More Mac 101, our series of tips and tricks for novice Mac users.

Now that the winter holidays are almost upon us, we're thinking about sharing stories, photos, and movies with far-flung relatives and friends. There's a slew of ways to get this done, and this post focuses on creating a simple site in iWeb '09 and publishing it not to Mobile Me, but to your own host via FTP.

If you're unfamiliar with iWeb '09, I'll say this: It does what it does well. If your goal is to share photos, movies and stories with minimal fuss and zero coding, iWeb will work. When I travel, I typically create an iWeb gallery and movie page. Yes, there are many other options, but this one works for me.

If you'd rather not publish your iWeb site to MobileMe and have access to FTP, you're in luck. The setup is simple. First, create your site. Next, click the title of your site in the iWeb '09 sidebar (this doesn't work with previous versions of iWeb) to reveal the publishing options. In the first drop-down menu, select "FTP Server." Give your site a name and enter a contact email.

Below that, enter your FTP settings. You'll need your server address, username, and password. Next, enter the path to the directory (http://mysite.com/paris, for example). Just make sure the directory already exists on your server or you'll get an error. It won't hurt to test the connection at this point by clicking the button that's available for just that purpose.

Finally, enter your site's URL and then click Publish. Off it goes! If you set it up correctly, your iWeb-powered site will be uploaded to the proper place on your site. Subsequent updates require re-publication, so just hit that Publish button again when you're done making changes

That's it! Have fun sharing your holiday experiences with iWeb '09.

Snow Leopard introduced many welcome changes to Leopard and one huge annoyance. When copying an email address from Mail, Snow Leopard wraps the address in "< >" brackets, for example, "<annoying@email.com>". When pasting, you've got to go back and remove the brackets.

Mac Daddy World has identified the preference setting and posted the simple Terminal commands that will eliminate the brackets. I tried it and it's working perfectly! Thanks, Mac Daddy World. That was very simple and most welcome.

While most users are happy with Snow Leopard, there are these annoyances. Is there something bothering you?

Before Snow Leopard was released, we were enjoying GrabUp for super-simple sharing of screenshots. It was a great little utility: After a brief setup, it automatically sent any screenshot to its servers (or your own) and added the resulting URL to the Clipboard. It was fast and very useful.

Snow Leopard killed it by changing the naming convention of screenshots. The developers haven't fixed it (in fact, Google now throws up a danger warning when I try to access the site) and it looks like they aren't going to. We posted a fix not too long ago, and today we found another approach on the Dropbox wiki that uses Dropbox and Jing. You get free online storage for up to 2GB of screenshots, and an easy way to get the URL of your screenshot where you need it in a hurry.

Here's how it works. First, download and install Jing (it'll work with the free version -- more on that later) and get a Dropbox account (again, the free version will work). Once your Dropbox install is all done, create a destination folder in your Dropbox's Public folder -- maybe "screenshots," for example. Now it's time to fill in the Jing preferences. Read on...

Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of tips for new and novice Mac users.

iTunes gets easier to use with every update. One feature, however, has gotten lost in the changes. Artist Alerts lets you receive email notifications of new releases from your favorite artists, which is great. The trouble is that the link to tag an artist isn't easy to find.

There are two ways receive alert updates from a given artist. First, navigate to that artist's page (for example, here's Paramore's page). On the right hand side, you'll see "Alert Me." Click it, enter your account password and then click "OK."

The other method is from an album page. Here's the page for Paramore's album Brand New Eyes. Scroll down a bit and you'll see "Artist Alerts" under "More Paramore."

To manage your alerts, click your account name in the upper right-hand corner. Once you've entered your password, a new window appears. Scroll down a bit and click "Manage My Alerts." From there you can de-select certain artists or clear the entire list.

Have fun and spend less time checking up on your favorites manually.

Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of tips for new and novice Mac users.

Earlier today we saw a tweet that inspired this post. Patrick Burleson asked how he can stop iChat from automatically joining chat rooms he visited during an earlier session. It's possible, but you won't find the fix in the preferences.

First, I'll describe how to join a room automatically whenever iChat is launched. From the File menu, select Go To Chat Room.... A window appears. From there, select the correct account and add your room to the Room Name field. Next, click the "+" in the lower left-hand corner to add it as a favorite and select the "Autojoin" check box. Now, iChat will join that room each time it's launched.

To disable the autojoin, simply de-select that box. Why would a person want to automatically join a chat room, you say? Some folks collaborate with far-flung coworkers via AIM all day.

There you have it, Patrick (and TUAW readers). I hope this helps.

The more we use Snow Leopard the more niceties we uncover. This week I found a simple little check box that has made my life infinitely more awesome. Yes, my entire life.

