Apple’s latest desktop operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, is doing well in its early days, nearing the almost four-year old OS X 10.5 Leopard in popularity, according to new OS market share numbers released Thursday by Net Applications. Mac OS X 10.5 Snow Leopard, released in mid-2009, is still the most popular version of the Apple desktop operating system out there with 3.46 of the overall market.

In just a month since its release, Lion has a 1.03 percent share of the overall desktop OS picture, while Leopard is still in use by 1.17 percent of Internet visitors, 160 million of which are the source of the Net Applications data. Snow Leopard and Leopard both gave ground to the newer operating system, dropping from 4 and 1.24 percent percent shares respectively in August, while Lion’s cut rose from just 0.33 percent.

When compared to the adoption of previous new versions of OS X, Lion adoption is already ahead of the curve. Snow Leopard, for example, saw only 0.78 percent share after its first full month of availability, passing 1 percent during its second month on the market. Both cost $29.99 on release, but the difference this time could be the digital distribution of Lion through the Mac App Store, which may have led more customers to upgrade earlier. At the very least, it shows that opting for the App Store as a primary delivery vehicle for major software upgrades (albeit with pricey physical media backup options) isn’t having a negative effect on Lion adoption.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Flash analysis: Steve Jobs

Whether your hard drive has failed or your OS has become corrupt, you may occasionally have to reinstall the Mac OS.  Fortunately, Apple does a beautiful job of making installing or reinstalling your operating system relatively painless compared to our Windows brethren. Unfortunately, it’s still a painfully slow process running off a DVD. Not to mention, optical media can get scratched easily (one of the reasons for the long install times is Apple’s optical media verification).

To solve this problem, I recommend backing up your Mac OS installation DVD to a hard drive. Doing so protects it and allows you to install the OS quickly, as well as run Disk Utility on your main drive or reset a password. I keep a hard drive with Leopard and Snow Leopard installers so I can reinstall or repair multiple OS versions easily.

Getting Started

To start, you’ll need a copy of Snow Leopard (or whatever OS version you want to install). Open Disk Utility, which is typically found in /Applications/Utilities. On the left-hand side you see your disk appear as “Mac OS X Install DVD.” Go ahead and click the New Image icon to make a copy of the DVD. Save the file at your preferred location (I have a Archive folder on my hard drive for installer disks).

Prepare the Drive

Now that you have a digital copy of your installer, the next step is to prepare the hard drive you will use for the restoration. In this example, I connected an old 160GB hard drive from my MacBook into an external case. I’m dividing this particular one into three partitions: one for Leopard, one for Snow Leopard, and one for other installers such as iLife. I could put Tiger on it, but I get few requests for that OS. Since I want this to boot Intel-based Macs, I’m going to click options and make sure GUID Partition is selected. I’m making the partitions 10GB, but you can choose any size above 8.5GB to play it safe. You could also use a USB flash drive, but those can be slow. I suggest sticking with a hard drive-based solution for speed reasons.

Restore the Image

After preparing your drive, you’ll need to restore the image to your hard drive partition. Click the Restore tab in Disk Utility. For Source, click Image… and choose that image you created earlier. For Destination, drag the partition you want to restore the OS to, then click “Restore.”

You might get an error saying, “Restore Failure: Could not find any scan information. The source image needs to imagescanned before it can be restored.” If you get this message, go ahead and go to the Images menu and choose “Scan Image for Restore.” Choose the disk image you are using as source. Now click Restore; it shouldn’t ask again.

In my example, I’ll do the same for the second partition and put Leopard on it. Both partitions will be named Mac OS X Install DVD. That can be confusing on boot, so I suggest you copy the icon from each installer CD and paste it onto the respective hard disk volumes. You’ll easily be able to tell from the icon alone which OS you are installing. If you hold down Option during the startup of your Mac, you’ll be presented with those icons as well so you know which installer will boot, and you can go ahead and install the Mac OS the normal way.

I love Time Machine for its simplicity and the fact that it’s free. Apple did the right thing in creating a backup utility that was integrated into the OS and was actually useful. Anyone who has fought with Windows Backup can tell you, this has been needed for a long time. Apple created a beautiful backup  utility and then made money on hardware that seamlessly works with it. For the home user, nothing could be more simple.

In the office environment however, users tend to backup to server shares and not local external drives. So, let’s take a look at how to use Time Machine over a network.

Setting it Up

It’s easy to do this in Leopard Xserve by sharing a backup folder. Under Server Admin, you can check the box “Enable as Time Machine backup destination.”

This worked great in Leopard but in Snow Leopard, Time Machine no longer saw this as an available destination. Luckily, changing a property for System Preferences solves this.

Enter this command in Terminal:

sudo defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

This tells Time Machine to treat network shares as possible backup locations. Now, when I go to select a disk in the Time Machine preferences, I see my mounted AFP share listed.

