Hiding The Dock

Here's a quick tip you might find useful. The Dock is great but there are times where it might get in the way of your work. This is especially true for MacBooks with 13" screens.

For an incredibly quick way to hide the Dock, simply press Command + Option + D. This will slide the Dock off your screen so you can take full advantage of the Desktop. When you want to bring it back full time, just press that key combination again.

iTunes Pass Arrives But It Is Not What You Think

When I see the words "iTunes Pass", I think of Zune Pass. Say what you will about the Zune but one of its strengths over the iPod is the subscription service it offers. For a monthly fee, you can download all the music you want. You can listen to it as much as you want until you either stop paying or the songs are no longer available in the store. Not a bad way to experience music if you don't really care about owning the content.

Well, Apple has launched iTunes Pass and you can get it today! Whoa, wait, stop partying in the streets. Stop hugging each other with excessive joy! It's not quite what you think. Read on.

iTunes Pass is a new service that get you new music and special bonus features for a particular band. The launch of this service is for Depeche Mode's new album, "Sounds Of The Universe". $18.99 gets you a pre-order for the album's release, the new single from the album and a remix that you can download today, and from now until June 16th, 2009, you'll get more songs, videos, remixes, and who knows what else.

If you are a fan of Depeche Mode, this might be a good deal. Chances are, come June 16th, you'll end up with more content than $18.99 would get you otherwise. If you are interested in taking advantage of this iTunes Pass, click here (this link opens in iTunes). Also, if you are indeed a fan of Depeche Mode, feel free to continue the party in the streets and all that. It's cool.

Safari 4 Beta Released

Happy Tuesday! Apple has given us a true gift from the heavens. Starting today, you can download Safari 4, the new version of their popular web browser. You can download it here for Mac OS X (Tiger or Leopard) and Windows XP and Vista.

New features include:

• Nitro engine. A fast Javascript engine that renders 4x faster the previous version of Safari, up to 30x faster than IE, and 3x faster than Firefox. Buckle up for safety.
• Top Sites. A new page built into the browser with thumbnails of all your commonly visited sites. It makes for easy access to your favorite online haunts. If you've used Opera of Google Chrome, this feature will be familiar to you.
• Cover Flow. Love it or hate it, Apple has integrated Cover Flow into your bookmarks. Now you can just scroll your bookmarks like album covers in iTunes.
• Nifty search features! Now you can easily search your entire browsing history. The search bar has been tweaked and now offers suggestions and previous searches as you are typing in your criteria.
• A new facelift. There's a lot of little modifications to the look and feel of the browser as well as some big ones. For one, the page tabs are now located at the top of the browser, much like Google Chrome. For Windows users, you'll find the interface to fall more in line with your other native applications versus the previous version of Safari.

For a more complete list of features, check out the Safari homepage.

Even though it's a beta, Safari 4 seems pretty stable and very fast. I've tried it on both Windows and Mac OS X and, so far, am very impressed. Give it a spin and let everyone know what you think of it in the comments.

Multiple iTunes Accounts And Apple TV

Here's a scenario for you. You've got an Apple TV and you sync your iTunes library to it. Someone else in your household also has a computer with an iTunes library. While you can only sync one library to the Apple TV hard drive, you can stream content from other computers very easily. One problem. Apple TV only authorizes with one iTunes account. Thanks DRM!

Thankfully, there is an easy way around this. On the computer that syncs with the Apple TV, open iTunes and click Store from the menu bar. Click Authorize Computer. The following window will appear. 

Simply enter the username and password for the iTunes account being used on the computer streaming the content to the  Apple TV. This will authorize the computer to access content from that account. Since Apple TV is attached to this computer by syncing, the credentials will follow.

Sharing Large Files With iDisk

Apple recently launched a new feature to their MobileMe service that lets you easily share large files without sending a large email attachment. In order to use it, you'll need to be in the me.com web interface. From here, you can share any file in your iDisk with the click of a button. You can set the share to expire after a set number of days and even password protect it. Once you share it with someone, they will receive an email with a link to download the file.

