hidden features of Safari 4 Beta.

Safari 4 Beta is pretty cool in terms of its functionality, speed and the UI changes. But some people still prefer the old Safari 3 look and feel. How would you make Safari 4 Beta look like Safari 3 and still take advantage of the performance improvements?

Safari 4 Buddy can help you tweak some of the hidden features of Safari 4 Beta. Some of the features of interest might be to uncheck the “Put Tab Bar on Top” check box, uncheck both the “Include Top Sites” check box along with unchecking the “User circular Progress Style Load Indicator” check box and applying and restarting Safari 4 Beta will have a look and feel of Safari 3.

Download Safari 4 Buddy.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Safari, Software, Safari 4 Buddy

AppCleaner helps you completely uninstall an application on your Mac.

In Mac OSX, you can uninstall an application by just dragging the application icon (.app) to the Trash Bin. It just vaporizes from your system with a puff of air. Pretty cool, isn’t it? Not all the time.

Even when you don’t see the application anymore on your Mac it still leaves traces of its existence on your system. So, how do you make sure that you take out every single trace of the application from your system without breaking bones?

AppCleaner can help you keep your posture and still erase all the traces of an application from your Mac.

It is a very simple utility that waits for you to drop the application on to it and it removes all the traces of an app just like a snap. It has a bit of a cool animation to indicate that the uninstall is done.

You can browse for an application within AppCleaner by clicking on the “Applications” tab and selecting the application that you want to uninstall.

Click on the Search button on you select the application you want to uninstall and AppCleaner will list you the files that will be uninstalled along with the application.

You can uninstall Dashboard Widgets and plugins by using the “Widgets” and “Others” tabs.

By removing all the traces of an application AppCleaner can help you extend the trial period of applications that you wanted to try. Just drop the application into AppCleaner and let it remove the application when it’s closer to the trial period or past the trial period. Even though it is not a recommended habit it can help you if you miss the trial period to evaluate a software before you plunge your hard earned $$$.

I hope you find AppCleaner a simple utility to help keep your Mac clean from traces of unneeded applications. If you have any questions on this please let us know in comments.

Download AppCleaner.

A simple way to resolve a Gmail Self Redirection bug.

When I tried to logout of my Gmail account on Safari today I ended up facing a bug (I loosely call it a bug) in Gmail that for some reason it redirects to itself and so it never signs-out.

Instead Safari complained about too many redirects and stopped displaying the page. After a bit of trial and error I got that resolved. Here is how,

With the Safari browser open click on the “Develop” menu and then click on the “Disable Caches” option.

Close the browser and relaunch it and I got it resolved that way. Later on, if course, I enabled the Cache.

I hope you don’t face this issue ever but in case if you do I hope this helps in some way.

Technorati Tags:
Gmail, How To, Safari