Restoring

So that’s how you get the Time Machine backup working, but what about restoring. Most people don’t test the restore functionality but it’s the most important thing you can do. To restore a Time Machine backup over an AFP connection,  first boot off the Snow Leopard install DVD. Then, Launch Terminal by clicking on the Utilities menu. In the terminal window, type the following commands.

mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine
mount -t afp afp://user:password@afpserver.local/ShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

This will mount your AFP share and make it available to restore from. Quit Terminal and then run “Restore from Backup” from the Utilities menu. You will see your backup listed and you should now be able to restore from it.

Time Machine is a very nice utility and if you aren’t using it, you should be. I even have other Xserves backing themselves up to this share using Time Machine. Sure, there are third-party applications out there can do so much more, but I’m for just getting the job done. Integration with the OS is also important to me. It’s the main reasons I use Safari as my main browser. As with all backup solutions though, you need to test the restore functionality once in a while. If anything, you might sleep better at night knowing your data is not only safe but recoverable.

With the release of 10.6.2, Apple killed unsupported support for the Atom processor — the processor used in low-cost netbooks. Certain models of netbooks could run OS X quite easily, and people used them to make the Little Netbook Apple Refuses to Make. While it’s a stretch to say Apple has killed the hackintosh market, it’s certainly proving it isn’t going to sit around and ignore it.

The reaction has been interesting and varies from casual indifference, to the defense of Apple’s action, to thinking Apple cancelled Christmas. While I’ve been a vocal supporter of Apple’s right to continue to club Palm over the Pre syncing fiasco, I imagine it’ll sound hypocritical when I say I’m disappointed in Apple over this move.

Up until now, Apple’s stance with the hackintosh community has largely been don’t ask, don’t tell. The people who bought a netbook and, hopefully, bought a copy of OS X to install it, were aware of the risks of doing so. Getting it to run might involve waving a dead chicken at the screen, or it could be completely painless. However, the person undertaking this task knew of the risks. So, there was little harm done.

I’d like to take a look at some of the armchair theories I’ve seen, and offer my own armchair analysis of them.

Apple wasn’t happy with the (alleged) piracy

The piracy angle has two fronts: your interpretation of the EULA, and how many copies of OS X running on hackintoshes were purchased.

In terms of the EULA, while I know Apple strongly disagrees with this, my personal take is as long as I’ve bought a legal license of OS X (and if it’s an upgrade license like Snow Leopard, I have the requisite Leopard copy), if I want to install it on a piece of non-Apple gear as long as I don’t waste Apple’s or mine time with supporting it, I’m in the clear. Now, this is not legal advice in any way, and all the usual disclaimers. It may be a tenuous stretch, but in this case I don’t consider a person creating such a hackintosh a “pirate.”

The second front, though, has no defense. If you’re creating a hackintosh and download a torrent or borrow a buddy’s disc, and don’t own a corresponding license, you’re a pirate. Where things get gray is if you’re downloading a hacked OS X distro, but have a legal license, are you a pirate? I have no data on how many hackintoshes were running pirated OS X installs, and I don’t have any corresponding data on how many Snow Leopard installs are legal. That said, since Apple offers no copy protection, I’m going to say that piracy wasn’t a motivator.

Apple didn’t like seeing netbooks with Apple stickers on them

In the somewhat wonky world of Apple’s Land of Preventing User Confusion, I can actually see this one being a reason for doing this. Now, I go to a fairly technical university and the overall number of netbooks I’ve seen is small, and zero of them have been running OS X (unscientific poll taken while trying to find tables at the canteen and library). I’ve never actually seen a hackbook, much less one with an Apple sticker slapped on it. But there are enough pictures on Flickr of people doing this, so I can see Apple getting irate and going, “OK, enough already.” Who knows, maybe people were walking into Apple stores looking for “that cute little Apple laptop I saw the nice guy at the airport using.”

Apple doesn’t have products running the Atom chipset

I’ll buy this one. While having support for the chipset doesn’t hurt anything, it’s unnecessary code. Maybe Apple was thinking of using the chipset and decided against it. Maybe knowing support for that chipset was keeping Jobs up at night. If Apple does end up using the chipset, it’s easy enough to re-enable the code in the future. Which is about as close as I’ll get to mentioning the oft-rumored, never-promised Tablaslabawhatevah. Some have opined that by doing this code cleanup Apple didn’t know it was breaking Atom support. I don’t agree. While it’s possible there’s nothing evil about its intent, I think it was intentional.

