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.)

Camtasia Studio has long been the best solution for recording and editing screencasts. It is a wonderful tool for creating tutorials, among other things, by recording the activity on a computer screen. Camtasia users have long thumbed their noses at Mac users, as it has only been available for the Windows platform. Until now.

The folks at Techsmith, makers of Camtasia, have let it slip they are going to release a Mac version on August 25. I am one of the lucky folks who have been beta testing Camtasia for Mac for weeks and all I can tell you (due to NDA) is: get it. As soon as it’s available. It is a superb method to record screens and the editor makes it a breeze to pretty things up.

(Via jkOnTheRun.)

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.)

Windows only: LightBox is an extremely user friendly tool for editing photos when you need more than a simple crop and resize but less than a full out Photoshop massaging.

How user friendly is LightBox? When you run the program you’re presented with a sidebar of common tasks like color balancing and red-eye removal. Mousing over each of them provides not only an explanation of the tool but sample pictures showing the results and every tool within the editor itself has mouse over tips. Once you’re actually editing your image you can easily—as seen in the screenshot above—divide the image to show how the alterations are effecting it compared to the original. The divided and side by side comparison feature is great for photo enhancements where your goal is to make the picture more appealing without giving it an unrealistic appearance. If you need additional functionality, there is a Plus version available for $19.95 which adds on features like masking and auto color correction. The basic version of LightBox is freeware, Windows only.

(Via Lifehacker.)

Hulu, which continues to see strong growth, has been a web-based video site since day one. As more and more premium content has made its way to the site, now with Disney even in the mix, more and more users have turned to Boxee for consuming that content in a desktop application or via an AppleTV hack.

Now Hulu seems to be throwing down the gauntlet, and today they’ve launched their own shiny new desktop application, Hulu Desktop, that brings all the joys of Hulu to your PC or Mac and works with Apple and Windows Media Center remotes. In fact, they’re even touting it as the ‘lean-back’ way to view Hulu video.

As a whole the application is top notch. You can expect a slick user interface centered around video watching. In fact, it’s hard not to notice that there are elements of Boxee’s sophisticated UI and navigation elements in the new offering. Suffice to say, though, if you’re a Hulu lover, you won’t be disappointed.

Hulu Desktop can be downloaded and used with or without an account, but if you do login you’ll get access to your video queue, subscriptions, and viewing history. You can also customize playback quality and tweak additional custom settings in the preferences menu.

Hulu’s play for your desktop is a pretty interesting and newsworthy move, especially given their contentious relationship with Boxee (who’s only fault was enabling you to engage with the same content in a similar fashion) and the recent demise of Joost’s desktop app.

Also interesting to note is that Hulu seems to have designed the desktop app not to play well with the Boxee app. If you have Boxee running, you might even see the ‘conflict’ message above (though if Boxee’s not running, everything should work smoothly).

For more on Hulu Desktop, watch this video:

(Via Mashable!.)

Social music site Blip.fm added YouTube videos to its music feed today, allowing users to turn its ‘Twitter for music’ service into a social video playlisting site. The free service, which allows users to listen to songs and share them in playlists that resemble Twitter’s interface, now includes a window for watching videos as the songs play. It’s a sort of on-demand, social MTV — at least one that’s reminiscent of the era when MTV actually played music videos.

The move also beefs up Blip.fm’s audio content offering for U.S. users, although recent changes to its content library have left some international users with fewer songs from which to choose. Blip.fm recently began sourcing songs via Imeem but eliminated content from MP3 search engine Skreemr, which scraped the web for songs wherever they were lying around. While that’s generally a boon to U.S. users, many international listeners have reported that their full songs have been replaced by frustrating 30-second clips.

CEO Jeff Yasuda discussed the first round of changes, but not the YouTube additions, in this blog post last Thursday. The post doesn’t say why Blip.fm effected the changes, but it does mention lawyers. The streaming of songs lying around on the web falls into a legal gray area, but Imeem and YouTube content is fully licensed.

While providing a visual component to go alongside Blip.fm’s audio stream, the YouTube deal also provides some insurance against the potential eventual loss of Imeem content, although Imeem appears to be staying afloat with a new round of funding. YouTube, meanwhile, still suffers from its loss of Warner Music Group songs last year, but features music from the other three major labels as well as countless indies.

