On June 6, Apple announced the latest incarnation of its OS X operating system: 10.7, more commonly known as Lion. Also announced were the imminent release of iOS 5 for Apple’s mobile devices and, hand-in-hand with that, the iCloud.

Folks who’ve been handy with Apple’s products for a few years now might recognize the source of this “new” service as MobileMe (née .Mac), the yearly membership with an email address, online storage, and push syncing for your mobile devices.

But iCloud is more than just a name change. Apple is revamping the service to expand its offerings and its reach. MobileMe used to cost $99 a year to subscribe. iCloud will be free to anyone using iOS 5, that is to say, anyone with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch capable of running the new software when it comes out this fall.

And as Apple says, for free, you get a lot. iCloud, like MobileMe, will continue to push-sync your contacts, calendars, and email, but it will also do the same with your photos, documents, and purchased content like apps, music, and books. It even uses that syncing feature to back up your device’s content and settings, so that plugging in to your computer to sync becomes nigh a thing of the past. New devices that ship with iOS 5 can even be activated through iCloud if you already have a membership. Apple is slowly but surely removing the computer from the equation.

But the thing I’m most excited for is the music. You can push new purchased music to your device directly, or access your purchase history and re-download songs you’ve already bought. And, for a yearly fee of $25, you can “match” up to 25,000 songs you didn’t purchase from the iTunes store (so, stuff you either ripped from your CD collection or, ahem, acquired) with iTunes Plus-quality content and download it to your devices whenever you want. Simply put, iTunes says, “oh, I see you have this song in your library, but you didn’t buy it from me. Oh well, it’s your song. Here, have my version if you want to listen to it. It’s encoded at 256K, so it’s probably loads better than that 128K version you pirated or the 192K version you ripped five years ago.”  You know what I say to that? “Gee, thanks iTunes!”

But even with this stable full of awesome new features, a little caution is warranted. As much as Apple declared its MobileMe service “just works,” there are plenty of users out there (me included) who can tell you it sometimes doesn’t. If you don’t understand how push syncing works, you can often end up with duplicate and even triplicate contacts or calendar events. And Apple’s servers, like all servers, do sometimes go down. There can be cons to relying too heavily on someone else’s storage space for all your stuff. And will those remote backups be more useful for troubleshooting, or will they, like the computer backups, be basically useless if you’re trying to remedy a software bug? And I don’t even want to think about the poor souls who share one big iTunes library, and thus whose devices are filled with content purchased by a handful of different AppleID accounts.

So the moral of the story? iCloud could be as revolutionary and awesome as Apple wants you to think it will be, or it could be a big old mess. I’m pretty sure it will wind up somewhere in the middle.

Probably leaning a little more toward awesome.

Thanks to Apple for the image!

Macs are well-known for their user-friendliness and relatively low-maintenance operating systems, and it’s true: as long as you’re conscientious about keeping your software up-to-date and don’t drop it off a cliff, you’ll likely never have a problem with your trusty Mac.  But that said, there are some things that remain veiled behind the curtain of mystery—like keyboard shortcuts. Or Flash. So it is in the spirit of discovery that we present this list of apps that can make your iLife (HA! See what we did there?) that much easier.

Automator – How-to & Training

Automator is, hands-down, the most awesome piece of Apple software that’s already on your computer that you’ve probably never touched. It’s exactly what its name (and logo) implies: a little engine to perform repetitive tasks and actions for you. You can save your workflows as services or plugins to be accessed from the specific applications to which they apply, or just drag and drop the files you want to process onto the workflow itself.  Its interface reads like an a la carte menu of potential actions and processes, and (like lots of Mac apps) constructing a workflow is as simple as dragging and dropping. The link above will take you to a site with a wonderfully comprehensive intro video, and even some step-by-step instructions to create workflows and scripts for some commonly automated tasks.

Apple Hardware Test – How-to

We’re sure you were so overcome with joy when you first got your Mac that you couldn’t be bothered to look through all the other stuff that came in the box (a cleaning cloth? SCORE!), but you might want to fish out those gray and white “system disks” and put them in a very, very safe place. Not only do they hold the operating system your computer shipped with and all the bundled software (like iLife), they have the particular version of AHT, or Apple Hardware Test, that goes with your computer’s model. AHT is a diagnostic tool that can tell you if all the major hardware components of your machine are doing their jobs, and the test results appear with a simple pass/fail. If your machine is acting funny, it’s always a good idea to run the test before spending a day waiting around at the Genius Bar or otherwise bringing out the big guns.