The Psystar lawsuit forced its hands

Now we’re getting somewhere. Up until recently, creating a hackintosh was very much a do-it-yourself affair. You had to get the hardware and do the grunt work to get the OS on it. Granted, while it’s gotten a lot easier over the years and many sites have complete walkthroughs, it’s still an undertaking. Psystar, though, upped the ante. It recently released the Rebel EFI tool which, allegedly, will allow you to install OS X on darn near anything. It’s not a stretch to assume it’s going to sell a netbook running OS X. Given the lawsuit, I believe Apple did this to both be able to demonstrate to a court it has taken measures to prevent OS X from running on un-supported hardware, as well as eliminate a future product line from Psystar.

Like I said, I’m a little disappointed in Apple. But I can understand why it would cut the code for an unused chip. I’ve given some thought to getting a netbook and hackintoshing it, but after I got my new MacBook Pro a month or so ago, that desire faded away. I’m much happier using Apple-built hardware. I have a Dell Ultraportable laptop for work, and the small trackpad on that drives me nuts…I don’t want to think of one smaller.

What about you? What do you think of Apple’s decision?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 Green IT Forecast
• A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast
• Green IT’s Q4 Winners: Wind Power, Solar Power, Smart Energy

The problem lies with Mac OS X’s Guest Account functionality, and was first reported at the beginning of September on Apple’s Support Discussions forum. Specifically, some Mac owners have found that after using the Guest account, and later logging-in to their usual primary account, all their personal data has been wiped clean. Everything. Documents, pictures, movies, music. The whole lot.

More worryingly, some users report that they didn’t even use their Guest account first — simply booting up their Mac normally resulted in an “out of the box” experience — default wallpaper, dock configuration and, again, a loss of all personal data.

It seems just about every technology or Apple-focused website is reporting the issue this morning. At a time when Microsoft is suffering the humiliation of having permanently lost customer’s data, Apple is in similar hot water. It’s not a competition, boys!

From what the user community has managed to figure out, the bug occurs only in Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) with a Guest Account that was created in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). After upgrading to Snow Leopard, the Guest Account settings retain Leopard’s older spots, to coin a phrase. And there the problem lies.

Thankfully, and in a break from its usual behavior (that is, stubborn refusal to admit anything is wrong with their products) Apple yesterday delivered a statement to CNET that reads, “We are aware of the issue which occurs only in extremely rare cases and we are working on a fix.” OK, a few plus-points for finally admitting there’s a problem. Minus a few points for it taking over a month to do so. (Seriously, do we really think it took Apple this long to reproduce the problem? No. Of course not.) And minus a few hundred more for Apple not putting that crucial statement on its own support pages, which I would modestly suggest is vastly more professional and helpful to Mac owners who aren’t CNET or tech-press readers. But oh well — at least we got something.

Thankfully there are some steps everyone can take to minimize the risks of falling foul to this hugely worrying bug.

First off, have a recent and complete Time Machine backup of your personal account and all your data (but think twice if you’re using a Time Capsule that’s a little more than 17 months old).

Next, if the Guest Account was enabled before you upgraded to Snow Leopard, pop in to your System Preferences and disable it. To do so, follow the steps below.

In System Preferences, choose Accounts

Click the padlock icon to make changes - you may be prompted for your password

The icon will now indicate you can make changes

Click on the Guest Account icon

Un-check the box labeled "Allow guests to log in to this computer"

That’s it. Close System Preferences and restart your computer. When you next log in, you can choose whether or not you want to re-enable the Guest Account. Doing so after following these steps ought to be safe, since the Guest Account will be recreated with all-new Snow Leopard settings which, it’s assumed, won’t delete all your valuable personal data. But please note carefully — this is a community-generated ‘fix’ and not officially recommended or endorsed by Apple. It might work. It might not. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Anecdotal Evidence Alert: I had my Guest account disabled on all my machines prior to upgrading to SL. In an heroic act of self sacrifice I’ve courageously enabled the Guest account on all of my Macs, then logged back in to my usual personal account. I haven’t lost a thing. Hardly a scientific test of the theory this problem occurs only with 10.5/Leopard flavoured Guest accounts, but encouraging, nonetheless.

Have you been hit by this bug? Can you offer a more technically sound workaround? Please share in the comments below.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

“Even though some considered Snow Leopard to be less feature-focused than the releases of Leopard or Tiger, the ease of upgrading to Snow Leopard and the affordable pricing made it a win-win for Apple computer owners — thus helping to push sales to record numbers” said Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD.

While it’s true Apple is not counting off 300 “new features,” as was done with Leopard, and it’s mostly true that Snow Leopard is an easy upgrade, at least after 10.6.1, the story here is really about price. At $29, Snow Leopard costs less than a quarter of the $129 price of Leopard or Tiger.

