You may have heard of Psystar, an infamous manufacturer of Mac clone "open computers." They're best known for frequently getting into legal hot water with Apple over everything from trademarks to copyrights to selling Apple's OS X operating on non-Apple computers. Apple just took Psystar to school on that last issue, winning summary judgment in a California court on copyright violations and Digital Millennium Copyright Act Violations.

Psystar's losing argument really splits some hairs, and the court wasn't buying it. Here's what happened: Psystar bought one copy of OS X and loaded it onto a Mac Mini. They then transferred it from the Mini to a non-Apple computer, where they modified the kernel so it would run on the computers they sell. Psystar argued that they were allowed to sell their (legally-purchased) copy of OS X, but the court recognized that the copies made from the Mini and the second, non-Apple machine weren't made legally. Advantage: Apple.

Judgment in Apple's favor means Psystar will likely have to pay damages at minimum. This could potentially sink their entire ship. The takeaway, according to an article on Groklaw? Don't mess around with licensing agreements, especially Apple's.

[via Slashdot]

The update, which is around 160MB if you're upgrading from 10.6.1, corrects a few nagging issues in the Finder: Exchange contacts not showing up in Spotlight, flaky menu extras, wonky VPN connections and - this one was a personal peeve of mine - not being able to add photos to Address Book. Also, the problem with opening multiple downloaded files at once (a problem Apple never actually acknowledged) is now fixed. Hooray! The whole list is pretty long, and there's also an extensive list of potential exploits addressed by 10.6.2's security update.

While software giveaway sites like MacHeist allow indie developers to trade a bunch of free copies of their app for publicity and new customers, some developers aren't on board with that arrangement. Red Sweater Software's Daniel Jalkut believes in getting paid for his hard work, so he decided to offer a 20% discount instead of giving his apps away for free.

It turns out he's not alone. In fact, over 80 different Mac developers have joined Jalkut's "One Finger Discount" promotion. That means you have your choice of over 100 apps at 1/5 off (hence the "one finger").

Of course, the promotion includes Jalkut's own apps, the impressive MarsEdit blog editor and Black Ink crossword maker, but there are some other choice goodies there, too. Some of my personal favorites include Flying Meat's Acorn image editor and VoodooPad, and SmileOnMyMac's TextExpander. There are also tons of apps I haven't tried yet, or haven't even heard of. That's the whole point, though: giving you a chance to discover something new at a big discount. Indie developers for the win!

If you're a Mac user who's considering giving iPhoto a try, and you're also a fan of sharing photos on Flickr, you might want to give FlickrImport a try. On its face, it's just a utility that imports your Flickr images into iPhoto, but there's more to this little gem than meets the eye. It preserves photo info, including EXIF and TIFF metadata.

Even better, FlickrImport works for more than just your own account. You can also use it to import photos from your contacts accounts, as long as those photos are visible to you. If you have more than one Flickr account, for some reason, you can add yourself as a contact and import from both accounts that way. One caveat: FlickrImport doesn't play nicely with Snow Leopard. To make it work, do a Get Info on the app and check the "Open with Rosetta" box.

As web apps become more powerful, more popular, and more full-featured, they're starting to replace desktop apps for many people. A Mac app called Fluid can pull those web applications onto your desktop and turn them into OS X native site-specific browsers.

Fluid has a lot of advantages compared to running web apps in your browser: you get a Cocoa app with its own Dock icon, automatic unread badges for sites like Gmail and Google Reader, and built-in userscript support. Keeping your web apps in a separate browser also means that they can't be taken down when another site crashes in some other tab. You can even create menubar apps, so your favorite webapp will be close at hand, right at the top of your screen.

To find icons for your Fluid apps, I recommend checking out the Fluid Icons Flickr group. The users there have come up with attractive icons for most of the apps on my list. Chris Ivarson has also designed a handful of great icons for Fluid apps.

Now that you know a little bit about how and why you should use Fluid, give these 10 sites a spin as site-specific browsers!