First, a bit of background. When Mac OS 10.0 was released in September of 2001, we all went crazy with the genie effect, watching windows slip in and out of the newly-introduced Dock with silky smoothness.* Window after window slid into place.

The problem was this: minimized windows moved neighboring icons aside, making everything a bit smaller and harder to identify. Eventually the whole mess became unusable. Sure, you could mouse over or check the identifying icon but ancient eyes like mine aren't meant for such strain.

Snow Leopard has come to the rescue. Now you can minimize windows "behind" their parent app's icon. Here's how. First. launch System Preferences and click "Dock." Then, select "Minimize windows into application icon." As Jeff Goldblum said, "There's no step three." Now, minimized windows scoot behind your Dock icons and there's no more crowding.

*OK, jaggy, halting smoothness. Still, it was cool. Mostly.

Welcome to a brand new series focusing on music creation on the Mac and iPhone platform.

As you know, here at TUAW, we are crazy about anything Apple. We just love it! But, dear reader, this is not the be all and end all of our hearts. For many, if not all of us, music is a great passion of ours too. So, when these two worlds collide, naturally, it's a beautiful thing.

Recently, you may have seen a few posts on TUAW covering iPhone apps such as FourTrack and Noise.io or Soundboard for the Mac. Well, in this series, we are going to be singing a similar tune but taking a bit more of an in-depth look, or, if you will, taking things a semi-tone down (OK, enough with the music word play).

What exactly can you expect from this (fortnightly) series? If you're a home studio enthusiast (or a singer-songwriter trying to make ends meet) there will be tips, tricks and how-tos from Garageband all the way to Logic Studio and everything in between. Reviews on some of the latest and greatest music creation software and hardware for the Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch as well as, every now and then, a bit of inspiration for those rainy days.

But don't fret (oops!) if you can't hold a tune. For those less musically inclined we know you still need a soundtrack for the holiday you had with Granny last year and she wants to share the photo's on a DVD with some 'hip and happening' music in the background - we've got your back.

Stay tuned and leave a comment if you have any bright ideas for what you'd like to see covered in this new series.

With Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, expected rumored to ship out any week day now, it's worth looking at one thing that can make upgrading to 10.6 a lot easier (at least on an Intel Mac-as most PowerPC Mac users should know by now, Leopard 10.5 is the end of the road for you: Snow Leopard is Intel-only).

Snow Leopard is mostly about optimizing Leopard's performance rather than introducing new features. Part of that optimization is that OS X 10.6 is expected to save users several gigabytes of space on their hard drives versus a 10.5 installation. And part of the reason that Snow Leopard is able to pare down that much space is that Rosetta is now an optional installation.

(Update: as many commenters have noted, the Rosetta program itself doesn't take up much space - only a couple of megabytes. Most of the space savings in Snow Leopard is from Apple stripping out PowerPC binaries from the apps and OS libraries. It's still worth going through your apps and updating the PowerPC-only apps to universal binaries, however, because you will still see a significant boost in performance by doing so.)

Introduced in 2005, not long after Apple announced its transition to Intel processors, Rosetta is a dynamic translator that allows legacy PowerPC applications to run on Intel processors. It was intended as a stopgap measure to allow PowerPC applications to continue to run on Intel-powered Macs until developers were able to update their applications to support either universal binaries or Intel-only code.

Applications which run under Rosetta provide slower performance than their universal binary counterparts because the CPU has to translate Intel instructions into PowerPC, so developers definitely had an incentive to switch to universal binaries. With four years having passed since the Intel transition, almost all applications for the Mac now run under a universal binary, which makes Rosetta largely unnecessary-hence its inclusion in OS X Snow Leopard as an optional installation.

So, why not save some space on your hard drive and leave Rosetta out? Well, if you do that, any applications you have that still have PowerPC only code won't run at all. (Update: Apparently Rosetta will download on demand if you try to run a PowerPC-only application.) Rosetta is absolutely necessary to run those applications. But, before Snow Leopard drops to consumers, you can take one simple step that will save you a lot of trouble.

Getting through the work week is hard enough for most of us... but the minute Friday afternoon rolls around, there's a certain breed that face the weekend with a long list of "honey do" projects and household duties. Yes, the weekend warriors need iPhone app love too -- whether to help with those maintenance challenges, or find ways to make the break from the day job a bit more enjoyable. Here's a five app collection just for you, my brothers and sisters in the two-day sprint; enjoy.

Weber's On The Grill™ [iTunes link] for iPhone, at $4.99, would seem to be a bit pricey compared to other grill-centric cooking apps selling for $0.99 (dadoo's Grill Guide) or the large number of free and well-regarded cookbook apps on the store (check out Epicurious Recipies & Shopping List, for one). Nevertheless, if you're serious about getting the most out of your grill, the $5 you spend on this app will be well worth it.

