One of the biggest stumbling blocks for Mac users who try out my Todo.txt CLI is finding and opening hidden "dot" configuration file (which is the standard Linux naming convention), so this will help me help them. Sadly this shortcut does not work when you're just browsing in Finder. [via DF]

If you've upgraded your Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6), it's now dead simple to synchronize iCal with your Google Calendar. While in Leopard you had to either know detailed CalDAV settings or install a helper application, in 10.6's iCal you can just open up the Preferences pane. Under Accounts, click the + button to add an account. Enter your full gmail address (you@gmail.com) and your Google Account password, and iCal will detect and configure the CalDAV settings for you. This is full two-way sync, so changes you make to events in iCal show up in GCal and vice versa.

Pro tip: Google Apps account users, iCal won't automatically detect you're using a Google Account. From the Account type drop-down, choose "Google" and then enter your full email address and password to get your GCal in iCal. This also works for Yahoo Calendar, Exchange 2007, and any other CalDAV server as well.

CORRECTION: Contrary to what I posted earlier and said on TWiG, multiple Google Calendars are indeed supported! In iCal's Preferences, go to Accounts, then Delegation to check off as many secondary calendars as you want to sync to iCal. My apologies for the mistake! Thanks, Stuart!

Update: Sadly this sync only works with your primary GCal or Outlook calendar, not any of your secondary calendars. Google's official word on this:

It's not possible to sync events on secondary calendars at this time. Google Calendar Sync will sync only events from your primary Google Calendar (first one in your list) and your default Microsoft Outlook calendar. If you've scheduled events on a secondary calendar in Google Calendar that you'd like to sync with your Microsoft Outlook Calendar, you can either move the event to your primary calendar or export your entire secondary calendar and import the events to your primary calendar."

A 200 GB drive shows 200 GB capacity (for example, if you select the hard drive's icon and choose Get Info from the Finder's File menu, then look at the Capacity line). This means that, for example, if you upgrade from an earlier version of Mac OS X, your drive may show more capacity than in the earlier Mac OS X version.

My own tests confirm: a 4GB Cruzer thumb drive in my Snow Leopard Mac shows up with a capacity of 4.01GB. Leopard reports the same drive's capacity as 3.74GB. (Click to enlarge the screenshot on the right.)

Kudos to Apple for leading the charge on this change for the better, which will reduce age-old consumer confusion and questions about why a drive seems smaller in the software than it says it is on the box. This change also raises two other interesting questions: Is this new "found space" part of the reason why Snow Leopard "saves" you disk space? (Because if it is, SL isn't actually saving you anything--it's just an accounting adjustment.) More importantly for the rest of the market: When will Windows follow suit?

Update: All the passionate points about the difference between base 2 and base 10 are well-taken. I've updated this post to put the word "correctly" in the headline in quotes. The base 10 calculation change is "correct" as per consumer perception--i.e., I bought a 500GB backup drive and my operating reports that there are 500GB free, which is exactly what I'd (reasonably) expect. Right now the base 10/base 2 difference is totally confusing to regular people. Software does indeed use base 2 computation, but as far as I'm concerned, reducing human confusion is more important. The possibility that this change will increase confusion for folks who now won't get the same file size and usage stats across operating systems is a valid one; it will be interesting to see how it shakes out.

It's not a very original story. In the wake of a bloated Windows Vista, with netbooks and smartphones offering smaller but less powerful hardware, the "smaller/faster/leaner" sell is the marketing tact of the year, and everyone's trotting it out. Look at Google Chrome (which is taking a piece of Firefox's bloated pie) and Google Chrome OS and Windows 7.

Don't get me wrong, "smaller/faster/leaner" is exactly what Snow Leopard is, but it doesn't deserve a +.1 version number increment. To end users, it's just a faster Leopard. While we all swooned over Apple's cheap-cheap pricing, on further thought, this is an upgrade I'd expect to see come down for free via Software Update.

