An operating system update like this Friday’s release of Mac OS X Snow Leopard is a perfect time to clean up your computer and start fresh. Let’s prepare your Mac for this weekend’s 10.6 upgrade.

Before You Upgrade, Part 1: Clean Up Your Mac

You don’t want to take those applications you haven’t launched in months, giant log files, superfluous startup items, and even old documents you don’t need anymore into Snow Leopard, so the first thing you want to do is give your Mac the virtual hose-down. Audit your data, applications, and login items; run some maintenance, and give the old hard drive a checkup with Disk Utility. Here are detailed instructions on how to clean up and revive your bloated, sluggish Mac.

Before You Upgrade, Part 2: Back Up Your Data

Before you crack open that pretty Snow Leopard box, get yourself an external FireWire drive and run a full backup of all the important files on your Mac. If you’ve got Leopard now you should already be running Time Machine, so make sure you’ve got a fresh new backup completed. If you’re still on Tiger, here are a gaggle of free Mac backup utilities for you to use. (But seriously, if you don’t already: get a FireWire drive. Back up your Mac. Now.)

Before You Upgrade, Part 3 (The Extra-Paranoid Track): Make a Bootable Backup of Your Mac

Maybe you go through the entire Snow Leopard upgrade process only to realize that your one, essential, company VPN application isn’t yet compatible. Maybe you accidentally lose files or apps in the upgrade process, or you just decide you hate Snow Leopard and want to go back to Leopard stat. One great way to ensure you can go right back to your working Mac’s state before an upgrade is to mirror the current state of your Mac on a bootable external hard drive. Even if you’ve got a Time Machine backup, grab another external drive and clone your Mac’s internal hard drive. With a bootable clone on hand, if anything goes wrong or you just want to boot back up into your old Mac’s environment (settings, apps, data, and all), you can do so by holding down the T key Option key, restarting your Mac, and choosing the clone as your bootup disk.

The Upgrade Path to Snow Leopard

To install Snow Leopard on your Intel-based Mac, Apple recommends you go from Leopard using the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade disc, or go from Tiger using the $169 Mac Box Set. Here’s Apple’s full set of system requirements.

The important thing to know is that you can only install the $29 upgrade on top of an existing Leopard installation. That is, you can’t start with a formatted Mac hard drive and install Snow Leopard only, which is kind of a bummer for geeks who like to do totally fresh, from-scratch installations.

Correction and update: We have confirmed that the preview of Snow Leopard DOES offer a standalone installer that works on a freshly-formatted hard drive without an existing Leopard installation or DVD. While we can’t absolutely say before Friday whether or not the final release will work this way, it’s very possible it will. (Read: The full version of the new Mac OS X may be just $29.) My apologies for the mistake! Thanks to commenters RudolphDer and dark42 for asking!

Choose one of two methods for the upgrade.

Upgrade Method 1. Install Snow Leopard Directly on Top of Your Existing Leopard Setup (Easy)

If youre already running a relatively clean installation of Leopard, and you want to make this update as easy, fast, and painless as possible, youre just going to pop your Snow Leopard DVD into your Macs drive and go. I did this using the Dev Preview of Snow Leopard on a well-used and cluttered Mac, and things went just fine. This is the upgrade path Apple wants you to take and suits most folks—with a good backup, youve nothing to fear. The only possible disadvantage to this approach is that some old logs and system files you dont need might stick around.

Upgrade Method 2. Wipe Your Mac Clean and Start from Scratch (Advanced)

Serious nerds who want their Snow Leopard installation absolutely pristine (and come from the Windows school of wipe-and-reinstall) can go all-out and format their Mac’s hard drive, reinstall Leopard, upgrade to Snow Leopard,, install Snow Leopard and then restore their data from backup and reinstall all their essential apps.

The one advantage to this approach is that you can take the opportunity to repartition your Mac’s hard drive in the process (though if it’s Boot Camp you want, you can set that up any time, not just when wiping your drive). You’ll also know for sure your Mac is completely cruft-free. The disadvantage to this approach is that it’s tedious and time-consuming. The Snow Leopard installation can take 45 minutes to an hour, then you’ve got to restore your Time Machine backup (depending on how much data we’re talking, this can also take up to an hour) and then you’ve got to reinstall your applications.

