Snow Leopard

Standalone Mac OSX security is fine, but the networking is so holey it will kill you an ISEC Partners report at Black Hat that actually explains clearly what problems it means.

The big news of Mac OS X 10.6.6's release is clearly the Mac App Store, but that's not the only change that came in the latest version of Snow Leopard. In addition, Apple nipped a pair of bugs and closed a security hole.

With Snow Leopard, Apple has streamlined and simplified the process of installing Mac OS X. While older versions of OS X made you decide what kind of installation you wanted to perform before you even specified what to install, Snow Leopard's installer gives you a single installation path. It's considerably easier.

The good news: The new Snow Leopard patch fixes a lot of problems. The bad news: It also introduces one.

Got a Mac? Then upgrade it. Now.

Try this experiment on your Mac OS 10.6 machine. Select some text in TextEdit, then Control-click on the selection. In the contextual menu that appears, you should see three entries at the bottom of the menu: New Note With Selection, New Email With Selection, and Make New Sticky Note. If you don't see these entries, you're experiencing the bug. Here's how to fix it.

If you do a lot of searches in Mail in Snow Leopard and often want to get to a message's parent folder, this is one easy way to do just that.

Apple is reportedly breaking Hackintoshes -- meaning netbooks illegimately installed with Mac OS X -- with its latest update to Leopard.

While the world focused on Microsoft's launch of Windows 7, Florida-based Psystar quietly launched Rebel EFI, a software product that should worry Apple a lot more than Microsoft's latest operating system.

When is a Windows PC not a Windows PC? When you toss out the Windows and replace it with Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard or any other major operating system.

When setting up new accounts in Mail, OS X 10.5 included a feature that would, if enabled via a checkbox, attempt to automatically set up the new account based on the preliminary information you provide. In the Snow Leopard version of Mail, however, the automatic setup checkbox option is gone, and automatic setup is now the default. While this works well most of the time, there may be times when you'd rather set up an account by hand.

To take full advantage of Snow Leopard’s speed, you’ll want to run in 64-bit mode, says Wallace Wang, author of My New Mac, Snow Leopard Edition. When your computer starts to boot up, hold down the 6 and 4 keys. This will boot Snow Leopard into 64-bit mode. Read on for more handy keyboard shortcuts.