This post sort of follows on from the previous post. If you have ever tried to take a picture of the screen saver you may find it quite hard. Every time you press the key commands your screensaver or other application may change and disappear. Although you could use grab for this, thats boring to use. This trick will use a small Terminal command that can take timed screenshots.

Open up Terminal. We will be using the screencapture command in Terminal. To take a timed screenshot type the following.

screencapture -T 10 ~/Desktop/screenshot.png

That will take a screenshot of the screen after 10 seconds and save it to the desktop named as “Screenshot.png”. You have to supply a path to save the file otherwise the command will not work.

I used that command to take a picture of the screen shot in the previous post. There is a slight problem with this command in that it cannot take a picture of you login screen with you quick user switch. I have yet to find a program that can do this.

Timed Screen Shots From Terminal

I like sponsors to this site. They enable me to keep it up and running. This is another shout out post for ScreensPro to thank them for sponsoring Mac Tricks And Tips. From my previous post about ScreensPro I mentioned that they offer screen savers for the Mac and Windows platform. I still haven’t tried there service out yet, I must get round to doing that one day.

If you want to sponsor Mac Tricks And Tips and help keep this site up and running head over to BuySellAds for more details. There is only two spaces left any they are filling up fast.

Welcome Back ScreensPro

This little screensaver trick might be pretty old but it is fun to use. If you have ever decided to play around with your Mac, you may encounter Kernel Panics. I have only encountered one Kernel Panic when I first got my Mac, I still don’t no how I did it. I haven’t had one since. But Kernel Panics are the be all and end all for a Mac. They are similar to the blue screen of death. It is game over, restart time when you experience them. Thankfully they don’t appear very often. As a result it is a great practical joke to have a Kernel Panic screen saver to play on unexpecting friends or work colleagues.

If you head over to Doomlaser, you can download the screen saver at the bottom of the post. Once as you install the saver by double clicking on it and following the prompts you can experience something similar to this.

Although it isn’t 100% life like it will fool the average passer by. Probably funny to use on a friends computer while they are working on an important document, and tape their reactions.

A fun little trick, although it stops working once as a person moves their mouse. You can have a blue screen of death version if you really want to freak out your friends and passers by.

Kernel Panic Screen Saver

For people who get a little bored of the original Mac icons used in  applications Elite By Design has created a new icon set which I thought you guys might enjoy. If you are familiar with the iPhone icons, with the glass bezel and rounded corners, theses are in a similar style. In the pack there are two sets, black and white and 128px x 128px and 64px x 64px.

They are really nice, and can be used for replacing the default icon set. He also includes the PSD file which can be used to make your own icons. I would recommend changing the images size in Photoshop to 512px x 512px since this is the largest size which is used by your Mac if you are on Leopard. You also get better quality when used in Quicklook for example. You can download the whole pack from Deviant Art.

To change and icon, simply Get Info for any application and then drag the png onto the little icon in the top left of Get Info. To change it back simply press delete on the icon in Get Info.

A Cool Mac OS X Icon Set

Its been a long time since I have done a comparison between two applications. This post will compare the two applications Checkout and Lightspeed. Theses applications are both designed for shops. They are applications which are designed to help shop employees sell their products. I am interested in this type of product since they are always well built and do have a lot of features. These two products are priced differently for different markets, as you will see from this post. This review will be split up into different sections, installation, interface, ease of use, price and finally my recommendation.

Installation

Installation of programs on a Mac is designed to be easy. Steve Job’s envisioned a simple drag and drop into the applications folder and you are done. Checkout follows this principle, you drag the application into your applications folder and you are done. There is other customizations which you can perform, but that is the short of it.

Lightspeed is designed to be a more used in larger stores. As a result it does install the “server” side software onto your computer if you are only using it on one machine. The idea behind this is that you can set up a server and then connect computers into the server, to make sure everything is running off the same database. As a result you have run an installer if you are using it on a single machine.

Both pieces of software, I should point out, are designed to scale. You can set up servers to store your products using both applications, Lightspeed is more deliberate about this.

Interface

The two applications have a very similar interfaces. They are both split up into two sections. Inventory and Selling. Checkout app has an interface similar to the ones below.

The image on the left is the screen which shows you your current products as well as past orders and stock. The image on the right is the order interface which you use to sell products in your inventory.