I'll admit: I've never built an operating system, and Snow Leopard's code improvements, which are invisible to me, might be a lot more significant than I'm acknowledging. Taking Apple on their word about Grand Central Dispatch and 64-bit computing and OpenCL--all things that ultimately mean nothing to me--Snow Leopard appears to be a solid upgrade that future-readies your Mac. It's an upgrade I'm installing right now because the speed improvements and disk space savings alone are worth the $30, especially on older Intel Macs like my MacBook Pro. However, in terms of impact on the end user, Snow Leopard is not even close to the 10.4 to 10.5 upgrade from Tiger to Leopard that gave you 200+ new features. Charging anything more than $30 would have been highway robbery. After forking over the 30 bucks, I just feel kind of nickel-and-dimed.

Make no mistake: Snow Leopard is all about Apple readying their operating system to run on smaller, less powerful hardware (a tablet, perhaps?) and you just get to help them test it on your current hardware now. For $30, I guess that's not such a bad deal.

• Gizmodo: Snow Leopard Review: Lightened and Enlightened--lots of great charts here demonstrating SL's speed increases doing various common tasks on your Mac
• The New York Times' David Pogue: Apple’s Sleek Upgrade
• Walt Mossberg: Apple Changes Leopard's Spots
• Macworld: Snow Leopard Review

Best way to see how much faster Snow Leopard is than Leopard doing a simple task like opening a few high-res photos in Preview? This video clip, courtesy of Gizmodo.

For owners of Intel-based Macs who are still using the older Tiger version of the Mac OS, Apple is officially making Snow Leopard available only in a “boxed set” that includes other software and costs $169. The reasoning is that these folks never paid the $129 back in 2007 to upgrade to Leopard. But here’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140.

So if you're jumping from Tiger to Snow Leopard, you saved $129 bucks never purchasing Leopard and you can save $140 skipping the box set. Guess being a late adopter does pay off.

To install Snow Leopard, all you need is the $29 Snow Leopard DVD, no matter what Apple says about the Mac box set. You do, however, do need an Intel-based Mac. you can either go from Leopard using the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc ($5 off at Amazon), or go from Tiger using the $169 Mac Box Set ($20 off at Amazon). Here's Apple's full set of system requirements.

In short, there are two ways to get Snow Leopard on your Mac: upgrade and install over Leopard, or wipe your hard drive clean and start from scratch.

Read the rest at Lifehacker »

* I happen to use an abandoned beta of Synergy KM to share my mouse and keyboard between my PC and Mac, and its System Preferences pane requires a restart every once in awhile to get it to connect. Overall, a minor annoyance for other worthy updates.

Notable non-compatible apps to look out for from the list: Adobe CS2 Suite, Adobe Photoshop Elements, CoverSutra, Cyberduck, (maybe) Disk Inventory X, Disk Warrior, and (maybe) Google Gears. (Google Gears occasionally does this weird thing where it launches a virtual disk and then closes it again; otherwise it has worked for me. Disk Inventory X also works for me, albeit slowly, in build 10A421a of Snow Leopard.)

Why is that? Well, while Snow Leopard has had much work done under the hood, there aren't a whole lot of user-facing new features--and that's what sells operating systems at a $129 price point. Instead, this time for 30 bucks you get "enhancements and refinements" (Apple's words).

Still, even though you might have to dig for them, it looks like a few nice tweaks are on the way with Snow Leopard. Here are the ones I'm most looking forward to.

• Faster bootup and shutdown times, and half the disk footprint of Leopard, which will save you about six gigabytes of disk space.
• Signal strength indicators in the Airport menu (so you can choose the Wi-Fi network with the best signal).
• A split pane terminal, so you can run jobs side by side (like tail a log in one pane while running a script in another, so you can see what's going on in each simultaneously).
• Date in the menu bar. (I use a hack to get this right now; happy to hear that won't be necessary anymore.)
• Safari 4. While the beta was crashy (at least for Windows), it is leaner, meaner, and a bit more flashy than Firefox or Chrome.
• Video editing and screen recording (for screencasts!) in Quicktime.
• Microsoft Exchange support--good for all those (poor) folks using Exchange.
• 64-bit computing, which means you can get more memory into your system.

Here's the full list of Snow Leopard "refinements and enhancements."

* Oh yeah, there was also something about some new phone and laptops, too. Or something.