Weber may be the world's largest grill manufacturer, but the relationship of Weber owners to their grills feels more personal than mass-marketed; in fact, the slightly obsessive and cultish fandom around the Weber brand may seem a wee bit familiar to, uh, owners of a particular company's computers, music players and cellphones. Ahem.

The iPhone app takes the Weber customer very seriously, providing a great collection of hundreds of recipes along with grilling technique guides (including videos from chef Jamie Purviance), time and temperature recommendations, a handy shopping list manager, and a convenient cooking timer right in the app. About the only thing that's missing is an optional meat thermometer to plug into the dock connector (which I would totally buy if they made one).

As I've discovered recently, one of the unfortunate side effects of having the logic board on your computer replaced (aside from the potentially hefty bill involved if your AppleCare has lapsed) is that your Time Machine backups won't play nicely with your Mac after the repair if you're using a Time Capsule.

Replacing the logic board is essentially like getting a whole new Mac; though all the data on the hard drive is identical, the new logic board will have different hardware identifiers (specifically, the MAC address) that will tell your Time Capsule, "This is a new Mac that's never been backed up before. Please treat it as such." The Time Capsule, doing as it's told, will fumble along and create a new Time Machine backup while ignoring the old backups completely.

Your options then are these:

1. Scrap your old Time Machine backups and start fresh. There may be an allure to this, but it's almost certainly unnecessary, and you can lose months of perfectly good backups. Plus, you then have to deal with the incredibly long first Time Machine backup all over again.

2. Hack your Time Machine backup using the following procedure, which will allow you to resume Time Machine backups as though your logic board was never replaced.

Recently, the question came up of how to automatically "tweet" a birthday message to a friend or loved one on their special day. After thinking on this question for some time I finally came to a solution. As it turns out, intrepid TUAW blogger Dave Caolo wrote a Mac 101 article all about attaching AppleScripts to iCal events. Additionally, Brad Linder over at Download Squad put together a nice little tutorial for posting to Twitter via the command line.

It wasn't obvious at first, but these two articles together formed a dynamic duo of birthday tweeting proportions. If, dear reader, you are interested in setting up a system for sending out some birthday tweets then follow along as we travel the mysterious world of iCal events and command line tweeting. Read on for a somewhat technical tutorial on how to set up some pre-scheduled tweeting goodness. (If you're looking for a service to take care of all this for you, here you go.)

Recently, we reported on AT&T's push to make it easier for iPhone & iPod touch users to connect to their Wi-Fi Hot Spots. One of our readers, Jamie Phelps, pointed out on his blog that AT&T's Wi-Fi service is not actually a "secure connection," as is advertised in various places on their website; we had overlooked this, and mistakenly reinforced the company's shaky claim in our post.

This brings to light an important point about wireless networks and security, however. It's really easy (and sadly all too common) to hop on to an available wireless signal in your office, at the hotel, or your favorite coffee spot and not even think twice about logging in to your e-mail or checking your bank balance.

What many users don't realize is even though the server you are connecting to (i.e. your bank's website) may employ several layers of security, the connection between your computer and the wireless access point is very likely to be unsecured. Anyone who is within range of your computer can trivially monitor the traffic being sent between your computer and the access point, allowing them to see what websites you may be visiting or capture details about other services that you may be connected to. This isn't because of some gaping vulnerability or software bug, it's just an inherent part of how wireless networks work.

So, what can you do to protect yourself? Read on for a list of simple steps you can take to ensure that your wireless connection is safe and secure.

TUAW reader Irice22 wrote "I accidentally switched over to iTunes Plus. How do I go back to the old format?" Here's how:

1. Sign into your iTunes account and select View My Account from the Store Menu.
   
2. Sign in once again (yes, I know! How annoying!) and click on Manage iTunes Plus.
   
3. Uncheck the box marked "Always show me iTunes Plus music and music videos when available" and click Save Changes.
   

You can always re-enable this option by following the same directions and checking the box rather than unchecking it.

Apple's "Apple Camp" is a series of workshops at retail stores intended for younger kids - aged 8 to 12 years - and their families. The schedule for 2007 has been made available, and all sessions will take place in July. Topics to be covered include making a podcast, iWeb and iPhoto, working with digital music and making a movie.

Apple describes just what "campers" should bring to class, as well as what they'll come away with. Sounds like a really fun time.

You've got a window open, any window. A Finder window, say, or in many of the built-in Apple apps like TextEdit. Ever wonder exactly which directory you're looking at? Here's a simple trick that may be new to you if you're a switcher.

See the name of your file or folder at the top of that OS X window? It usually has a small icon right next to it. Command-click the name or title in that title bar and OS X will show you the directory tree that leads down to the item you're looking at.

And if you click on a folder in that list? Finder automatically opens a new window showing that folder. Very convenient.