Originally a service from Fuzz.com, a now-defunct social network for musicians, Blip.fm reorganized last fall with new funding from insider investors. Stats from Compete.com show steady growth in recent months, pegging its April 2009 U.S. audience at about 500,000 users, while Quantcast data suggests that more than half of its 1.2 million global users are in the U.S. Blip.fm takes in modest revenue from referrals to online music stores and ticket agencies, as well as advertising.

(Via GigaOM.)

Twitter might not be the first place you’d think to look for video entertainment. But each day, legions of Twitter users post videos of breaking news, trending topics, wacky feline antics, and so on. All you need is a better way to discover them.

Enter Twitmatic, from a company called ffwd. The second iteration of the service, launched Tuesday morning, lets you search, browse, rate, watch, and skip videos from throughout the Twitter universe with remarkable ease.

“Users are constantly sharing video links on Twitter from a huge range of sites, and it’s a natural pool of social information from which to draw out videos,” ffwd co-founder and senior developer Greg Roberts, with whom I used to work at CNET many years ago (transparency), told Wired.com. “[But they] are constantly clicking a link, jumping through redirects, maybe opening a new tab, until landing at a page where the video hopefully plays. We think it should be easier than that, and that each tweet should be smart enough to display the relevant content inline. ”

Search is the special sauce in this new iteration of Twitmatic, which launched two months ago. When you enter a search term, Twitmatic runs it through the Twitter API, looks for links from more than 5,000 domains known to host video (Roberts says competing services lack that sort of breadth) and imports them into the system. When other people search for the same term, the system accesses those videos faster than it did the first time, and presents the newer results. Meanwhile, in the background, Twitmatic runs searches using an index of search terms, which also helps speed things up, according to Roberts.

Aside from its transformation of Twitter into a television network for popular and arcane video, our favorite thing about Twitmatic is its no-nonsense interface. We’re hard-pressed to think of ways it could involve fewer clicks.

First, enter up to three search terms (or click straight to a trending topic):

n the default interface, the top video associated with your search term appears below the original tweet. Don’t like it? Click the Next button to move on — or, if you really don’t like it, click the “Video Fail” button to help other Twitmatic users avoid the video (a really helpful feature, since some folks mislabel ads as videos on Twitter):

We prefer the expandable list view, which lets you see multiple tweets associated with your search term and view each one right there on the same page. Note that there’s no “up arrow” rating; if you like something, you retweet it:

We’ve been testing this thing for a few days now, and it has performed well, channeling Twitter’s inherent chaos into a smooth, lean-back video experience. Aside from the all-important search feature, the other main improvement in this version is a native Twitter log-in. This means you can follow users, add videos to your Twitter favorites, and reply to tweets from within Twitmatic.

(Via Wired)

Google Reader has been adding more and more social features recently, like the commenting on shared items options they added back in March. Today, they announced some updates that continue this push with several new social features.

The most social of Google Reader’s new features is a new section of Google Reader Trends called ‘Friends Trends.’ It’s designed to be a way to gauge how much you rely on the shared items of certain friends. You can quickly figure out whose shared blog posts you love most and who is just filling your RSS reader with noise.

While Friends Trends may be a fun and possibly insightful tool, Google’s new iGoogle importing feature takes the cake as the most useful. For anyone who has created a sophisticated iGoogle page with RSS and blog widgets, this is for you. Instead of having to re-subscribe to every single news source in Google Reader, you can simply import all of the feeds with a few clicks.

Google also expanded its comment feature by releasing it to all non-English users and added the ability to share notes via Google Reader’s mobile interface. In addition, they released a new video tutorial and start page for new Google Reader users.

These small changes reflect two of the biggest trends in social media today: simplicity and social graph interaction. Comments and Friends Trends are both features that help you better connect with and understand friends, while iGoogle importing and the new user start page are attempts to lower the time and energy cost of starting with Google Reader. Hopefully all of these moves indicate that Google Reader isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

(Via Mashable!.)

Here’s a 7-port USB hub for the hardcore-singles or corporate-couples amongst you. The ¥7,035 (about $71) AC-powered U2SW-B27SBK hub from Elecom lets you share up to seven USB 2.0/1.1 devices simultaneously across a pair of USB connected computers; Mac or PC, makes no difference to Elecom. While it’ll share a USB keyboard and mouse between machines, there’s no video-out so it’s not a true KVM. It does, however, include a little change-over switch that’s supposed to allow for a nag-free swap-out of computers. A welcome solution for couples toting laptops back and forth from the cubicle farms. At least it will be when it begins shipping in Japan starting mid-May.

[Via Impress]

(Via Engadget.)