AppleJack - download

One thing about Macs: when they do fail, they tend to fail pretty catastrophically. Often the crashes or weird behavior that play harbinger to full-on system failure can be fixed through terminal actions, and therefore avoid the explosion every user dreads. But if you’re like a lot of computer users, you haven’t had to run a command line script since, you know, ever. AppleJack can help you with that. It’s a simple utility you can install that will create “shortcuts” in Terminal to some of those magical restorative processes that will fix your corrupt OS woes. All you have to do is boot into single user mode (not scary, just holding down buttons), and type the word “applejack” before hitting the return key. The app will walk you through the rest. With luck, you may never need it. But the day you do, you’ll be really, really glad it’s there.

Onyx - download

Onyx is like one of those crazy Swiss Army knives with the butane lighters that they don’t sell in the US… that’s how many random tools are packed into it. It will do almost anything, from repairing your directory to cleaning up registry or plist errors, to showing you some of the hidden preferences for your system or applications you might not have known you wanted changed. Rather like AppleJack, it’s sort of hard to pin down exactly why you’d want to download Onyx, just because its uses are so varied. But in any case, it’s free. So do yourself a favor and install it, and figure out how awesome it can be for yourself.

GrandPerspective – download

Remember last week, when we talked about the PC Program Sequoia View that displayed the various items taking up space on your hard drive in a graphical, color-coded, and scaled representation? Yeah, GrandPerspective does the same thing for your Mac. It’s a great tool to have when you’re pruning your files, since you can see what’s taking up the most space without having to navigate through every folder one at a time. It’s also just interesting to look at.

Secrets – download

This app is meant to lift that veil of mystery we mentioned in the intro. It’s a Preference Pane plugin (so after installing, it shows up in the System Preference application), and it short cuts you to some of the most sought-after but well-hidden Mac user preferences and shortcuts. It not only has shortcuts for your OS, but also for a handful of popular third-party apps you might be using. If you don’t have the patience to sort through every single preference menu to customize everything your liking, Secrets is the app for you.

Thanks to Appstorm for the image

The internet is everywhere. Literally. It’s in coffee shops, city parks, and likely every room in your home. If you have a smartphone, you’ve even got it in your pocket. It’s probably safe to say that you, like all the rest of us, take this constant connectivity for granted. But this ubiquitous access aside, you might not be getting the best browsing experience. Here are a few recommendations to help you remedy that!

Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

This browser is our top pick for a reason—it really does have it all. It’s super fast, easy to use, and has tons of features like tabbed browsing and thumbnailed site images to help you get what you need from the ‘Net. It’s got a neat mode called Incognito that allows you to open a browsing window free of your regular cookies and autofill information whose history won’t be saved, which is both secure and handy if someone else wants to check their email on your computer. It also opens each Incognito window in isolation, without affecting or requiring you close your other open windows. But the real feather in its cap is its stability: Chrome runs each open window as its own process thread, which means if the massive Flash game you’re playing in one window crashes, it won’t take any other windows down with it (like that important email you’re drafting). Other perks include synchronizable bookmarks, built-in reader view, and bundled Flash (so you don’t have to deal with those annoying Adobe update panes). The downsides? While Google has opened up the season for extensions, the options are still a bit less expansive than the competition. And you are, of course, giving a larger share of your internet presence (and info) to Google.

Mozilla Firefox (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

Firefox is the original alternative: a fast, open-source solution with more downloadable tools and add-ons than you can shake a stick at.  It has the full complement of convenience features like tabbed browsing, space for bookmarks on the toolbar, built-in reader view and customizable search bar, and synchronizable bookmarks. While it also has a private browsing feature, enabling it will force all other windows to close. And though it is easier to update than, say, Internet Explorer, it prompts you to update when you open the program and forces a restart (whereas Chrome downloads updates as you browse and applies them after you close). The biggest pain? It’s kind of a memory hog and can really slow things down if you browse for long periods without restarting the program or your computer.

Apple Safari (Windows & Mac)

Apple has quite a reputation for the sleek look of their interfaces, and their internet browser is no different. You can browse your site history and bookmarks with big, colorful Cover Flow thumbnails, use the reader view to strip ads and extraneous formatting from articles on the web, and even enjoy super-sharp text thanks to the font-smoothing on every page.  And while the aesthetic components of Safari are (of course) on lockdown, the rendering aspect is, like Firefox, open source. That means geeks of all colors can submit bug fixes and improvements as they find them, which helps build a more stable platform. The problems? Most of the really good, innovative stuff is reserved for Mac owners (check out Apple’s site to see how Safari interacts with Mail, Address Book, iPhoto, and the Dashboard). And remember how Steve Jobs hates Flash? Yeah. Though lots of non-Apple technologies can be accessed through “extensions,” some of them (cough, FLASH!) really slow the browser down. Also, the automatic update window is irritating in the PC environment. In OS X, you get all your system updates at once, so it’s no big deal. In Windows, it’s yet another popup demanding your attention.  And who wants that?

