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.

The latest point update for Mac OS X Leopard has just been released. If you thought OS X 10.5.2 was big, hold onto your socks because 10.5.3 is even bigger. The combo update for versions of Leopard prior to 10.5.2 is 536 megabytes and the standard update for users of 10.5.2 is a still staggering 420 megabytes.

Still, with big sizes come BIG changes, fixes and features. Apple has the full list, but here are some highlights:

• Addresses stuttered audio or video playback from certain USB devices
• Improved Airport and 802.11x behavior and reliability
• iPhone users can now sync their address book contacts with their Google account
• Safari works better when connecting through a Microsoft ISA proxy
• Improved Spotlight search on AFP volumes
• Improved iCal syncing
• Fixes issues with authenticated RSS feeds in Mail.app

Plus improvements to Time Machine, Spaces, iChat, .Mac and Parental Controls. Apple is recommending this update for all users, but as always, encourages making backups of important files and folders before installing.

Matuschak believes an operating system is only as good as its ability to avoid or solve problems, and that's what Ubuntu's really good at. For example, in Ubuntu, if a user tries to watch a video and doesn't have the proper codec to do so, the open source OS will attempt to find and install the codec.

But there's a solution on the horizon, or Matuschak would like there to be. He believes the answer is in Spotlight, a commonly underused but very powerful OS X feature which can be adapted to be a general problem solving tool.

Coming back to the video codec problem, if the user would like to figure out what's needed to play the video file, he types the file extension into Spotlight. The service would return a variety of options including codecs and programs. The suggested codecs and programs aren't necessarily installed on the computer, but, with one (or two) clicks, the user can then install whatever programs or codecs came up as a result of the search. It's merely a concept at this point, but Matuschak would like to make it a reality. If you'd like to help him out, make sure to check out his site.

To inaugurate Apple's latest Mac OS X release, version 10.5, we grabbed all the latest news we could find to answer some of the outstanding questions floating around the web:

Q. Can Time Machine backup to network shares?
A. Yes, but only using the Apple File-sharing Protocol (AFP). Jeers. And Macworld agrees with us that Time Machine is Leopard's most important new feature.

Q. Is Time Machine visible on screen during backups when the external hard disk is connected?
A. No, backups occur automatically in the background.

Q. The new screen sharing feature is VNC-based. Does this mean I can use my other VNC-equipped machines with Leopard?
A. Yup, only not with iChat's screen sharing feature; that only works with iChat clients.

Q. How long does this puppy, er kitty, take to install?
A. According to Engadget, about one hour on a Macbook Pro with 2GB of RAM.

Q. Have any improvements been made to file systems or disk partitions?
A. Well, the most underhyped improvement is this: According to MacWorld, disk partitions can now be resized on the fly. Nifty.

More after the jump.

When Apple said they were going to redesign the Finder, we though, oh, we've heard that before. But with Quick Look and Cover Flow, Leopard introduces the most significant upgrades to the Finder since the 10.1 to 10.2 transition. One of the most time-consuming aspects of using the finder is previewing files. If you're thumbing through a folder looking for a file you need, and the only way to identify the right file is by peeking into it, OS X can really slow you down, at least until Friday when Leopard arrives.

Quick Look is a system-wide technology that the Finder takes advantage of in order to give you fast previews of a file's content within the file system browser. Unlike thumbnail views, which were sloppily implemented and didn't actually work all the time on previous iterations of the OS, Quick Look actually supports all kinds of files, from movies to Keynote presentations and images. Plus, Quick is the name of the game, as anybody who has used Cover Flow on in iTunes will attest.

The other new feature we looked at this morning is Parental Controls, which Apple has amped up by adding to the Preferences window. Historically Apple has done pretty well by allowing parents to designate which applications children can run (and even which web sites they can visit), but with so many cool kid-oriented web sites popping up all the time, it's hard to keep up with the demand. Echoes of, "Hey Dad, can you unlock this web site for me?" can drive a parent bonkers, especially when it's happening five or six times each time your kid sits down to surf.

For the first time, Apple has implemented some content filtering in Safari. They've adapted the anti-spam filter from Apple Mail as a web content analyzer, and apparently it works well enough for blocking "no-no" sites on your kids' behalf. Of course, if you still want to totally lock down your kid's browser, Safari will still allow you to permit only those sites you've approved ahead of time.

We've not mentioned Pixelmator before, but our colleagues over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) have. Pixelmator is arguably one of the intriguing looking Mac applications in a while, and whilst the user interface looks great, so does the feature list.

Layer-based editing, an array of selection, painting and editing tools, real-time filters and a metric ton of file formats with which it's compatible (thanks to its under-lying ImageMagick base) make this a very attractive addition to those of us unable to afford, or unwilling to budget for, Photoshop. Unfortunately, that is as much as we know at the moment, as the program has been kept strictly under wraps until today. The good news is that a closed beta test is now going on to fix any bugs that are in what would appear to be a complex piece of software so hopefully it won't be too long before everyone can enjoy the features this baby-Photoshop-esque application has to offer.

Pixelmator, once available will cost $59.

If you're a blogger, the chances are you've heard of ecto - the multi-platform-supporting blogging client for Mac OS X and Windows. Today, however, sees the unveiling of an entirely new, from-the-ground-up, re-write of the Mac OS X version of ecto in alpha form.

