Looking for an easy, out-of-the-way method for quickly accessing your favorite websites? Try using Dashboard. You can store them there by making your own desktop widgets in Leopard, and you don’t have to know how to code. These are called web clip widgets, and making one is easy. In this example, we will make a YouTube widget, but it can be done with any site.

As we near the release of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), the final updates for the current version of OS X will slowly start to trickle in. Today, Apple has made available Mac OS X 10.5.8, the 8th revision of the Leopard operating system. It is available through Apple’s website, as well as OS X’s Software Update.

Is the World Wide Developers Conference too far away for you? Are you desperate to get your hands on an Apple netbook straight away? The folks over at TestFreaks.com couldn’t stay away any longer, so they took a Dell Mini 9 and decided to install Mac OS X Leopard. The process seems surprisingly simple, and gave them a fully functional MacBook Nano (or close enough) within an hour.

Although Spaces was a hyped feature of Mac OS X Leopard, it seems to lack functionality and reliability. Thankfully, an app named Hyperspaces is available to cover some of those missing features. What’s unique about Hyperspaces is that it does not replace Spaces, it simply adds functionality and improves usability.

XKCD Comics, an extremely popular online comic strip that can usually be found among the top ten stories on Digg, has created a pretty funny comic about the new Windows 7 beta. This beta, which has been released to the public (2.5 million to be exact) this week at CES, is being offered by Microsoft as an update from their current operating system, Vista. Although it is still in the beta process, many users believe it already has quite a few improvements over Vista. Most are even saying Windows 7 is what Vista should have been.

According to MacRumors, the latest build of Mac OS X v10.5.6 (9G55) seeded to developers contained no known issues, which suggests 10.5.6 is ready for the public. MacRumors also says Apple started distributing this build internally to more than just the developers. This also suggests that this is the final build. Yet another rumor says more »

There has been a lot of speculation in the Mac community recently that Mac OS X 10.5.6 would be released in the next few weeks. Apple has recently been releasing quite a few builds of Mac OS X 10.5.6 to developers, with the most recent, build 9G38, being released last week. The latest build appears more »

Neither Mac OS X Snow Leopard or Microsoft Windows 7 have been released to the public yet. They both promise to be a nice improvement from that last release of each OS and offer some interesting new capabilities. Despite not being on the market yet, The Onion decided that now would be a good time to compare them and see how they do against each other in some very important aspects. They have even created a nice, easy to read chart with their analysis.

Check that chart out after the break.

Users of Google tools such as Docs, Reader, and Picasa can now ditch the Windows and enjoy their tools on a Mac. Until now, Gears was available for Firefox or IE on Windows only, but today Google announced the availability of Gears for Safari. A Mac running OS X 10.4.11 with Safari 3.1.1 (or higher, including Leopard) is required.

So what makes Gears so important? It exists mainly in the background and never really gets any direct interaction from the user—deceptively simple, in fact, but fundamentally important for enabling Web 2.0 applications.

Mac app RiftVault has come out of pre-release for its full public 1.0 release. RiftVault allows you to store your important personal information using encryption to ensure the safety of your private information. RiftVault is designed to hold credit card information, passwords, banking info, and even files that you want to be secured (using the more »