Google Wave

Google's hot new communication tool is a perfect candidate for a site-specific browser. It's pretty resource-intensive, and it's still in the preview stage, so it's prone to crashes and lag. I haven't found any excellent Wave userscripts yet, and the site's favicon makes a nice enough Fluid icon. If you want an additional icon and a userscript that gives you a badge count for Wave, Devthought has posted them.

Google Reader

A lot of people are already using Google Reader as their main RSS app, so it makes sense to set it up in Fluid. You also get the benefit of an unread count badge on the Dock icon and a bunch of great userscripts. One of my favorites is Helvetireader. Try setting it up with Chris Ivarson's icon.

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According to OSXDaily, Apple's next scheduled update to Snow Leopard, OS X 10.6.2, doesn't support Intel Atom processors. This is no problem for anyone on Apple hardware, because no Mac product runs an Atom. If you're on a hacked netbook, though, it looks like this is the end of the line for your OS X updates.

Although it's not confirmed, rumor has it that next update to Apple's previous Leopard OS (10.5.9) will also knock out Atom support. Until a workaround pops up from netbook hacker circles, Atom machines running 10.6.1 and 10.5.8 should probably avoid upgrading. Is Apple sending a message to users running its software on third-party machines? It seems likely, but it also doesn't seem like it will do much to stop determined netbook enthusiasts.

Intrepid Boot Camp users have found ways to run Windows 7 on their Macs, but Apple hasn't officially supported their efforts thus far. With the release of Windows 7 today, Apple has announced official Boot Camp support is on the way, and plans to release an update before the end of the year. The update may be Snow Leopard only, however, and won't work on some older Intel Macs.

As MacRumors notes, there are already alternative ways to run Windows 7 on a Mac. You can go the virtual machine route with Parallels which supports 32-bit Windows 7, or wait a week for the newest version of VMWare Fusion, which will support 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS.

[via Engadget]

If all the excitement about Windows 7 isn't floating your boat, you might be interested to see that notorious Mac cloners Psystar have released an app that makes it easy to run any OS - including Apple's OS X - on any machine.

Psystar's app, Rebel EFI, just needs to be burnt to a CD, and from there users can follow instructions to install the OS of their choice. No word yet on how this might play into Apple's lawsuit against Psystar for selling PC hardware with OS X preinstalled.

The full version is $49.99, but a working demo is available for free. The demo will apparently stick you with "limited hardware functionality," so it might be good to test it on a backup machine, and then buy the full version for your main PC.

Although Win7 was released today, Psystar says it's compatible with Rebel EFI. Not such a big deal for Mac users, who already have a few ways to run Windows operating systems on their Intel hardware.

[via Macrumors]

Yahoo's FireEagle project has long been a great (albeit under-used) service to let you share your location with other websites. Services such as Dopplr, Brightkite and many others can all update & read your location and use the service to display location-based data.

On the iPhone, there's plenty of free applications that update FireEagle such as yofe, but what if you're working on a desktop or laptop computer? That's where Clarke comes in handy -- a small, open-source utility for OS X that runs in your menu bar, it'll figure out where you are based on the Wi-Fi networks around you.

In earlier versions of Clarke, the updates were based on Skyhook Wireless' database -- the same used by the original iPhone to triangulate your location -- however the utility was recently updated for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and now uses the OS' built-in Core Location system to figure out where you are when run on the newest big-cat.

A free download, developers can also grab the source code over at Github, and the application also lets you easily view nearby data from Flickr, Google Maps, OpenStreetMap and Yahoo Maps.

When Apple introduced the new shelf-like dock in OS 10.5 Leopard, users were up in arms over how ugly it was, with some even switching their docks to the side of the screen to avoid seeing it. If you hate the shelf, or just wish you could make it look better, you should give Dock Library a try. It lets you replace your dock with a custom design, and works in both Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Sites like LeopardDocks.com and LeopardDocks.net have extensive libraries of designs you can download and add to Dock Library. Once you've got a few of them set up, it's just a couple of clicks to change to a new one, or go back to the default. To install a new dock, you don't need to expand the downloaded, just use Dock Library's "import" button and select the .zip file.