Apart from the shiny new icon (shown right) a new rich text editor that leverages the WebKit engine and a plugin-based architecture where "almost everything that can be powered by a plugin is a plugin." are amongst the gems found in this (feature incomplete) build. There's plenty more features still to come in future builds, but this looks like a very exciting, and free, upgrade to a long-established application.

[Via Andy Piper's Twitter]

After a year-long beta, renowned virtualisation specialist VMware have announced that VMware Fusion, their consumer-orientated virtualisation application has hit 1.0. Featuring 64-bit support throughout, DirectX 8.1 compatibility, the ability to run "over 60 different guest OSes", a virtual machine 'Snapshot' feature, and "Unity" (allowing users to drag and drop into Virtual machines, minimise Windows applications to the dock, and use Virtual Machines with Exposé), it's certainly a compelling 1.0 product to compete with Parallels Desktop that has, to date, ruled the roost for Mac OS X virtualisation tools.

The full release does mean that the introductory pricing has ended (with a licence now costing $79). A demo is available, and if you're looking to pick up Fusion today, it does appear that there's a $20 mail-in rebate available on the full RRP via the VMware store.

Disclaimer: I am a part-time support ninja for the company behind the product I mention in this post.

Back in September last year, we covered RapidWeaver when back at version 3.5.0. Since then, version numbers have increased, and today sees the release of RapidWeaver 3.6.2. The release includes not only bugfixes, but a few new features too: Aperture support in the Media Browser; Dynamic PHP Sidebar to "significantly reduce upload times when posting entries, particularly on larger sites"; Customisable RSS URLs (for integration with services such as Feedburner) and more.

The upgrade is free to registered customers of RapidWeaver 3.6.x users, owners of versions of RapidWeaver 3.5.1 or earlier can upgrade for $25, and a new licence costs $49.

So far in our invite-a-palooza, we've given away over 500 invites to web services that everyone is clamouring to join. Today, however, we've got a slightly different one.

Day 7: Skitch
Back in June, we took a look at Skitch - the utterly brilliant screenshot and annotation app from the folks behind Comic Life. The Mac users amongst the team here at Download Squad swear by Skitch (and the accompanying mySkitch website) - and we're not alone. Screenshots, annotations, web uploading (including Flickr support) and more make this a must-have amongst Mac users taking screengrabs. If you're on a Mac, and dying to get your hands on a Skitch beta, all you need to do is comment below, and be sure to activate your comment! Whilst there's currently no word on what the final product will cost once out of beta, Windows users will be pleased to hear that there's talk of a Windows version.

If you know of another site or service you'd like us to consider for the Invite-a-palooza, drop us a note.

Mac's OS X operating system has a number of system caches where it stores information that may be of use in the future, to speed up the process of looking it up. The trouble is, there appears to be no limit to how large these caches can grow to be. At a certain point, a huge cache can be just as bad as no cache at all in terms of performance. Plus, all it's really doing is storing "nice to have" information in case it needs it. But if you didn't have your cache populated, your machine would go and seek out the information from its original source.

Okay, so we're talking out of our cache here a little bit, but you get the idea.

If you've been using your Mac for a long time, your cache files could be pretty large. Cache Out X is a utility that specializes in clearing out these caches, with the result being a snappier machine.

Whilst Disk Inventory works just fine on PowerPC Macs, the current release version is not a Universal binary. There's a beta version available for those on Intel Macs which in our brief testing appeared to work well (and members of the DiskInventory forums are reporting that it works well), however as with all beta software, only use it if you're happy with the risks associated with pre-release software.

While most people would agree that Mac OS X is a very attractive operating system, there are still times when you'd like the ability to apply a new set of icons to your system. The easiest way we've found to apply icons system-wide for all operating system objects is to use a utility called CandyBar.

CandyBar, from Panic and Iconfactory, is an easy to use utility that lets you browse through the various operating system elements in Mac OS X that require icons, and set new downloaded icons as you wish. Wondering where to get beautiful new icons? Check out Iconfactory, and particularly their Freeware category.

The fully-functional trial version of CandyBar allows you to change your icons up to 25 times, or use the application for 15 days (whichever comes first), and then you must pay for a license to continue using the software. A license for CandyBar will set you back $12.95 USD.

Democracy Player version 0.9.5 has been officially released, introducing a host of new improvements and enhancements since the 0.9.2 release back in November of 2006. Here's a brief highlight of what to look for:

• Simpler, more minimal interface
• New 'Share' menu on each item allows user to email a video or post to VideoBomb, del.icio.us, Digg, or Reddit
• VLC 0.8.6 on Windows version that powers Democracy has been upgraded with improved Flash video support
• Video downloads are now stored in folders by channel for better organization
  
• New pause and resume download functions
• Improved BitTorrent performace
• Drop-down menu feature for auto-download for individual channels
• Automatic thumbnail generation on OS X for videos lacking thumbnails

The application is immediately available in all PC, Mac, and Linux flavors. Of course, the team still urges users to keep an eye open for any potential bugs that might be lurking about and fill out a bug report where necessary. Anyway, the program is looking great thus far and this upgrade will be worth the download. Check out the full list of improvements at the Democracy blog.