NPD further reports that the sales momentum has declined from the first week to the second by only around 25 percent, contrasting sharply with a decline of 60 percent for both Leopard and Tiger. NPD’s Stephen Baker suggests that Apple’s “aggressive pricing policies in this economic environment generate an outstanding consumer response,” but there is also money in volume. Macrumors previously reported on a research note from Piper Jaffray research analyst Gene Munster predicting as many as 5 million copies sold during the current quarter. That’s good news for the bottom line, but there may be another benefit for Apple in the low price of Snow Leopard.

While there are few new features in the user interface, Snow Leopard does make use of new technologies, like Grand Central. By encouraging users to upgrade through a lower price, the adoption of those technologies will occur sooner rather than later. An upgrade wave also makes it easier to discontinue supporting legacy technology associated with the PPC architecture, like Rosetta, now an optional install with Snow Leopard. Ultimately, this means the low price of Snow Leopard now will reap support savings for Apple in the future.

At $29, Snow Leopard appears to be a good deal for both consumers and the company. If there is a downside, it could come in trying to charge $129 for the next iteration of OS X. Good luck with that, Apple.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Traditional OS X users may be familiar with some of the more advanced installation options beyond the usual “Upgrade Mac OS X.” Options such as “Erase and Install” and “Archive and Install” have been changed for Snow Leopard. To prevent users from accidentally erasing their hard drive, the erase and install functionality has been relegated to manual formatting via Disk Utility.

Should one need to archive and install (which is where your previous system files are archived in a separate location and a new system is installed in their place), the installer will it automatically when it detects an attempt to install the same operating system as is currently found on the Mac. When installation is complete, Snow Leopard cleans up after itself and doesn’t leave users with an ugly “Previous System” folder as before.

Trickery With Versions

With Snow Leopard’s “behind the scenes” archive and install process, it now automatically installs the current OS version number. For example, if someone is running 10.6.3 and reinstalls, when installation is complete they will still be using 10.6.3 instead of 10.6. This removes the need to run an hour of software updates, but it does present a potential problem. When “dot releases” come out, compatibility is sometimes affected, and users archive and install to revert back to a previous system version. Beyond erasing and installing, this doesn’t seem possible with Snow Leopard.

Wither Rosetta?

By default, when you install Snow Leopard, it will not install Rosetta, Apple’s technology to allow older PowerPC apps to run on Intel processors. As most applications are Universal and Snow Leopard itself requires an Intel processor, Apple is finally making big strides to leave behind the world of PowerPC. Should users still need Rosetta, it is available as an optional install.

QuickTime X vs QuickTime 7

Snow Leopard introduces Apple’s redesigned version of QuickTime, dubbed QuickTime X. Though several of the more popular third party plugins will work with QuickTime X out of the box, users may need to resort to QuickTime 7 and any plugins they’ve used with it for playing more specialized content (or you could just turn to the much more robust VLC).

Snow Leopard will include QuickTime 7 as an option, but will not install it by default unless users already have QuickTime 7 Pro on their system. Should you try to open a file in QuickTime X that requires QuickTime 7, Software Update will automatically download it for you if it’s not already present on the system.

Unanswered Questions

As mentioned earlier, it remains unclear whether Apple has a solution in place in case users install a “dot release” like 10.6.4 and wish to revert back. What we’ve heard about the archive and install seems to infer you would end up with 10.6.4 upon completion.

There’s also still some question as to how Snow Leopard will behave with fresh installs and with older operating systems. Will users need to install Leopard first when swapping in a new hard drive, for example? Recent evidence points to no, but we won’t know for sure until tomorrow.

I’m sure many of you are going to have questions about the installation process, upgrade requirements, and the like. Feel free to use with the comments below to help the process along as the Apple faithful adopt yet another new operating system.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A 2011 Infrastructure Forecast
• Big Data, ARM and Legal Troubles Transformed Infrastructure in Q4
• In Q3, E-books and White Spaces Ruled

I was just installing the Garage Band update on my Mac mini, when lo and behold, upon checking again at completion for updates, the 10.5.8 cumulative update appeared.

I’ve yet to update my mini to 10.5.7, because of reported issues with outputting to 720p resolution, which is the resolution of the TV I have it connected to. 10.5.8 appears to fix display resolution issues, as stated in the update description itself.

It also claims to bring the usual bug fixes and security enhancements we’ve come to expect from incremental updates, in addition to solutions for AirPort connectivity and reliability issues, Bluetooth connectivity problems, and sluggish startup times. My iMac has had some AirPort hiccups from time to time, which I’ve actually just learned to live with, but hopefully 10.5.8 gets rid of even those minor annoyances.

It’s available now via Software Update, and you can read more about it at this Apple Support article.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How Speech Technologies Will Transform Mobile Use
• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce

Last week, we discussed the evolution, rhyme and reason behind some of Apple’s icons since the public release of OS X in 2001. This week, we’re going to take a closer look at some of the “Easter eggs” that are hidden in these icons.