If you do decide to go this route on Snow Leopard upgrade day, here are a few notes:

• Only start once you have your Leopard DVD and Snow Leopard DVD in hand, and your data backed up.
• Inventory your Mac’s application list. Command-line lovers can do a simple ls /Applications/ >> appsiuse.txt to get a textual listing of everything in the Applications folder. Otherwise you can just eye your Applications folder and note down its contents. Also check your System Preferences panes for any panels you’ve installed there.
• After you’ve inventoried your applications and backed up your data, insert your Leopard DVD and click on ‘Install Mac OS X.’
• Insert your Snow Leopard DVD and click on ‘Install Mac OS X.’ When you reach the Snow Leopard Installer’s ‘Welcome’ screen, from the Utilities menu, choose ‘Disk Utility…’ From there you can (say a little prayer) and format or repartition your Mac’s internal hard drive. Once that’s done, continue with the installation as usual.

You get a few opportunities to restore your Time Machine backup during the Snow Leopard installation. Even if you pass each time, once Snow Leopard is completely installed, you can get your data out of Time Machine by running the Migration Assistant (located in /Applications/Utilities/).

One important thing to know about restoring a Time Machine backup: you can’t be logged in as the same user name that you’re restoring. That is, if I’m logged in as gina, and my backed-up Time Machine user is also gina, the Migration Assistant either makes you rename the restored user or log in as another (admin) user to do the restore. The Migration Assistant also lets you decide what you restore: which data (in predetermined folders/categories, like Music, Pictures, Documents, etc), all of your Applications (or none), settings, and other files. Here’s what that looks like:

How are you planning to upgrade to Snow Leopard? Are you doing any special Mac prep beforehand? Tell us about it in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, can’t wait to get her paws on the Snow Leopard box. Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Often it’s an artist’s second book or album that draws the public’s attention—so too with Apple’s number 2, whose story is excerpted here from Core Memory, photographed by Mark Richards and written by John Alderman.

Name: Apple II
Year created: 1977
Creator: Apple Computer, Inc.
Cost: $1,298 with 4KB of RAM; $2,638 with 48KB of RAM
Memory: 4K semiconductor
Processor: MOS technology 6502

Spurred on by the small but encouraging success of the original Apple, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, retreated to the garage (Jobs’) to craft the personal computer that was the most convincing case yet that such an item could have a mass market. The Apple II started where the Apple I left of, namely, with a case. It didn’t look like an object dropped from a starship or developed in a military lab. It had a familiar, prosaic form of an elongated beige typewriter, though additions like the television monitor and the cassette player used to store programs made it look a little like a college-dorm entertainment center.

If its appearance was familiar, the Apple II was also attractive to consumers in a way that pervious computers just weren’t—even if their manufacturers tried. It shipped with high-resolution color graphics and sound, and it had a rainbow-colored apple logo that seemed both fresh and optimistic. Said Wozniak, ‘The Apple II, more than any other early machine, made computer a word that could be said in homes. It presented a computer concept that included fun and games—human-type things.’ The ability to have a business and a social side was an important sign of computing’s growing relevance.

The price made the Apple II affordable for businesspeople, well-off families, and schools. It was in the education sector that its influence lasted longest—although it certainly made its mark on business as the first platform to run VisiCalc, the first consumer spreadsheet program. It was the programs that really hooked people, and the Apple II had a great roster of educational and entertainment software. By attracting developers, a snowball effect occurred, and a new generation of developers became attracted and then obsessed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum’s collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The top photograph was taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum’s Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo ‘79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

(Via Gizmodo.)

He said he’d be back, he’s allegedly been spotted at Apple’s Cupertino campus, and Woz thinks he sounds fine. Now the WSJ is saying Steve Jobs—after nearly ’starving to death’—might make it back in time for WWDC.

Yes, this is a Wall Street Journal report, but no, it’s not at all official; in fact, it’s classic Apple rumor:

Two people who do business with Apple said senior Apple managers have told them the company is now trying to coordinate Mr. Jobs’s return with a product launch or public event.

The statements of these ‘people who do business’ with Apple are then supplemented with some info about the new iPhone, which Jobs may unveil, from ‘people who’ve seen the device’:

The new phone will look similar to last year’s model but has more processing power and some new features like video editing.

That side of the story has been more-or-less taken for granted by other publications for a while now—it’s the Jobs angle that matters here. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good Jobsnote, and even if Schiller and co. did pretty well on their own, I think we’re all ready for one. [WSJ]

(Via Gizmodo.)

Analysts are sometimes way off the mark with predictions, but that doesn’t mean that can’t invent ideas we’d actually really like to see implemented—in this case, Gene Munster’s speculation about an app store for the Apple TV.