Adding products to the applications is not simple on the face of it. You have to go to the “Stock Room” to add products and view their statistics. As well as this you can manage your suppliers and stock.

The Lightspeed interface is a higher calibre than Checkout. It uses more gradients and looks a lot better. The applications is really split into two.

You use the left hand screen shot for controlling your stock, products and other store actions. The right hand screen shot shows the order interface, which is full screen and very pretty. The Lightspeed program is designed for fully fledged shops. There are hundreds of options for controlling the products in stock as well as the prices, time sheets plus many other features.

Ease Of Use

Although Lightspeed application is more professional, I do find it harder to use. There is so many features and items which you have to mange insert and use it does become overwhelming. Saying that the order interface is very simple. Lots of big buttons. The order interface is full screen so it work really well with a touch screen monitor.

Checkout app is a lot simpler to use. It is designed to be a simple Mac application to help sell your products in your store. It doesn’t have many of Lightspeeds advance features, but it is simple to switch back and forth between ordering and selling products. Lightspeed has lots of options which require admin passwords. Although this does increase security, it does make it longer to user.

Price

The different applications have different price tags as is probably apparent by the feature set. Checkout is priced at €329, which works at around $520. Update: The price in dollars is actually $399, the exchange rates ended up a bit of a squiffy price. Lightspeed works out at around $749. Both of these are one user licence. They are not cheap applications and as a result you will have to pay a lot.

Recommendations

Recommending these applications is hard. You could pay for the cheaper application, Checkout, and save some money. But Lightspeed is a very complete application and is designed for big shops. It has many features that Checkout app doesn’t have. I would buy Lightspeed if I had the money. It also has lots of addons and other products which work with Lightspeed. So you are buying a complete popular product.

These are both good applications. They show what you can do with a Mac, but you do need to invest a lot of time and effort in setting them up correctly. I would love to use these applications. All I need to do now is have a shop.

I have only scratched the surface with these applications and is designed as a basic review. They are so complex and detailed that they need a whole load of posts just to review them. As with any big purchase I recommend you really test them out and see if you could use them.

Checkout vs Lightspeed - Shop Applications

Time Machine is great for the average consumer of Mac’s. You don’t need to think about backing up files it just does it for you. But sometimes you have to wonder, what exactly does Time Machine backup? Some times, when I haven’t do a lot file creating, it backups around 2Gb of files. Some clever person has created a small perl application that scans your Time Machine backup for changes and displays them in Terminal.

The firs step is to download the timedog app. Its a small executable. Unzip the executable.

Next open up Terminal. We are going to move the executable so it can be activated from any folder and you don’t have to write the path every time. In Terminal type

cd ~/downloads
sudo cp timedog /usr/local/bin

This will change the directory to your downloads folder, you will have to change this if you have a different downloads folder. It will then copy it into you local binary folder. This is a system protected area as a result you have to use you admin password to copy across the file. You can delete the timedog file in your downloads file when you have finished all of the steps.

The next step is to change Terminal to you Time Machine folder. In Terminal again type:

cd /Volumes/Time\ Machine/Backups.backupdb/[Computer Name]

You have to cross check the path correctly in Finder. The backslah (\) escapes any spaces. For example if you computer name has a couple of spaces in it or you Time Machine disk isn’t called “Time Machine”, you should use backslashes to escape them properly.

The final step is to invoke timedog, simply type the following:

timedog -d 5 -l

The -d option is the depth of files. If you have millions of files to backup you may find the Terminal output gets long. This cuts it down to only 5 folders deep. The -l modifier is linked to symbolic links that Time Machine creates. I would keep this option to to display the best output.

A simple little script. It looks clean from what I have seen although caution should be taken. It is interesting what Time Machine exactly backs up.

Via: Mac OS X Hints

View What Time Machine Backs Up

If your an Apple Geek today is a very special day. Happy iCal day. Today is July 17th, which means that the date on iCals dates is the same as today. On July 17, 2002 iCal was born (hence the date on its icon). As a result every year, Apple Geeks celebrate this programs birthday. Its 6 years old, the trouble some toddler stages have passed and its on to its young life as a youngster. Don’t they grow up fast.

Although it is a bit sad, I love iCal. It boasts some of the best features for an calender program. For example it works with pretty much every Apple application, enables you to easily add, remove and change calenders with a couple of clicks. As well as this teamed up with the iCal server in the Mac Server Pack you can easily share and see other people calenders quickly and easily.