Hidden Detail

An easy way to one up the competition when you release a new OS is to release your OS with bigger icons. Before Mac OS X, icons were limited to a paltry 32×32 pixels. It got the job done, but there wasn’t anything exactly spectacular about it. With newer versions of operating systems, Leopard brought about a new maximum size of 512×512 pixels and Windows Vista settled on a maximum size of 256×256 pixels. In the Windows world, that just meant your screen could be cluttered by large icons. But in the Mac world, larger icons meant they could take on a whole new meaning.

In a lot of these large icons, Apple has given extra detail, such as the flecks in folders, in an attempt to make them more photorealistic. (Cool tidbit: In Snow Leopard, a generic folder icon appears to open as you drag files into it.)

Here are a few examples where Apple has added Easter eggs to their icons.

The most recognized is the inclusion of Apple’s infamous Think Different poem on the TextEdit icon.

The Keynote icon from iWork ’09 references Q4 2009. Q4 stands for fourth quarter, the final quarter of a company’s fiscal year; results from both it and the full-year period are reported simultaneously. The writing depicted on the icon, quoted below, is actually lyrics from Spring Awakening. Thanks to Ken Drake for decoding it.

Hidden inside the Dictionary app icon is a reference to the Latin-esque placeholder text displaying “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet Etiam.”

A closer inspection of the Disk Utility icon shows in tiny print, “Handle the hard drive carefully to avoid damaging the circuit board. Make sure you are properly grounded.”

Looking close at the iTunes icon, you can see “iTunes 7” and “Apple 2006” inscribed on the inside of the disc. (The file is a transparent PNG, so if you have issues seeing it, save it out to your computer and view it with a colored background).

The icon for Font Book features a book with an “F” and two type blocks for “A” and “K.” Was it intentional for them to read as “AFK,” or the abbreviation for internet slang “away from keyboard?”

The Mail icon is also “postmarked” with the phase “Hello from Cupertino, CA.”

Of course, even Apple’s own icon for Windows computers on a network takes on a very familiar sight.

Apple’s Dashcode icon features actual CSS code on the icon.

Interface Builder, Apple’s developer tool for creating user interfaces, also features extra detail, labeling its contents.

Jar Launcher, an application for loading Java JAR files, features code written on the napkin.

Apple’s icon for Aperture also features a familiar “Designed by Apple in California” line, seen on other Apple products. The other markings, 55mm and 1:1.4 indicate the lens has a large maximum aperture. Kinda fitting, don’t you think?

The Fun Goes On

Even other third party developers have been creative with messages hidden in their icons. For users of CSS Edit, look closely to find “ie sucks” on the icon. There are likely many other icons that feature these types of Easter eggs, so please use the comments below in case I might have missed some!

P.S. All of these icons were pulled from the original applications. If you’d like to explore and dig out your own, right click on an application and pick “Show Package Contents.” Inside the Resources folder you will find lots of glyphs and other images as well as a .icns file which contains the 512×512 version of the icon.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• What Google’s Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft

The real power of OS X lies in all of the hidden gems beneath what you see at first glance. Technologies like Expose, Spaces, Stacks, Spotlight and others help users tap the power of their Mac, while keeping the experience sleek and elegant. Aptonic’s Dropzone, a third-party application designed to further simplify your Mac experience, fits into this group perfectly and naturally.

It’s Like an Intern for Your Dock

Dropzone is an application that resides in your Dock like any other app. The power of Dropzone comes into play when you begin dragging files onto its icon. Similar to the appearance of a Stack, Dropzone will expand giving you options of what to do with the file or files you’ve selected. Think of it like Automator for your Dock.

For example, if I have a handful of files selected, and drag them onto my Dropzone icon, I am presented with a series of choices, one of which is “Zip files and email.” As simple as it sounds, dragging the files onto this icon zips the files automatically and attaches them to a new email message inside of Mail. Gone are the days of right-clicking to compress the files, attaching that to an email and then deleting the zip file when I’m done.

Another “destination” included is the ability to install applications quickly by dragging a DMG onto the “Install Application” destination. Behind the scenes, your Mac will mount the DMG file, locate the application inside, copy it to your Applications folder and launch it, unmount the DMG and move the DMG file to the trash.

Other destinations include quick access to uploading images to Flickr (including copying the image URL to your clipboard when its done) or upload files to your FTP server. Want those files zipped before upload? No problem. Just hold down the option key as you drag the files onto the icon. It’s quick and simple and really does save time.

I’m the type of Mac user who likes to keep my Dock as simplified as possible, but I do enjoy the ability to be able to drag files onto an application icon and force the file to open in that application. Dropzone allows me to throw applications I use frequently inside of it and then I have the ability to do just that. Compared to attempting the same thing with a stack in Leopard, I only spawn Finder windows.

