I was watching a video of the WWDC the other day, mostly to see the new applications of the 2.0 firmware for the iPhone. After watching the WWDC, I cannot wait for the 2.0 firmware, and also the release of Mobile Me. For those who do not know, I am a .Mac user, so this service will become absolutely free to me!

While I was watching the WWDC, I was also curious as how Mobile Me would be. I started watching it, and looking at the really cool amazing features. One feature that I want to talk about is in the mail service. While they were showing the mail service, I saw a feature that I didn’t think our mail applications today have. That would be the feature he used for quick reply.

All he did was click on a little button on the side of the sender, and there came up a little box for a quick reply. Steve Jobs talked about releasing a sneak peak to developers on Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”. After watching this video, I am certain that having a quick reply button in the new mail application will be available.

If this feature is available, I think it will help enhance mail even better. I love the mail application that comes in Leopard, and I have a feeling just by this little sneak peak the new application will be even better.

What other features would you like to see in the new mail application? What feature would you like them to work on?

People are always saying that Firefox is better than Safari; which one is it? This post is not going to be a debate about which one is better, it is about the use of tabs in Safari. Apple has really enhanced the flexibility, and user friendly interface of using tabs in Safari. There are some features that probably not a lot of people know about, or even use.

Merge All Windows

This is a great way to put a group of windows, all into one. The example I had was I had four windows open, and I wanted them all to be in one single window. Well, just by going to Window => Merge All Windows, they are now all in one window, in four separate tabs.

This is a great feature if you want to de-clutter your window, or even make browsing a lot more easier and faster. The next Tab feature that I want to talk about is moving your tabs.

Organize Tabs

Organizing your tabs in Safari is extremely easy, all you need to do is click and hold, then drag your tab where you want it to be. My example was that I like to have the tabs I am visiting the most, on the very left side. So if there is a site that I do not use very often, I can just drag it all the way to end, and put my more used ones on the left.

You can even drag tabs between multiple windows. So if I have one window for each subject (i.e. one for technology and one for sports), I can drag the tabs from window for window. All you need to do is take your tab, click and hold, and drag it into the other browser window. This will allow you to move tabs from one window to another.

You can also do many other things to create a new tab. You can drag the URL into the separate window to create a tab there. Not only can you use the URL, but you can also use bookmarks, or links from your bookmark menu, or even links from websites. It is really nice and simple to use.

What are your favorite features about Safari? Which ones do you use the most?

If you want great tips for the Mac, you should defiantly visit this website - this talks about how you can change your folder view in Leopard. Say that you are in your application folder, and you have it set to list, well then all your folders are set to list.

Maybe you want one folder in list and the rest in icon. This tip will show you exactly how you can do that.

First, choose the folder that you wish to set. Then set that folder in icon view, list view, column view or cover flow. Once you do that hit Command + J. Then lets say you have it in list view, in on the box, you want to check the checkbox at the very top. That will say always show in list view.

You do this for all the folders that you want to have customized.

iTunes is one of the greatest, if not the greatest music player for your computer. For over 7 years, iTunes has been improving itself, and having amazing features that make listening to your music so much easier and cooler. They made it really user friendly so you can do many easy things, like burn CD’s or find what song you are looking for.

Like it was said before, iTunes has some pretty amazing features; which of these features however are the most underused. You would be surprised at what exactly you can do on iTunes that you may not know you could do.

1. Browser

You may not have known that your iTunes had a browser did you? Well this is great for really finding the song you want. Maybe you want to listen to only acoustic music, and just from certain people. The browser on iTunes will sort all your music to the mood you are in.

2. Equalizer

If I ever wanted to be a DJ, I wouldn’t spend money on all that music software, I think iTunes would work just fine. With equalizer you can fully customize how your music sounds; so maybe you want to really emphasize the guitar or maybe pump up the bass.

3. Rating

Rating is really helpful when you want a good song to listen to. Some people organize their music by Artist or Song Name, but I organize it by Song Rating. This way I know where all the songs that I usually listen to are, and not the ones that I do not really listen to. If you have a lot of songs, and do not want to go through every single song, a great program that does it all for you is AutoRate. They rate your songs really accurately too.

4. Smart Playlists

Maybe you want a folder of just Frank Sinatra or the Beetles. Why should you have to add every single song at a time or whenever you add a new song to your library? When you have a Smart Playlist, it will do it all for you. You can customize the playlist for whatever you want, based off rating, how many times the song was played, you name it.

5. Album View/Cover Flow

Now, the main library should always be in List View (which it usually is); however you can spice up your library for the smaller folders and playlists. Maybe you have a playlist of many different artist, you can look through your folder in Album View or Cove Flow. Doing this will really help your library look a lot cooler.

6. MiniStore

Since iTunes has one of the largest music stores on the web, you can almost download any band and song that you want. Maybe you are getting sick of your music, and want to find new music. Well by using the mini store, you can do just that. With MiniStore, you can see what other songs are played by the Artist, what other Albums they have, and what other Artist’s people bought with the same music taste as you.

7. Change Columns

Now, I am sure you are like me, and do not care what album it is from or what genre it is. What I care about mostly is the name of the song, the artist who sings it, the rating it has, and the number of times it has been played. Now you can add many columns to your iTunes library, which will cause your library to stretch. So you can organize your columns so the most important ones are what you see first.

So I went online, and I found this amazing application called smcFanControl, and oh boy, did it help my computer. smcFanControl hacks into your computer, and lets you change the rate of the fan, and by doing this you can really lower your temperature. I only raised the fan speed by about a quarter, and it lowered my processor speeds by about 20 degrees, and I can still barely hear the fan!