Opera (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

In a word? FAST.  Opera is blazing fast. Opera will load even the heaviest of pages, like CNN.com or Yahoo!, in the blink of an eye.  This super-speed is thanks to the fact that Opera multithreads every download, which is the technological equivalent of creating a widemouth bottle. Unfortunately, thanks to an ill-conceived attempt at creating a for-pay browser in its early days, Opera doesn’t have nearly the user base of Firefox or Chrome; so a lot of sites don’t bother to check for compatibility with it. There are also no add-ons or extensions available, so what you see is what you get.  Though we confess, those side-anchored tabs are pretty cool.

Internet Explorer (Windows only)

There is really nothing to recommend this browser.  If you’re still using it, please stop reading this article immediately and go download either Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer is full of security holes, slow as molasses, and its version of the new browsing standards (tabs, bookmarks on the toolbar) are clunky and unintuitive.  Internet Explorer is like a gaudy tie or a tacky sweater—you got it as a gift and you have to keep it, because there are those rare instances where you absolutely have to bring it out into the light. Like when Aunt Mildred’s visiting from out of town. Or you’re trying to fill in an “interactive” form on a shoddy government website. There are some times when, we confess, you will need Internet Explorer. But for all those other times, have something better at the ready.

For a more humorous (albeit more cynical) take on the five browsers we higlighted, check out CollegeHumor.com

Thanks to InternetBrowserSoftware.net for the image

In spite of all the wonderful things computers have added to modern life, they’ve given us some pretty rotten things too: sentient AI along the lines of HAL and SkyNet, diminished capacity for social interaction, FarmVille. But of all these modern inconveniences, repetitive strain injuries have to be the most prevalent, persistent, and downright annoying. From headaches to hand cramps, there are myriad ailments you can blame on your PC.

Including sleeping poorly.

Ever since computers stopped using interfaces made up of neon green fixed-width type on an empty black screen, the light emitted by your PC’s display was meant to mimic daylight. Specifically, the color temperature of most displays is set to around 6000K by default.  And if you leave your display’s brightness setting at the higher end of its range, it means your eyes are getting bombarded with an awful lot of photons.  Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to stare into the sun?

And burning holes into your retinas aside, staring long and hard at your computer screen after dark can actually affect your circadian rhythms—the biological clockwork that tells you when it’s time to eat, time to wake up, and time to sleep.  Since your body interprets the cooler temperature light coming from your display as sunlight, it thinks computer time equals party time, even if it’s actually nighttime and you want to retire shortly after that last round of Spider Solitaire.

So what’s a self-respecting technophile to do? Luckily, the kind folks who designed F.lux made it just for you.

F.lux is a simple, free application (for Mac, Windows, and Linux) designed to run in the background on your computer and create a gradually changing color overlay for your display to affect the temperature of the light it emits. It’s tailored to your geographic location and the kind of indoor lighting you already have to make its changes in time with the sun’s movements and to create overlays that look like the artificial lighting you already have. You can make the transitions a quick 20-second flip, or an hour-long fade. There’s even an option to disable the whole program for an hour at a time when you need to do color-sensitive work like photo editing or graphic design.

While F.lux doesn’t affect your display’s brightness settings, the less intense contrast from the overlays helps reduce eye strain in addition to helping your body clock remember what time it is.  It’s a sneaky utility.  You will barely notice it’s there, but take stock a week or so after installing it.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll notice you haven’t had nearly as many headaches as usual and your eyes don’t feel like they’re made of sand after hours in front of the computer.

And hey, maybe you’ll even sleep better!

Thanks to IRPC on Flickr for the image!

It’s not a question of if your hard drive will fail, it’s a question of *when* it will fail. Hard drive life is rated in MTBF or mean time between failures which basically means that your hard drive will only run for so long before mechanical breakdown or physical damage will render your computer and your data unusable. Professional data recovery companies can charge several thousands of dollars to recover data from a failed drive and even if you make sure to use new drives and replace them frequently a fire, flood or theft can wipe all your data out in a heartbeat.  What can you do about this?

The first line of backups should always be local, an external hard drive or other device that your computer backups up to on a regularly scheduled basis.  If your system goes down it’s always faster to restore a large data set from a backup on site than it is to restore from the internet.