Now I can share this huge 1 KB text file!

This is a great way to share a large document, video, or any type of large file without worrying about email file size limits. Many mail servers block attachments of a certain size and this gets around that problem. It also helps to keep the size your friend's mailbox down. They'll thank you for that and you can count it as your good deed for the day.

New Battery Products From 3GJuice

Good news for those of you who need a bit more battery life from your devices. 3GJuice has unveiled some new products designed to get you more battery life on the go.

The first is the 3GJuice Mini. This is an 800 mAh battery that clips to the bottom of your iPod or iPhone and delivers enough of a boost to add another hour or two of life. It has charge/discharge lights and can use your existing iPod/iPhone power cable to charge. You can get your hands on one for $35.

This is the one that has me excited. 3GJuice has come up with a MacBook Air external battery. It's small, but they claim that it doubles the MacBook Air's battery life. Pretty impressive! Look for it sometime next month.

For more information, check out 3GJuice's website. Thanks to @henkvaness on Twitter for the heads up on this one.

Play A Classic Matt Hazard Game For Free

Anyone who loves the video games from yesteryear will enjoy this one. You can now play the classic action game "Super Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land Extreme Alpha Advance" for free! Even better is that the game runs inside of your web browser so you don't even have to wait for it to download and install. All you need to do to experience the awesomeness is click here.

Go back in time and play the hard to find Super Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land Extreme Alpha Advance for free, the follow-up battle to the extremely popular The Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land. The nefarious Lord Octosurgeon (Adventures of Matt in Hazard Land – 1983, and Haz-Matt Karts – 2000) is making trouble in outer space!!!, and Matt is out to battle the evil space creatures, who are out to destroy the universe.

If you are scratching your head wondering why you never heard of this game (despite your longtime video game addiction), it's because this game never existed until now. This game is part of the marketing for a new game called Eat Lead: The Return Of Matt Hazard for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It is an action game that spoofs the video games. Think of it like the classic movie Airplane. 

Who cares why this little game exists. It should offer you some fun this weekend. Enjoy!

Using Disk Utility To Protect Important Files

Need an easy to protect some important documents or files? We've covered securing your home folder in Mac OS X using FileVault but this won't cover you if you are storing data outside that location. A great example of this is offsite storage.

Let's say you have some financial records on your computer. You keep them safe on your Mac but you want to keep a copy someplace else in the event your hard drive fails or (worse) you lose your home in a disaster. Be it a USB flash drive kept at a friend's house or your trusty iDisk, there is a way to keep those important files safe from prying eyes. The best part? You can do it with tools built right into Mac OS X.

To do this, open the Utilities folder under Applications. Next, open Disk Utility.app. This is where the fun begins.

On the top of the Disk Utility application, click the New Image button. A window will drop down with several options. This process will create a DMG (Disk Image) file that you can mount on any Mac and drop files into. You are probably familiar with DMG files as they are commonly used to package OS X applications that you download from the Internet. Unlike those, however, we are going to encrypt ours.

On the top, next to Save As, give it a name. This is the name of the DMG file. You can call it anything you'd like. On the lower part of the window you are asked to provide a Volume Name. Again, this is up to you. Next you can choose a volume size. Make sure you make it big enough to fit all the files you want to protect but don't make it too large as you'll just end up wasting space. You can leave the Volume Format alone. Unless you know what you are doing, there's no need to change this.

Finally, choose an option under Encryption. 128-Bit AES Encryption is pretty secure, however, if you want to feel really secure about your data, you can opt for the stronger 256-bit AES. When you have made your choice, click the Create button. 

When the encryption process begins, you'll be asked to provide a password. You know the drill: Make it easy for you to remember but hard for others to figure out. Disk Utility even offers you a security gauge as you type so you know you've made a good one. Make sure you remember this password! If you forget it, all of the data stored inside this DMG file will be inaccessible.

You now have a secure disk image that you can use to protect important files, no matter where you store it. When you open the DMG file and enter the password, it will mount the disk right on your desktop so you can treat it like any other storage device. Once you "eject" it, your files are protected from prying eyes. Couldn't be easier!