[via Sizlopedia]

We've all heard - or seen for ourselves - how OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is basically a smaller, faster version of 10.5 Leopard. That doesn't mean much if your favorite apps still haven't been updated to be compatible with the new OS. I've had a good experience so far, with all of the major apps I run working quite well under Snow Leopard, but Apple's keeping a list of some that don't. Your incompatible software should be moved to the aptly-named Incompatible Software folder on your hard drive when you upgrade, but check out the list to be prepared in advance.

Parallels is one notable incompatibility, especially if you're using it to run key Windows apps on your Mac. The infamously troublesome Application Enhancer also doesn't work, which is good to know, considering that it crashed a ton of Macs during the last major OS X update. Some antivirus programs also make the list. Also, be aware that updated printer drivers might not be out for some printers and scanners.

[via Lifehacker]

If you use Gmail on a Mac, you should consider checking out Notify. It's a great-looking, compact app that sits in your menubar and tells you when you have new Gmail messages. It works with up to 4 Gmail accounts, and also supports Growl notifications. It uses only a fraction of the system resources of clients like Apple Mail, so trading in Mail for Notify and Gmail's web interface might be a good move if you're strapped for memory.

Notify takes up almost no space on your screen, even when fully expanded. Your separate accounts are laid out in an elegant tabbed interface that's compact, but not crowded. You can use Notify to manually check for new mail, or have it automatically refresh every 1, 2, 5, 10 or 15 minutes. There's also a handy button that opens Gmail in your browser, so you can quickly read those new messages. The app will soon be updated to work with Google Apps email accounts on your custom domain, or with any IMAP account, for that matter.

As someone who has used Windows as my primary operating system for years, I got very comfortable with modding various parts of the user interface. One of the things that was most fun to change is the startup image - my favorite was a very official looking FBI splash screen that made it look like you were logging onto a government computer.

Since switching to the Mac platform, I've been surprised at the relative dearth of modding options for the operating system. Thankfully, Steven Sande over at our sister site TUAW recently posted about BootXChanger, which allows you to change the monochromatic Apple logo that you see when booting into OS X to something different. While it's not an entire boot screen, it is enough to give your machine a bit of personality.

It turns out that creating images for use on the boot screen is very finicky, but BootXChanger comes with a set of fifteen sample images to get you started. Right away I was torn between using the radioactive symbol, or the classic Commodore 64 logo. The radioactive symbol won for now, but given the ease of switching boot logos, I can imagine I'll be swapping between the various options or maybe even taking a shot at making my own soon enough.

[via TUAW]

Anyone who regularly plugs and unplugs external drives from their computer has at some point been frustrated by the operating system's refusal to eject a volume. Lately I've begun using more external drives, and this phenomenon is occurring more and more frequently. Apple has acknowledged this issue, and will be addressing it in the forthcoming Snow Leopard release of OS X, but that doesn't help us right now.

Fortunately, WhatsOpen does help us right now. The next time you run into the "disk is in use and could not be ejected" error message, fire up WhatsOpen to see what file is open from the volume you are trying to eject. It should be immediately obvious in most cases.

If you're not interested in hunting down the offending application, and you're not worried about potentially losing data if you haven't saved your work, there's a Force Eject button that will simply stop any process that has a file open on the drive, and eject the drive.

Hopefully in future all operating systems will build in a graceful way to handle ejecting external drives, but until then utilities like WhatsOpen are necessary in your tool belt.

[via Macworld]

There are plenty of people out there who would be willing to give Linux a try if Linux UI designs looked more like Mac OS X. Mac4Lin brings Apple's UI design to a Linux install near you, including great details like app icons and even the Dock. It looks like the Mac4Lin project had been stagnating for a while, but it's finally at v1.0, and looking good.

Mac4Lin works on a variety of Linux flavors, including Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26, but there's no KDE version (yet). A lot of third-party apps that use GTK for skinning, like Firefox and Songbird, look great in Mac4Lin. An unstall script is also included in the latest version, in case you decent you don't like the OS X look, and you'd rather go back to your default UI.