Mac OS X

Apple posted a preview page about the upcoming OSX 10.7 features. Here is the list, which one excites you the most?

Follow the App Store's Twitter account for featured apps, exclusive offers, and more.

The Mac App Store is now live.

With the Mac App Store, getting the apps you want on your Mac has never been easier. No more boxes, no more disks, no more time-consuming installation. Click once to download and install any app on your Mac. The Mac App Store is now available as a software update for any Mac running Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Hidden is like Find my iPhone, but for your Mac. When you activate tracking, Hidden will locate your stolen computer anywhere on the planet, collect photos of the thief and screen shots of the computer in use. And, best of all it's free until January 2011.

Want to learn OS X and iOS programming? Apple offers 5 developer books for free on iBooks. Search for Apple Developer Publications.

Sometimes you want to add media files to your iTunes so you can sync them on your mobile devices, but you don't want to copy the files to your /Music folder to avoid extra copies of the content and to save space on your hard drive.

In order to do that you can open iTunes Preferences and switch off Copy files to iTunes Media folder when adding to library.

If you want to transfer files from your Mac to a Windows PC or play your movies on your TV that accepts USB drives you will need to reformat your USB drive to a format that is widely accepted.

You can format any drives with the Disk Utility application, but the default Mac OS Extended formats will usually only work on Macs and the MS-DOS(FAT) format will only work on Windows XP and not on Windows 7.

Judging from the event invitation that will be held on the 20th of October (in just a week) Mac OSX 10.7 will be code named Lion.

What are you counting on or hoping for in Lion? 3D or vector interface? Better use of the mostly idle graphics chips? Opening up OSX for any PC? Brain-Mac APIs?

You must have heard that Google introduced phone calling right from your Gmail. The service is not yet available in all countries but being rolled out fast.

Calling the USA and Canada is free and the rest of the world is cheap. You can buy credits with Google Checkout.

The prices of Google Voice are generally cheaper than the already very cheap rates of Skype.

The only remaining question is how to get all your numbers from your iPhone or OSX Address Book into your Gmail? There are two ways to do that.

While I'm a veteran OS X user and I only recently discovered the highly useful Services feature in the OS. The Services menu is always found under the active application's name in the menubar and can be configured to match your exact needs.