Syncing iDisk Locally To Your Mac

MobileMe is the service everyone wants to love but doesn't always live up to everyone's expectations. In this brave new world of iPhones it would seem that its most useful feature is syncing your data between your Mac and your iPhone. MobileMe can do a lot more than this and much of that functionality will be covered on this blog in the future. Today however, let's talk about iDisk.

iDisk is part of MobileMe and it works just like a network share or a flash drive. The difference is that iDisk lives "in the cloud" (online). You can access it from anywhere you can get an Internet connection (and where can't you find Internet these days). It's a great way to deposit files in a location independent of your Mac so you can access them somewhere else. In fact, you don't even need a Mac to use it! Logging into Me.com will let you use iDisk using a web interface. Nifty.

Let's say, hypothetically, you have your trusty MacBook with you on a long road trip. It's getting late and you are tired. You pull into a hotel and get a room. Before going to sleep, you decide to write a few pages of the next great American novel. You've been keeping it on your iDisk so you can work on it from your iMac at home and your MacBook on the go. You look for that data port in your room. It's not there. Well, surely they have WiFi. What's this? There's NO WiFi? There's No Internet At All!?! This is beginning to sound like a horror flick. The people running that hotel should be punished for their cruelty.

If only you could access your iDisk offline. As it turns out, you can.

Go to System Preferences and click on MobileMe. Next, click on the iDisk button at the top of the window. At the bottom of this window there is an option for iDisk Sync. Click the Start button. That's it. That's all you have to do. From here, Mac OS X will keep a local copy of your iDisk and it will sync the changes automatically when you are online. If you would rather sync your data manually, you can change it here as well.

Now get to work on that novel! Having no Internet is no excuse to slack off now.

Securing Your Data With FileVault

Portable computers have become so popular that notebooks/laptops have begun to outsell the venerable desktop PC. Apple's product line is no different. In fact, as announced back in October of last year, the MacBook is the best selling Mac in history. Not bad for a machine was that born only two years prior.

If you have a MacBook/Air/Pro that you carry with you everywhere, you might be concerned about what happens to your data should it get stolen. Short of having your MacBook recovered you can wave goodbye to any data you had stored there. You can still protect it from anyone else ever seeing it, though. Enter FileVault.

FileVault is a feature built into Mac OS X that turns your home folder into an impenetrable fortress! Well, maybe not impenetrable, but it makes things more secure. FileVault takes your home folder, copies it into an encrypted file, and password protects it. Unless someone can log into your account or knows the Master Password for the machine, your data is safe from prying eyes. It's pretty easy to setup.

Open System Preferences and click Security. Click the FileVault button on the top of the window to bring up its preferences. 

Click Set Master Password and create a password that can be used to unlock your FileVault in case you forget your login. Make sure you don't forget this password. If you forget your login password and you forget the Master Password, your FileVault is essentially a junk file as far as you are concerned.

Once your Master Password is set, click Turn On FileVault. From here, Mac OS X will begin the process of securing your data. Be patient. Very patient. This process takes time. Go play with another Mac, rent a movie on Apple TV, or go outside for some fresh air (don't forget to bring your iPod).

Before you go through this process, take these concerns in mind. When you turn on FileVault you can choose a "secure delete". During the process of encryption, FileVault copies your data into the secure file. When it completes this process, your old home folder is deleted. A secure delete helps prevent this data from being retrieved by disk recovery tools. It can give you piece of mind but it will also increase the completion time greatly. 

Another concern relates to Time Machine. If you encrypt your home folder on a version of Mac OS X prior to Leopard (10.5), Time Machine will see your encrypted home folder as one file. Since your home folder is constantly changing, it will be backed up in its entirety. This is a huge waste of time and disk space. Time Machine can backup your data within a FileVault created with OS X Leopard but there's still a catch. In order for Time Machine to backup your data, you will need to be logged out. This may or may not be an inconvenience to you.

If you are looking for security on your MacBook, FileVault is a good place to start. It will give you a little more security out there in the wilds.