Taking It Further

Several optional downloads can extend the functionality of Dropzone. There are add-ons to allow you to start your screensaver, mount/unmount firewire drives, and set your computer to sleep, in addition to many others. Dropzone even includes support for popular web services, including the ability to quickly share photos via TwitPic, shorten a dropped URL via the Is.Gd service (and copy it to the clipboard automatically), and quickly share photos and documents on Posterous.

If you are comfortable programming ruby scripts, Dropzone also offers a scripting API to allow you to create your own “destinations” to further extend the application.

If you’d like to try out Dropzone, it’s currently available for Leopard or Snow Leopard users. Aptonic does provide a trial version of the software, and the cost is only $10 to purchase the full version. The trial does limit you to 15 days of use and up to five “destinations” at a time. I spoke with the developers at Aptonic and they informed me that updates through 1.0 will be freely available to users who register, but the $10 price is likely just an introductory price. Download the demo version here.

I’ll be the first to admit, much like Quicksilver or Spaces, once you get used to integrating this app, it really does save you time. If you have tried out Dropzone, let me know your thoughts in the comments below!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Report: The Connected TV Marketplace
• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide

Here are some highlights from the new release:

• Includes additional RAW image support for several third-party cameras.
• Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.
• Improves the reliability and accuracy of Unit Converter, Stocks, Weather and Movies Dashboard widgets.
• Addresses a situation that may cause issues when logging into Gmail.
• Improves reliability when syncing contacts with Yahoo.
• Improves network performance when connected to certain Ethernet switches that have Flow Control enabled.
• Improves stability for network home directories hosted by Mac OS X Server v10.4.
• Improves Finder search results for network volumes that may not support Spotlight searching, such as Mac OS X Server v10.4, Time Capsule, and third-party AFP servers.
• Includes several improvements to Directory Service and Client Management, which are described in the About Mac OS X Server 10.5.7 Update article.

For a complete list of fixes and enhancements, check out Apple’s official support article detailing the release. As always, let us know if the update brings any unpleasant surprises.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

A quick recap for folks who may have gotten their first Mac for Christmas or recently upgraded to Leopard and not yet discovered Quick Look, just highlight the desired file’s icon in the Finder and press the Spacebar.

If the file is a text document, you’ll see a preview something like this. If it’s not big enough, click an arrow button at the bottom of the Quick Look window and it will zoom to full screen display.

If it’s an image file, the preview will appear like this with another icon beside the full screen zoom toggle icon that you can click if you want to add the picture to your iPhoto photo collection. Quick Look can preview all popular graphics formats such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Camera RAW, and Photoshop, as well as PDF.

Speaking of PDFs, Quick Look can not only open PDF images, but also is able to scroll through multipage PDF documents right in the QL preview window, which is draggable and resizable.

Quick Look can also preview movie and audio files, which are playable in the preview window, which includes a navigation slider. As with graphics, most popular file formats are supported, including MP3, MIDI, AIFF, AAC, and MPEG4.

Document files of Apple’s iLife apps are supported by Quick Look. Some third-party productivity application formats may not be, but certain widely-used ones like Microsoft Office documents are. Quick Look also previews HTML documents.

Folders opened in Quick Look appear like this, with contents data shown.

There’s more. How cool is this? Open a font file in Quick Look and the preview displays a preview of the typeface.

Finally, if you highlight and open a group of documents simultaneously in Quick Look, more viewing options are offered, including a nifty built-in full-screen slideshow in which images change at about three-second intervals. The Quick Look slideshow feature works with any type of file QL supports — not just images.

There is also an index view that displays thumbnail previews of all items in a folder.

Do you find yourself using Quick Look often? What items do you tend to preview most?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Apple today released the next major update to OS X Leopard in the form of Mac OS X 10.5.6 and is now available via Software Update, or the Apple downloads page. It is a 377MB download, recommended for all users running Mac OS X Leopard.

Some of the notable changes and updates included in the release are:

• Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac automatically sync within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at me.com. This should go a long way towards making MobileMe more usable.
• Improves reliability of Address Book & Airport.
• Adds a Trackpad System Preference pane for portable Macs.
• Improves Time Machine reliability with Time Capsule, and problems with locating backup volumes
• Includes fixes for possible graphics distortion issues with certain ATI graphics cards, and improvements for several graphics intensive apps (iChat, Cover Flow, Aperture, and iTunes).
• Several improvements to Mail to improve performance, junk filtering and handling of PDF attachments
• Networking enhancements for AT&T 3G cards and TCP connections
• Improved printing for users of Adobe CS3

As ever with updating to the latest software version, Apple recommends that you:

• Back up your computer prior to installing any updates.
• Quit any open applications before starting the installation.
• Do not interrupt the installation process.