If you are in the party mood. You can download and make your own iCal party hat. It clearly shows how geeky and sad you really are.

If it is your birthday please leave a comment below. You have a 1 in 365/6 chance of being on the same birth date so the chances are likely that one of you readers has the same birthday.

Happy iCal Day

While searching the web I have come across a cool little site by Mac Life, of 30 application you have not heard off. It was a good list so I have decided to share it with you. Some of the applications on the list are very interesting which I have never heard of but will be checking out in the coming weeks.

The list if you don’t want to visit the site is:

1. Anxiety
2. FileChute
3. Yojimbo*
4. Scrivener* - I have written my review of this application here.
5. Celtx
6. Desktop Curtain*
7. Inquisitor* - You can see me little review of it here.
8. Witch
9. A Better Finder Rename
10. Text Expander
11. ThisService
12. Yep*
13. Acorn
14. Connect360
15. Audacity*
16. VLC* (who hasn’t heard of VLC?)
17. HandBrake*
18. Doug’s Scripts* - I don’t really think this is an application, more of a website.
19. Cyberduck*
20. Newsfire* - I have written about this in my RSS post.
21. Adium* - The best IM client ever.
22. Chax
23. Twitterific* - I currently use this to send my Tweets to Twitter.
24. Call Recorder For Skype
25. Mail Tags
26. Mail Attachements Iconizer
27. SuperDuper*
28. TextMate* - This site was practically built on TextEdit, that an CSSEdit.
29. Coda*
30. Geektool* - Mentioned in the Menu Bar post I did recently. Although this tool never works for me.

I have heard quite a lot of these, noted by the star (*). For a new user to the Mac a lot of these applications would be useful. I’m not hundred percent sure 25 and 26 are that useful. I could think of a couple of other applications that could take its place. Also I think 18, isn’t really an application more of a website. I have listed a couple of these on my Top 100 Essential Mac Applications. Anyway a fun little list. Who doesn’t like lists.

Mac Life - 30 Apps You Have Never Heard Of

If you cast you mind back, over two weeks ago I did two competitions for Sugar Sync and Pages Templates.The competition closed last night. But due to time constraints I was unable to pick a winner and write a post. But, now is the lucky time for a couple of winners to receive some prizes. I wont be giving them out directly, I will forward your emails on to the companies who own the product and they will send you your prize.

Sugar Sync

This competition, slightly harder out of the two, involved writing a comment about how you would use this product. I have chosen comment numbers:

• 3, John Mahlman
• 4, Marco Deyasi
• 9, Maria Valente

I will forward your emails address onto Sugar Sync and they will upgrade your account. On a similar note Sugar Sync have released a new feature which enables you to send large files anywhere. If you are still using there service that would be a welcome addition to their feature set.

Pages Templates

The pages templates competition was a lot for you to enter. All you had to do was leave a comment and I would pick your name at random. Every time I think of random numbers I always think of this cartoon. Anyway using the sequence generator from random.org the winners are:

• 5, Brian Fleming
• 13, Tim
• 41, johndbritton

Well done to those who didn’t win, hopefully you will have more luck in competitions in the future. If any one has any products they want to promote through competitions on Mac Tricks And Tips please contact me.

Competitions Winners

This is a little shoutout about a cool little site you should visit if you are an avid Mac fan. If you head over the mac.alltop.com you can visit a whole page of the latest Mac News. It brings all of the latest feeds from some of the big and small Mac sites and puts it all on one page. I have just been included, yey, as usual with theses kinds of things I am at the bottom of the list.

There are a lot of feeds and it is a bit overwhelming. But if you are bored and want a bit of Mac news you can always browse the list to see if you can find anything you like. You can close the feeds with the little cross on each of the boxes, if you find a feed you don’t want to view.

Visit Me At Alltop

I use Mail a lot. Mixed with a compulsion to keep everything tidy and organised I end up using a lot of flags, folders and other organisational tools within Mail to make sure I know where everything is and it is in the right place. This little application that I am going to talk about today is called Flagit. It is a small program/plugin for Mail that enables you to add more than one type of flag to your inbox as well as a couple of other features.

This little programs works slightly differently from normal programs that you may encounter. Since Mail doesn’t have a natural API and plugin interface Flagit has to high jack your computer slightly to install its self. It doesn’t do any harm, it just has to write a couple of files to system places. As a result it uses a package installer compared to a normal drag and drop. You also have to use your admin password to install the file.

