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]

If you're anxious for Snow Leopard to ship, you might be excited to know that you can grab copies of the built-in desktop images, thanks to the developer previews and a crafty blogger over at Uneasy Silence.

While there are four images out of the set of 35 that feature leopards, the rest of the images run the gamut from beautiful landscape photography to classic pieces of art. The images are offered as JPEGs, so even Windows users might like to pick up a few.

It seems to be a requirement now that major operating systems release with a relatively substantial set of beautiful images to be used as desktop wallpaper.

No longer can OS manufacturers get away with offering eight photos and a few tiling images -- remember tiling your desktop? Does anybody ever do that anymore?

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]

If you're not excited about the potential of updated CSS and HTML standards support in the newest WebKit browsers, you might be after you check out Snow Stack.

Snow Stack is a demo of some slick visual effects using just HTML, WebKit CSS effects, and some Javascript. To see the live demo, you need to be running Snow Leopard and Safari, or Leopard and the latest nightly build of WebKit.

Snow Stack shows off a 3D wall of Flickr photos - if you're familiar with the Cooliris photo viewer, it looks a lot like that - and all the animation, reflection and transformation is done in CSS. If you're not on a Mac or can't run a new version of Safari, there's also a YouTube video that shows Snow Stack in action.

For developers, the source code and some useful development notes are available on the webpage, so you can check out how the demo was built.

It's been a long-debated topic as to the pricing (and availability) of Apple's next operating system release: Mac OS X 10.6 - a.k.a. Snow Leopard. However at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco Apple has (if you'll excuse the pun) let the cat out of the bag and announced that Snow Leopard will be available in September for $29 (if you're upgrading from Mac OS X Leopard), with Family Packs for up to 5 computers costing just $49 - again, if you're upgrading from 10.5.

Long-touted as 'just' a behind-the-scenes update, Snow Leopard features support for Microsoft Exchange, a re-written Finder and an all-new QuickTime player with hardware acceleration and built-in YouTube uploading. There's also a tonne of new developer technologies to allow developers to handle multi-processor machines with Grand Central, and an all-round speed increase for all the OS components.

Apple's official web pages have yet to be updated with the pricing details or more information beyond the original holding pages, however in today's WWDC keynote Apple confirmed dates, pricing and some more features - as well as confirming that Mac OS X Snow Leopard is indeed going to only run on Intel-based Macs.

If you're running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on an Intel machine, the options are between a Mac Box Set (featuring Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09) for $169 or 5-User Family Pack which brings you the iLife, iWork and Snow Leopard package for $229.

If you're wanting to stay up to date on everything at WWDC, be sure to stop by our good friends at TUAW who're covering the conference throughout this week.

Enthusiasts love leaks, and early Windows 7 builds aren't the only OS that beta testers are sharing with the P2P community. Yes, Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard is starting to spread on popular torrent sites as well.

Currently, there are at least two builds. 10a190 was first to be appear (on The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and Demonoid), and now 10a222 has surfaced on Demonoid as well. No, you won't find the links to the files here, especially after Apple's full frontal legal assault on Wired the other day.

If you're brave enough to download it, keep in mind that these are still alpha builds, and may be extremely buggy. Some downloaders have stated as much, and caution others to be patient and wait for a later build.

But hey, where would the fun of playing with a leaked OS be if it was totally stable?