We need to specify one thing before we start: This is not a rumor. There is absolutely no information to back up this idea, there have been no leaks on the subject, and there’s no reason to believe Apple is working on anything of the sort. It’s an idea based purely on speculation. That being said, we think it’s a smart idea, totally within the realm of possibility, and something we’d really like to see.

Given Apple’s massive success with the iPhone and iPod touch App Store, it makes sense that maybe Apple would try to implement something similar for the underdog in their lineup, the Apple TV. While Windows Media Center has developed quickly into one of the best pieces of software Microsoft’s ever created, and Boxee and XBMC have pushed the limits of user-created media centers, the Apple TV has languished with behind-the-times software and features, seemingly ignored by Apple themselves. With Boxee, it’s a great device, but how many people really know Boxee exists, let alone how to install it? The Apple TV has a ton of mainstream potential, and an app store might be just the way to achieve it.

An app store could deliver loads of new features to the Apple TV, from games to news to other digital video services (like Hulu), and could really exploit the under-used combination of Apple TV and iPhone. It’d be the best of both worlds, with the flexibility of Boxee and the security of the iPhone. Think about it: You could use the acceleromter in the iPhone to control a racing game displayed on your TV through the Apple TV, stream media across the world, or even just use your home theater system for truly epic fart apps.

And this could make media streamers (or home theater PCs, whatever) the mainstream devices they really should be: Despite Windows Media Center’s slick interface and ease of use, mainstream users barely even know it exists. XBMC, with its Linux base, requires users to hunt for apps, just like cell phones pre-App Store. Apple could really capitalize on the possibilities and relative lack of use of HTPCs and media streamers, and they’d barely have to do anything themselves!

Especially given Microsoft’s big push toward what they call the ‘three screen’ strategy (computer, mobile device, television) with the Zune HD and new Xbox 360 features, it really seems like the time for Apple to jump into the ring too.

Remember, there’s no reason to think an Apple TV app store is in the works. But on the other hand, we really hope it is. [via All Things D]

(Via Gizmodo.)

CEO of Sandisk, Eli Harari, has finally thrown in the towel (so to speak) by admitting that Apple has dominated the portable media player (PMP) market in the US in a way that anything else released would automatically be relegated to niche status. For this statement to come from the world’s number two PMP manufacturer goes a long way in cementing Apple’s sheer dominance. Do you think this trend will continue for years to come, or will Apple suffer the fate of American automobile manufacturers who once thought they had cornered the market only to be met by Japanese (and now Korean) makers that leapfrogged them to the top of the pile? If so, which is the best company to usurp Apple?

(Via Ubergizmo.)

Not to be outdone by the Nintendo press conference earlier today, Sony announced that it was making its portable console, the PSP, more girl-friendly. The company introduced a new Tybee Island Hannah Montana-branded version of the portable device.

The company also touched on a number of’ family friendly games for the device, including Petz and Rock Band Unplugged.

(Via http://feeds.ziffdavis.com/ziffdavis/gearlog-ziffdavis.)

creativebits – Apple oriented design community.)

Belkin’s milking its TuneBase product line for all it’s worth, today introducing two new wares that are just marginally different than those we’ve seen before. The new TuneBase FM and TuneBase Direct both enable iPhone users pick up a call handsfree (via the built-in speakerphone) as well as channel tunes to one’s stereo via an auxiliary input jack (that’s the ‘Direct’) or FM transmitter (and that’s the ‘FM’). The TuneBase FM is set to hit shelves next month in the US for $89.99, while the TuneBase Direct should make its way out this month for $69.99.

(Via Engadget.)

From John Gruber’s diary of an App Store reviewer: ‘Not sure what a ‘lingam’ is, but if it means what I think it means, just thinking about it is making mine swell. Jackpot. Rejected app for inappropriate content.’ Tragicomedy ’cause it’s true: [Daring Fireball, Image via Joy of Tech]

(Via Gizmodo.)

If you’re missing the now defunct FeedMyTorrents and its awesome duplicate-free RSS based automation, showRSS offers the same functionality and integration with RSS-enabled BitTorrent clients.

Founded by a refugee from FeedMyTorrents, showRSS has shielded itself from the same fate by setting up camp in Spain where torrents have been ruled legal. The site collects torrents from a variety of sources and weeds out the duplicates. You pick from shows you want to keep an eye on and showRSS adds them to your personal RSS feed. From there you can load the feed into a feed reader and manually select links to shows as they appear or you can plug it into a BitTorrent client with RSS support like µTorrent to automate the process.

(Via Lifehacker.)