Once you have gone through the installation process and restarted Mail, upon right clicking on any message and selecting “Mark” you will be give a set of options to expand your options for organising the type of flags you can assign to a message.

In the default install you can add 4 different types of flags as well as the normal flag supplied by Mail. You can customize the colours and messages associated with each flag within the Customize section. As well as this you can also mark messages using Flagit as questions or as important messages.

All of these flags could get overwhelming but for people who have OCD and need everything in the right place, theses extra flags can help. It makes your message box a lot more colourful after a couple of minutes of adding flags.

There is a couple of small problems I find with this program. It doesn’t add a “flag” so you can’t use smart mailboxes to capture them with the flag setting, as well as this it also isn’t configurable for normal smart mailboxes. One of the biggest problems I have found is there is no visible way of uninstalling it with out going through the method explained below.

You can uninstall this program is you go to /Users/[name]/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins and deleting the Flagit.bundle file. Not the easiest method but you can get rid of it. You do have to restart Mail if you want to fully get rid of it.

A nice little app. It does cost $8, so you may have to try before you buy. Hopefully it will appear on MacPromo soon going cheap. Leave a comment telling me what you think of this program.

Increase The Type Of Flags In Mail

I like terminal, it is so powerful and useful. You can do so much with it. This little tip will show you how you can delete a lot of files, and certain types of files really quickly using Terminal. This tip carries a warning of “Insert Brain Before Doing Anything”, because if you type something incorrectly you can delete you entire hard drive, I am serious one little line and zip no more files. Anyway, I am going to use a bit of caution in this tutorial and you should to.

To being, open up Terminal. This this tip will show you how to delete every file and folder in a certain directory. First navigate to folder you want using the cd command. You can then type the following.

rm -rf ./*

That will delete everything in that folder. The -f option will not prompt you about file permissions and delete the files anyway, -r will delete the folders and then and files and folders in the folder and so on and so forth. Don’t do this on the root or your home directory because it will be unforgiving and will delete everything. It doesn’t move it the files to the trash. The slash dot at the beginning will make sure it will delete everything forward of the current folder and not anything else, a small security measure. The star is the wild card operator. You can delete certain files by inserting their names separated by spaces.

Another trick which you can use is to delete files by file type using the wild card operator. For example the following will delete everything that is a png file.

rm -rf ./*.png

You can also use this the other way around.

rm -rf ./test.*

That will delete everything called test not matter what the application extension it uses. You can make the wild card more open by adding the following.

rm -rf ./r*.p*

That will delete any application that any file that begins with r and the file extension that begins with p (.png, .psd etc).

The uses of this are endless. For example you can quickly clear out a whole folder in a couple of characters. How long do you think it would take to delete everything out of a folder that contains starts with the letter “t” and is a png file, this folder contains 1000 files and is mixed in with a lot of different files. You could do it within a couple of seconds with Terminal but it would take you a lot longer in Finder.

Have fun with rm, just make sure you don’t type rm -rf /* otherwise bye bye hard drive.

Easily Delete Files Using Terminal

I’m always concerned about security of my Mac. I spent a lot of money on it and I don’t want it to go missing. A while ago I mentioned about Gawker, the time lapse application, that would be very useful in using it for security cameras. Well I have stumble across a new application, Periscope, that takes your Mac and makes it into a CCTV application. Its very polished and really easy to use. It does a good job of doing something really simple and make it even simpler.

Once as your duzi the application it is split up into two sections. The left section is your configurables and the right hand side is the live picture from your chosen camera. Notice the gormless looking person realizing he wasn’t having his picture taken.

Setting up how pictures are taken is really simple. It is split up into three steps. You configure how you take your pictures, for example with movement, sound, timer (similar to time lapse photography) or remote. The most interesting aspect here is movement, which is useful if you want to make a security camera over you holiday but don’t want to use up lots of hard drive space as you would with taking a picture every X seconds.

Once as you set up how you want you photo to be taken you change the look and location of the image. For example you can add timestamps, images and text to your screen. As well as this you can set it up so you images are emailed, uploaded to ftp or saved to your local folder. FTP and email are very useful since you want to secure an image of the intruder before they take off with you computer full of images of your intruder.