Local Backups

If you’re using Windows 7 (you have upgraded already, right?) you already have a great back up solution built into your system! Just get an external hard drive that’s at least as large as your internal drive (2 TB external hard drives are under $150 these days), connect it to your computer, go to your control panel and then click “backup and restore”

Then just follow the wizard to select your data, select the external hard drive and set the schedule and you can rest a little easier now.  With Windows Backup and Restore you can go back through all existing backups and recover individual files or whole directories.  This is especially useful if you make changes to a file or accidentally delete something and later realize you need the old version.  With a large enough backup drive you can go back months.

If you’re using an older version of Windows you can still backup your data, you just need to use some extra software to accomplish it. I’ve used Cobian Backup for years.  It’s a great free backup software that gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of choosing how many full backups, incremental backups, scheduling and other options.  You can even configure multiple backups to different locations (multiple external hard drives, thumb drives, etc) so you can better organize your data.

If you’re using a Mac with OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or newer you should definitely give Time Machine a try, like Windows 7′s Backup and Restore it comes built into your operating system.

Just like in Windows 7 you connect an external hard drive, and configure Time Machine and then just let it automatically back up your files. You can also use an Apple Time Capsule as your wireless router and backup hard drive.  That way as long as your computer is powered on and connected to your wireless network your backups will run on schedule!

Online backups

The advantage of online backups is that even if your computer and workspace are totally destroyed by natural disaster or massive theft all your data is safe somewhere on the internet.  Also with a backup solution like dropbox not only are your files backed up but you can also use it to keep files in sync between different computer and devices like Android devices and iPhones.  The down side is that unless you only have a little data to backup you’re going to have to start paying for a subscription.

Last year I wrote about a couple online backup options. An interesting addition to this list is crashplan.  They offer similar features to other online backup providers such as real-time backups, incremental backups to save time and bandwidth and the ability to go back in time and recover previous versions of files. One option that I really like is Backup to a Friend’s Computer.

It works like this.  You and a friend (or family member, or just another computer you own at a different location) sign up for a free crashplan account and link your computers together.  You then backup the files from one computer across the internet to the other computer.  So instead of using crashplan’s bandwidth and storage space you’re trading space with the other computer.  All your files are encrypted and the person on the other computer cannot open them in any way however if the unthinkable happens you can recover all your data safely using your credentials.

What other backup software or hardware do you use?  Let us know in the comments.

Like many people, you may have received a new computer for the holidays.  If you’re already an avid user you know how to set it up, install your favorite apps and get to work/play.  But if you’ve just moved to a new operating system (Windows 7, OS X or even Linux) you may be a little lost as to the new functionality in your new toy.  Luckily lifehacker has put together a great list of tips and tools for whatever system you’re baffled over.  Take a look at this list and let me know if you have another cool trick you’d like to share.

image from bolti22 on flickr

There are times when you may want to keep files away from prying eyes. A great way to do this straight in OSX is to make an encrypted image that you can mount and write to. So first open up disk utility. I am going to create an image on a usb drive so that I can take it with me.

As you can see I have made a partition called test. Highlight the partition then goto File –> New –> Blank Disc Image

Select the Save as and give it a name, You may also give the volume a name but it is not necessary.

Choose volume size and select custom, enter a size smaller than what the volume in question can hold ( as you see in the video I choose 1.8 GB). Select the encryption type, the partition should be changed to harddrive and the image format should be changed to sparse image.

Click create, it will ask you for a password. When you hit create it will start the process and automount the image for you. It will not ask you for a password because it will have saved it to your keychain.

Here is a video of the entire event.

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You can now drag any icon to the highlighted icon on top. If it was successful the preview icon below should change as well.

Congratulations! You have changed your icon. Easy wasn’t it.

I love Firefox, but there are always minor issues with any piece of software that should to be addressed to make them run even better.  Here’s one that has bothered me for quite some time.  If Firefox has been running for a while and I have a bunch of tabs open Flash performance, especially video, tends to suffer.  It turns out there’s a simple fix.

If you’re watching video on Firefox and it seems to skip or stutter every ten seconds or so it’s because Firefox is taking a snapshot of all your open tabs in case your browser crashes.  You can either disable the session restore feature (not really recommended) or you can just change the interval from every ten seconds to something a little more reasonable.

To do so simply type about:config in your address bar, then type browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box.  It’s default value is 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) so just change this to something like  60000 for 1 minute intervals 120000 for 2 minute, etc.  You don’t even have to restart Firefox for this to take effect.

I made this change earlier today and I cannot believe the difference.  Even after having Firefox open all day and dozens of tabs open youtube videos play totally smoothly.

Found via Lifehacker

Open up terminal ( it’s in your application folder under utilities, you can also just type terminal in spotlight).
Enter this in the window:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

The dock should close out and open up in 2D mode. There you have it, a short and sweet hack. If you ever want to change it back all you have to do is set the Boolean value to NO in that command.