They also note that you should take care with any third-party system software modifications installed, or if you have moved Apple applications from their default locations (the /Applications or /Applications/Utilities folders).

For full details and download instructions, see the official release page.

Do let us know how the update process goes!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• What Google’s Honeycomb Means for Apple and Microsoft

This post will explore the different possibilities open to you, outline a variety of relevant websites and applications, along with providing a walkthrough of how to alter the style of your Dock.

Brief history of the Dock

As mentioned above, the Dock has been present since the very early days of OS X. Through the years, it has undergone a few major design changes.

OS X Puma and Cheetah

OS X Tiger and Panther

OS X Leopard

These changes haven’t always been met favorably, particularly the reflections and gloss featured in the new Leopard dock (personally, I’ve never been a major fan). Ars Technica, along with others, have raised interesting critical points.

In-Built OS X Options

With recent updates to Leopard, Apple ha re-enabled the level of customization found in previous versions of OS X. It is possible to move the Dock to the left or right of your monitor, and experience a slightly different design. Other options such as auto-hiding and using different minimize effects are still available.

Many Mac users prefer to align the Dock to the side of the screen, making the most of the widescreen real estate present on new machines. These limited in-built options don’t come close to justifying a whole post on customizing your Dock, however, and far more fun can be had when third party applications are used to change its appearance.

Other Software Options

The Dock, as with any OS item, is made up of a collection of different images. Shortly after the release of Leopard, people found where these image ‘resources’ were located, and experimented with swapping them for others. As this is a fairly technical operation, several different Dock manipulation tools have abounded which are able to swap the image resources automatically. I’m only going to focus on a couple, so it’s worth searching for others if the ones mentioned don’t fit your needs. Here is a quick run-down of the main tools available:

• Mirage – Clear all background material from your Dock
• CandyBar – Complete customization control over the Dock
• SuperDocker – Simple utility for making changes
• Dock Library – Another simple swapping utility

Obviously, in addition to any of these applications, you’ll need to find a set of Dock resources which suit the look you are aiming for. A site called (very appropriately) Leopard Docks catalogs a huge range of different themes which you’ll be able to apply through the above applications. Jack Rebel also has a few nice options.

CandyBar is arguably the most popular option for quickly customizing your dock, so here is a quick walkthrough of the process.

Step 1: Download and install CandyBar.

Step 2: Head over to Leopard Docks to choose and download a Dock that catches your eye.

Step 3: Open CandyBar and select the ‘Dock’ icon in the top left corner.

Step 4: Drag and drop your downloaded Dock resources into the appropriate location on the right hand side. The files in the zip you downloaded from Leopard Docks should be appropriately named to make it obvious which ones to drag where.

Step 5 & 6: You will then need to enter your password (CandyBar requires authorization in order to replace the system files making up your dock), and then agree to restart your Dock (to refresh the graphics). If all goes well, you should then be looking at a delightful updated Dock style:

It’s important to note that CandyBar makes it easy to revert your Dock back to the original style if you grow tired of the altered version. It’s as simple as clicking ‘Restore’ in the top right corner, so you don’t need to worry about experimenting with a questionable ‘grass’ dock…

A Few Examples

Here are a few examples of some truly lick-able Docks to boost your levels of inspiration:

A wooden theme:

A ‘slick retro’ dock, with a glossy silver feel:

For all you chocolate lovers out there:

And finally, a dock to complement the default Leopard wallpaper – Aurora:

Conclusion

No longer does the Dock need to be an untouchable part of your system look and feel. With the tools outlined you’re able to take control and change it for the better (or worse –some themes are truly awful). I hope you have fun experimenting, and please feel free to look at our earlier customizing articles relating to wallpapers and icon applications if you grow tired of applying different Dock themes.

I’m always interested to see new themes and effects, so please feel free to post a link to screenshot below and share the masterpiece you’ve managed to create!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

For basic photo editing, if you’re running OS X 10.5 Leopard you don’t need Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. Leopard’s Preview graphics viewer application is much more than a viewer; it now incorporates some very handy image correction tools that are not only user-friendly and intuitive to use, but also work really well.

Consequently, if you take digital photos or scan transparencies or prints onto your computer and want to optimize them, you may not need a traditional image editor application at all. Preview can do the job for you.

New Tools

Check out Preview’s new Tools Menu. If you’re familiar with the Tools Menu in OS 10.4 Tiger Preview, you’ll note that there are some new selections.

Now, say you’ve downloaded a photo from your camera, and you’re not quite happy with the exposure, color rendering, or other picture attributes. For example, here is a photo of a beach near my home. It’s straight out of the camera (an old, 3.2 megapixel unit) and is a bit underexposed, has a greenish tinge, and it isn’t as sharp as it probably should be.