That was the temperatures of my computer once I got home, and yesterday my fan speeds were running at about 500. So as you can see, I raised it by about 1000 RPM. Using smcFanControl is really neat, because now I do not have to keep going to dashboard to look at the temperature of my processor’s as my temperature is always displayed on the menu bar.

So when I took this picture my average CPU temperatures were at about 30 degrees Celsius with the fans running at about 1400 RPM. smcFanControl is already my new favorite application, one it is keeping my computer at a cool temperature in my hot house, then two, its got the temperature on the menu bar, and then three, it is really user friendly, which is really good.

This is how you can control your fans, you choose which fans that you wish to control, and you just raise the RPM to your desired number. This happens instantly, for a test I raised my CPU fan all the way, and just like that I instantly heard the fan pick up the pace. Then below the fan control you can customize the way you like it, like if you were on a MacBook or MacBook Pro, how you want to display temperature, and many other features.

Now you may be asking, well if you run the fan to hard won’t the fan break? Well, I hardly believe the fan will break because you are raising the speed. I do believe that it won’t last as long, but you need to remember. Replacing a fan costs about $50 max. Then to replace a CPU, that can cost anywhere to $1000!

Concluding Thoughts

So what are your thoughts of smcFanControl? How hot does your computer run without it, how hot does it run with it?

Chances are you have heard all about AppZapper, if you have not let me tell you what it is exactly. AppZapper is a really fun application that deletes your applications. You are probably asking yourself: How is deleting Applications Fun?

Well let me tell you how it works. You open AppZapper, and you will be greeted with a little box that you just drag your unwanted application to. Once you find the application, just simply drag it right into the box and you will get a cool little like zapping/shooting noise.

The only down part about AppZapper, is that it costs $12.95. Now you are probably asking yourself: Why would I pay money to delete applications when Trash is perfectly fine? The answer to that question is that AppZapper is better than Trash.

What trash does is it deletes the application, thats it. Now, what AppZapper does it deletes everything, the preferences installed into the computer, caches, and other files that are added to the computer. Let get the guys at AppZapper to better explain what it does for you.

Drag an app into your applications folder, and it’s installed. You’d think it would be that easy to delete an app — just a matter of dragging it to the trash. But it’s not. Applications install preferences, caches, and other support files throughout your computer that take up space and generate clutter. Deleting these by hand every time you delete an app is a pain.

This program is great for notebook users. That is because you are fully deleting everything that the application came with, which means that you will have more free space on your hard drive.

Concluding Thoughts

So what are your thoughts on AppZapper? Do you already have the application, if so how do you like it?

This question was asked: Should I buy an iMac with a 500GB HD now, or should I wait to buy it later when they upgrade?

The answer to this question was you should definitely buy it now. Apple just upgraded the iMac’s not to long ago, and I do not see them being updated for a while now. You also asked if you should buy it not, or wait to buy it with your student discount. Just like I said in the video, you should buy it now because no matter what you should be able to get an iMac with your student discount, not matter what the year is.

My only suggestion is that if you want to wait, you should wait for a few months, that way you can get a more powerful computer at the same price if you buy it refurbished. I usually do buy refurbished products from Mac because they are extremely cheap, and they are as good as new. So this is to everyone out there: If you want to get a more powerful computer for a cheaper price, look at the refurbished section!

Inquisitor has made searching the web a lot easier, simpler, and enjoyable. Here are quotes from the Inquisitor website, that better explains what exactly Inquisitor is.

“Inquisitor… it’s like spotlight for the web. Start typing and websites pop up immediately. It’ll autocomplete your words. (is it reading your mind? and you can add more search engines to safari with customized keyboard shortcuts. “

Inquisitor is really simple to set up too. All you do is go to their website, and click download. After you unzip the folder, just click on the “package” and it will basically install itself. That’s all you have to do, now just open safari, start searching and you will notice that searching is a lot different.

You can also fully customize the settings for inquisitor as well.

To access these settings, just go to preferences on safari, and click on search. You then get this screen, now I already changed some of my settings around, so yours will not look exactly like this. You can see though that you get to decide what search engine you want, how many websites to show, and how many keywords to show.

This is a great application, and I would recommend it to anybody. To me, this is like quicksilver, only its for the internet. It will greatly improve your workflow.

What type of plug-ins do you use for safari?

I finally found a Super Nintendo emulator! It is called Snes9x, and it works amazingly, very simple to use, and very simple to configure. Here is a screen shot, from when I was playing Donkey Kong.

So as you can see, it is just like the same thing, only you are playing on your computer. Now when I have nothing to do, I plan on catching up, and beating my favorite games all over again.

How it Works

So here is how you set it up, you can play your favorite games within minutes. Download Snes9x from their website, unzip, and drag to your applications folder, or wherever you want it. After you have the application installed on your Mac, it is time for you to visit some ROM (that is what the games are called) sites, to download your favorite games. Here is a list of sites that supply a huge amount of ROMS.

• http://www.romnation.net/srv/roms/snes204.html
• http://www.coolrom.com/roms/snes/
  
• http://www.doperoms.com/roms/Super_Nintendo_Snes.html
• http://www.snesorama.us/ROMS/

Once you download the game that you wish to play, just open up Snes9x, click on emulation => Run, then choose the ROM you just downloaded. It is really simple, you can customize the controls to your liking, import cheat codes, and much more.

This is an application that I plan on to use at least once a day or so, so when I have nothing better to do, I can just make hours go away faster and faster.

If you need any help, or have any questions, fell free to email me or leave a comment. What is your favorite Super Nintendo game? Do you know of any other emulators?