The final section isn’t used when you are taking photos but later on when you review them. The share option lists all of your images, the time and date when they were taken.

There are lots of little different settings which you can use to get the right image captured. Once as you have set it up you let the program run. It will automatically take pictures every time a setting meets your specification. The camera movement is very useful. Although it does tend to make images ever so slightly blurry. But if you bump up the resolution in the settings in the Preferences you should get a better image. As well as this the motion capture is ever so slightly off and as a result you get a lot of cut off heads. For example take the image below of me falling off my chair.

It is a good little application but it might not be fully worth the $39.99 price tag, it is very well built and does look good. But may only be needed by proper security enthusiasts. As well as this it doesn’t have support for multiple cameras (which I am really interested in findin) and does not work to well for a police point of view, if you Mac is stolen and your images are on that computer.

Periscope - Make Your Own Security Camera

A while ago I mentioned a little tip that you can use to view the boot up text on your Mac. It enabled you to view the verbose output of all of the various commands that your computer uses during the boot phase. Kevin kindly left a comment mentioning how you can set the boot up text to be always visible. It doesn’t take long to implement. This tip does carry a warning of be careful. As you do edit system files that really can stop your Mac from booting up.

The first step will be to open up a Property List editor. If you have the developer package installed from your OS disk open Property List Editor in /Developer/Applications/Utilities. This program is designed to show you the various properties that a plist file uses. If you don’t have the developer package installed you can always download and use PlistEdit Pro, it is similar to the one in the developer package except you have to pay.

The next step is to navigate to /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration this holds a couple of system wide preference files. Open up com.apple.Boot.plist into your favourite editor. This is the preference file used when your computer starts up and shutsdown.

In your editor change Kernel Flags to -v and then save out. If you are having problems with saving out due to permissions errors you may need to change your file permissions. Simply right click on the file go to Get Info and add yourself to the permissions list at the bottom. You may have to use your admin password.

If you can’t get the correct permissions to work and you want a quicker one line way open up Terminal and type the following.
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.boot "Kernel Flags" -v

That will write using using your admin powers the the plist file in the correct location. It will change Kernel Flags it -v. If you want to revert the plist back and have the splash screen visible simply type in Terminal again.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.boot "Kernel Flags" ""

You will then be back to normal. Its a simple and effect method if you are interested in viewing the boot up text. Just remember you are editing system files. This trick did work for me. But it may not work for you. So exercise caution. Thanks to Kevin for pointing this out. If you have any more tips please send them in.

View Boot Up Text - Update

This is just quick post to say welcome back to Audio Jungle as a Mac Tricks And Tips sponsor. As I have mentioned previously. Audio Jungle, from the makers of PSDtuts and Freelance, offers flash and audio clips for you to download and buy. Although not a big user of this type of media, I have dabbled in it a bit. Many of you designers out there will find this type of site useful for any projects you are working on. Check out Audio Jungle in the sidebar or from the link previously.

If you want to advertise on Mac Tricks And Tips and help keep this site up and running head over to BuySellAds for more details. Once again thanks to Audio Jungle.

Welcome Back Audio Jungle

I like using Terminal, it is usually much more efficient and a lot quicker then the normal methods you use on your Mac. This post is about one widely used tool on UNIX and Linux systems, wget. Wget is a small program that can download files and folders to your computer through Terminal. There is already program similar to wget on your Mac, it is called curl. Although they do the same task, I prefer wget. When I tried curl on my computer it threw up lots of errors and problems. This post will tell you how to install wget and some simple basic usage. It is simple to do and really doesn’t take that long. I can’t take full credit for this tip, I took some of the steps from asitis.

The first step is to download the source code. Head over to the offical site and download the code directly. Once as you have downloaded the package unzip it. There will be a lots of funky files and folders. Thankfully we don’t have to deal with any of them. Open up Terminal and navigate to the folder wget is extracted in. For example:

cd ~/desktop/temp/wget-1.9.1

We know need to configure the package for your computer and install it. This is done slightly differently to normal packages and folders you may experience. In Terminal again type the following:

./configure

This will configure the packages and files for your computer. Then type:

make

This will make the files into a single binary file for use on your computer. Finally type:

sudo make install

This will copy the binary file into the correct location on your computer. Since the folder wget will copy into is a protected system folder, you will have to use the sudo command and an administrator password.

You have successfully installed wget. For example you can use wget to download zip files using the following command in Terminal.

wget http://www.file.com/location/file.zip

Wget is designed to download files and web pages in Terminal but it can do a whole lot more. For some reason the link to the man page does not seem to work. So you can visit this URL instead.

You can do hundreds of different things with wget. It really is quite powerful and very easy to use. I recommend reading the man page to find out how to use it. You probably wont use it every day, but for anyone who likes using Terminal, or wants to play around with some more Unix commands, wget is a very fun one to use. If I remember correctly there was an old joke where you type “wget *.*” to download the entire internet.

Installing wget On Your Mac For Terminal

If you have a Mac you will want to get the fastest possible speed out of it. There are a couple of tips and tricks which you can employ to get the most out your Macinstosh and make it into a speed daemon. Although this post wont enable you to make your Mac magically a hundreds times faster, it will enable you to complete tasks just that little bit quicker. A few of theses tips you wont notice the difference in, but with some tips it could enable your Mac to start up, for example, considerably quicker. I have used most of these tips and I have seen a big improvement.

RAM (Random Access Memory)

Probably the biggest gain in speed will be to upgrade your memory. A computer running on 2Gb of RAM compared to 1Gb of RAM will be noticeably quicker. This is because the computer doesn’t have to keep swapping applications in and out of your Hard Drive. Personally I think most Mac’s should have 2Gb of RAM to keep it up to speed, as well as nice and quick. RAM doesn’t cost that much, £25 for 2Gb for a MacBook Pro is very good.

Having lots of RAM is one thing. Having working RAM is another. A cool little application is Rember, it is a small application based on memtest, that is designed to write and read to your RAM. If you have RAM with bad blocks it can cause applications to freeze and slow down. Simply because it can’t use them. If you have tip top RAM you can get your Mac running at top speed.

As well as RAM, and if you have the cash, you could also consider an SSD hard drive. A solid state disk is similar to one big block of RAM. It is in the new MacBook Air’s. They are designed to give you quicker access times as well as more battery life in laptops. SSD are quicker than hard drives since you are not waiting for the drive heads to find the right sector of the disk. You get your data almost immediately. Speeding up your computer.

Applications

Probably the biggest save in speed will come from the applications you are running. The biggest save can come from running universal apps if you have an Intel Mac. Although the majority of applications are universal apps, some notable exceptions are Word. Having a PPC app is similar to telling some exactly how to drive when you want to go to work. It slows down your computer. Changing to Intel apps enables you to speed up your computer.

Another way to speed up your applications and to make your Mac into a speed daemon is to make sure your applications are regularly updated. Old applications could have bugs in them that make them appear sluggish. A fully updated Mac enables the applications to run at their full potential.

Another applications tip is to check your login items. Every so often an application may put its self into the login items box in your System Preferences. This means that the application will load every time your start your Mac, adding seconds to your start up time. To remove and checks apps go into the Accounts option in System Preferences.

System

Applications may cause problems even if they are up to date and are Intel binaries. Some problems occur due to caches. Although caches are designed to make your Mac as fast as possible, they do from time to time become large, bloated and corrupt. The problems with this is that apps are trying to read this cache files but are encountering errors. You need to delete your caches. This is done from, in Finder, /Users/[name]/Library/Caches. Simply delete all of them or the single apps that you think are causing you trouble.

Another top speed tip is to check Disk Permissions and Disk Health. If you pop open Disk Utilities under /Applications/Utilities you can run both of the programs. Disk Permissions is designed to make sure the correct applications and files have the correct permissions. Disk Health is to make sure your hard drive runs as well as possible. As well as this it also make sure it find and secures any corrupt disk sectors.

Files

Although many aspects of you Mac sit away until they are needed some applications in particular do run even though you don’t actually run them yourself. Quite a few programs I use add daemons to the running process list even though I don’t start them up. By uninstalling apps you never run, you could save yourself both disk space and the chance that you uninstall an application that may secretly run in the background.

On the same line as applications, another one to check out is the Menu Bar. Recently I mentioned about the Must Have Menu Bar Applications, although some of theses applications you should install having to many will take up both RAM and CPU. Uninstalling the ones you don’t use will speed up your Macintosh just that little bit.

Another quick speed boost will be to disable the Dashboard. Although dashboard doesn’t run until you open it. If you do open it, it then becomes difficult to close it once as it is open. The best method I have found is to disable it through Terminal. You can find out how to do this in Top 50 Terminal Apps, its number 13.