So, open the image file in Preview and choose Adjust Color from the Tools Menu. A translucent black color and exposure adjustment palette will appear, with ten sliders that facilitate the adjustment of exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia, black level, white level, and sharpness.

Real Time Feedback

The adjustment sliders give you real time feedback, and I have found that they work beautifully. I love to play with all possibilities, and after my adjustment efforts, my beach photo now looked like this. It definitely has more brightness and pop and I like the color balance better. I was also able to make it sharper, although in cranking up the brightness I lost the cloud detail in the sky.

However, if you’re pressed for time, or are not quite sure what adjustment/correction effects you would like, just click the Auto Levels button and the program will make its best guess as to what the optimum values should be, automatically adjusting the sliders. You can still tweak individual qualities if you wish before saving the image. Here’s Preview Auto Levels’ best guess for my beach shot. I like my manual effort better, but it does retain the cloud detail.

Best All Around Tool For Simple Image Correction?

What both surprised and delighted me the first time I used it is how well this all works, and from one simple palette too. I’m not sure that this isn’t the all-round best tool I’ve ever used for this sort of image correction. It’s certainly the most convenient, and has added a great deal of value to the Leopard Preview application from my perspective.

But there’s more. Preview now has an image scaling and resizing tool as well, allowing you to conveniently and quickly change a photo’s resolution. Just select Adjust Size from the Tools Menu, and either manually enter the desired dimensions in the provided fields, or pull down the menu and choose one of the resolution selections provided. You can also change the resolution of your picture (number of pixels per inch) by setting it in the resolution box.

Of course, if you need to do more advanced correction such as red eye or spot removal, or retouching, you’ll still need an application like Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, or iPhoto. But for basic exposure, color and sharpness correction, Preview is now a very quick, handy, and effective tool.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Hopefully Benjamin Disraeli will posthumously forgive me for the major abuse of his quote (made famous by Mark Twain), but the fine folks over at the Omni Group gave us all a sneak peek into some very interesting data they’ve been allowed by users to collect on various details of the operating system their applications run on.

Even though this is a very rough snapshot of the Apple landscape — OS X users who have at least one installed Omni Group application that has checked for updates and allowed data to be collected — it does provide some fodder for discussion and analysis.

Which Cat Rules?

The Omni folks seem to have an even spread of Tiger and Leopard users. While we do not have hard numbers to go with the data, it would seem that any developer who makes a calculated decision to develop a Leopard-only application needs to realize they are targeting a fraction of those who upgrade or just those who have purchased new systems.

The most reliable and recent official information I could find (quickly) noted that Apple’s Leopard update penetration was at 19% by end of March 2008. Since the chart does not distinguish between upgraded systems and newly purchased ones with OS X Leopard pre-installed, it is interesting to see that there is a convergence, which would lead me to believe that we are seeing a slowdown in Leopard migration and an small, steady increase in new systems with Leopard.

This next chart was very encouraging (as I tend to care more about security than anything else) since it shows that Mac users are pretty good at updating their systems within a small delta of minor versions being published by Apple (at least when it comes to Leopard).

What’s Inside?

If there is any indication of whether the Omni data is more skewed to a certain part of the Mac user-base, it was this next chart. I am not ready to believe that 50% or more of all Macs are now Intel-based, however Apple has had great sales data to report quarter-after-quarter. Even if we take the 50% at face value, I think it shows that the Universal Binary is not going away any time soon and that makers of Intel-only software have to fully understand their market or have legitimate constraints for such a decision (e.g. VMware or Parallels). It also stresses the need for developers to test their creations on as diverse of a platform spread as possible.

I was surprised to learn that the majority of users in this subset of Omni customers also works with only one display and this makes me wonder if the data takes into account the built-in display on Apple’s mobile systems when collecting the statistics.

There Has To Be A Better Way

Atomic Bird, makers of (among other utilities) Macaroni – a handy system maintenance utility — has also published some other statistics compiled from their use of the data collected via the Sparkle auto-update framework. There is some correlation and some divergence in the data as their information shows a clear migration from Tiger to Leopard. It may be that their user-base is just more likely to have updated, especially since they are likely to care about things like that given the types of products Atomic Bird makes.

Because both examples are skewed to a particular software vendor, it would be very interesting to see more aggregated statistics from Sparkle or even the new Google Update Engine (once use of it takes off in the OS X developer community). Either project could allow for application-specific information to be stripped and system/component information to be forwarded to a central collector. Either service could then give some information away for free and possibly monetize their service by providing more thorough data to developers who want to make serious decisions as to how to proceed with development choices.

There would definitely be security and privacy concerns with an aggregated service, but with proper code review/auditing it should be easy to verifiably allay consumer and developer fears. Ultimately, the availability of such information would mean the creation of better software and be a significant help to many independent Apple developers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks