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I know that Apple advertised Snow Leopard as being a more “under the hood”-type upgrade, with fewer new features than Leopard had at its launch. But one of my favorite pieces of this fine new cat is in the new version of QuickTime. (Pieces? Of a cat? Maybe someone needs another mint julep!)

Let me point out, though, that if you’re using an older version of QuickTime (especially if you bought the pro upgrade), you should make sure that you keep it installed. As much as I love the new one, Apple chose to make it less robust with certain tasks (like exporting to other formats), so you might find both versions very useful to have.

Anyway, QuickTime X (as the new program has been dubbed) has a screen recording feature that I love more than I love taffy. After you’ve installed Snow Leopard, simply type “QuickTime” into your Spotlight search field to launch the program, or if you’re more old-school, you can look for it within your Applications folder.

When you’ve got it open, go to File > New Screen Recording. At this point, you can click the down-arrow that shows up on the recording window to pick an audio source (yep, your screen movie can be narrated!), your audio quality settings, and your save location. Then simply click on the record button to begin, and when you’re finished, click on the “Stop Recording” button in the menu bar or press Command-Control-Escape.

This feature has many uses and was unavailable in Leopard without purchasing a third-party program like Snapz Pro X. Snow Leopard hasn’t been around for very long, yet I’ve used this function over and over again to explain things more clearly than text can. And let me repeat: I love it more than taffy. Heck, I love it almost as much as I love chocolate. I would marry screen recordings if I could, but alas, no states recognize that love as worthy of legal protection. YET.

PEBMAC is doing a networking presentation at the Apple Store at 29th Street in Boulder on Wednesday, September 30th at 7:00. If you’re interested in setting up, troubleshooting, or better utilizing your network, drop on by. It’s free, and anyone is welcome to come. See you then!

Now that Apple has released Snow Leopard, you’re probably wondering whether it makes sense to install it on your system. The short answer to that is an almost unqualified yes. The long answer is a bit . . . well, longer.

If you already own Leopard 10.5, Apple is offering Snow Leopard 10.6 as a $29 upgrade (if you’re using an earlier version of the OS, Apple requests that you purchase the full boxed set that includes iLife and iWork). For that price you get a number of new behind-the-scenes features that will make your machine faster as developers start taking advantage of them. Apple has also re-written the OS and its supporting programs to take advantage of the latest hardware and give a speed boost, not to mention a space savings. Oh, and speaking of the latest hardware, you’re gonna need it—Snow Leopard won’t run on the old PowerPC Macs (G5 processor or earlier).

That being said, you likely won’t notice much of an increase in speed after you install Snow Leopard. The developers haven’t quite caught up yet, and aside from some of the Apple core apps like Mail launching faster, there isn’t much difference. What is readily apparent, though, is how much less space Snow Leopard takes up. A regular install on my MacBook saved me a whopping 10GB of space, and I could have saved more if I’d turned off foreign languages and the like.

If you’re looking for major changes to the OS, you’re going to have to wait for 10.7. Snow Leopard offers a few new interface tweaks, a couple of additions to system preferences, and so on, but on the face of it you won’t see much difference. It’s too early to tell whether there are major increases in stability, but I’m guessing that overall things will just work better.

Is it worth the $29 upgrade price? Yes, but I don’t think we’ll really see what Snow Leopard has to offer until the developers can catch up.

We’ve been very happy with our 3GS phones in general. The AT&T issue of dropped and missed calls has not been resolved, so we’re not thrilled with the phone part of it, but as a personal device, the iPhone is simply the best there is. But we’ve noticed that there is one thing you’ll need to know about the care and feeding of your new electronic baby, even if you’ve been an iPhone user since the beginning—you know, way back in 2007. Ah, the days of yore.

Because of the way that the 3GS works (compared to the first-gen iPhones and the 3G models), there are a few things about its operation that are different. The most important one of these, though, is that force-quitting an application that has run amok is no longer just about holding down the home button. (On the 3GS, that launches Voice Control.) To force-quit a stuck app, hold down the power button on the top of the phone until you get the “slide to power off” prompt. Then release the power button and hold down the home button until the app quits. Useful, eh? This is also good to do in conjunction with one of the App Store’s utilities like Memory Sweep, which allows you to see what processes are running and how much memory they’re taking up on your phone. This can be helpful if your battery life is getting slurped up like spaghetti and you’d like to stop whatever process is running in the background from eating your device alive.

We haven’t written a blog post in a while because we’ve had a death in the family here at PEBMAC. Stay tuned for more frequent updates!

Here at PEBMAC World Headquarters, we’re big fans of security. After having to guess the passwords on wireless networks, user accounts, routers, and so on, we know how easy it can often be to get into someone’s private stuff. Luckily, more and more users are starting to use complicated passwords like “fl3ab1tten” instead of “1234.” However, doing so may not make you more secure and ultimately could even make you less secure.

A recent paper from Dinei Florencio, Cormac Herley, and Baris Coskun makes the claim that strong passwords really aren’t that much more effective than weak passwords in online environments. It would take a random hacker literally years to guess a simple password on services that lock out users after three incorrect password attempts. Unless you have a password that someone who knows you can guess (be careful of using pets’ or kids’ names) or is very simple like “password,” you can feel pretty comfortable using passwords that don’t require mental calisthenics to keep track of. Do yourself a favor and make sure you’re not using a password from this list.

That being said, it’s still a good idea to use different passwords for different services. If someone hacked into that cockatiel enthusiasts website you’re a member of and got a list of usernames and passwords, and you used that same username and password for PayPal or Wells Fargo, you could be in big trouble.

You can try using a tool like 1Password to store all your passwords, or you could devise a system that’s easy for you to remember but hard for someone to guess. For example, the URL of the website and the number of characters in the name (such as paypalSIX for PayPal, or wellsfargoTEN for Wells Fargo) is easy to type, easy to remember, and extremely difficult to guess.