Final Steps

There is one final step you could complete to really give your Mac a speed boost and that will be to start again. Although re-installing your OS is a bit extreme you could create a new account. This will set all of you defaults back to normal, reset caches and anything hidden away. You just have to copy across your files and you can start a fresh. This is very good if you have clogged up your account so much but you think it will take to long to go through every application and find out what is wrong with it.

These are only a couple of my tips that I use regularly (expect the last one, and buying more RAM). If you have any more please leave a comment below. I would love to find out what you do and how it effects your computer. I would also recommend you checking out MainMenu, it does some of the tasks stated such as clearing caches for you. It is very useful.

Admittely these tips wont make your Mac a million times faster. But every little helps. As well as this most of the tasks don’t take long to complete. If you have any more to add please leave one below.

Getting Your Mac To Be A Speed Daemon

I like good software for the Mac. I also like cheap software. What is better than good software being heavily discounted? This site, called Mac Mix Promo, is designed around giving you good software at a cheap price. As limited offer, similar to MacPromo and MacHeist. For every piece of software you buy you earn so much off. It similar to the promos we have all heard off, but is designed to give you more control and more of a discount.

The principle behind Mac Mix Promo, is slightly different to offers we have seen. All applications have been unlocked, but you get to choose which applications you want. Currently there is 28 applications to choose from. In other offers you would have to buy all 28 offers to receive the discount. In this promotion you can only buy one and receive a discount.

The discount increases the more you buy. If you buy one app you get 10% off. Three apps 30% off, 5 apps 40% off, 7 apps 50% off, 9 apps 60% and finally 12 apps or more for 75% off. For example, out of the applications listed if you want only one, you could buy only one and receive a discount. If you want to buy every single application it would cost your $1000 dollars nearly, but you get is for just $234. Bargain.

Navigating the site is a bit tricky. I does look amazing. If you want to add some products to the checkout you simply click on the numbers for the different sections and then click on icons for the different applications. I think the designers went a bit mad on the javascript and div’s are flying everywhere. There is a light version in the top left if you click on the link.

The whole list includes: Paraelles, iBank, iBiz, Process, Yep, MacGourmet, Linkinus, Leech, Xyle Scope, KavaTunes, Flux, Forklift, Picturesque, DrawIt, Photon, YourView, HoudahGeo, AlterEgo, Witch, HoudahSpot, Steel, Shovebox, TextExpander, AppShelf, Wacky Mini Golf, Islands Mini Golf, Comic Book Lover and iConquer.

Check them out. See if there is anything you like. There are some very good options, but not every program is up my street and it may become a bit expensive if you purchase every application. It is a good idea, but the applications they have lets it down a bit. We need a good site with some good options and applications.

Make Your Own Mix Offer

can’t accept originality of this image I found it over at iPhone Gold. But it is very interesting about how the iPhone has evolved and changed over the years. I remember them releasing the ROKR, thinking how un-Apple it looked and operated.

I wonder what will come in the next coming months and years. Hopefully they will release an iPhone which is on Pay As You Go (PAYG). I mentioned with another Mac buff friend, that if Apple released an iPhone on PAYG they would sell millions more. I would have bought one, all of my friends would have bought one. But since it is on contact they missed out on a making money trick. iPhones would have become as disposable as iPods.

Leave a comment below on what you think about the iPhone and if you do have one. As a side note I wonder if I will ever become as recognised as Endgaget enabling me to wipe off $4 billion off Apple’s stock. The power.

iPhone Timeline

This post is a gentle reminder that the two competitions on Mac Tricks And Tips are about to end. Both the Pages Competition and the Sugar Sync Competition will run till the 16th of July. So you have only two days left to enter. There is still a chance that you could win.

If you can’t remember the competitions. The Pages competition sponsored by OneEyedGoldfish, enables you to win one of three template packs worth £40. All you have to do is leave a comment asking to win. Over 37 people have entered so you still have a 1 in 10 chance (ish) of winning.

The first competition that I did here was the Sugar Sync competition. That competition asked you to leave a comment about how you would use their service. Currently only 10 people have entered. So if you want a free copy of Sugar Sync yearly service worth $50 leave a comment and you may have a chance of winning.

Good luck and I hope you all win. Except you can’t. Good Luck.

Competition Reminder