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Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X market share has passed the 8% mark for the first time, a research company reported today. In September, Apple's operating system ran on 8.2% of the computers that accessed the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications for clients, the company's data showed. The Mac's share of the operating system market was up over August's by nearly four-tenths of a percentage point, the biggest one-month gain since May. Apple tends to post significant increases in September, according to Net Applications. Last year, for example, Mac OS X climbed by 0.45 points that month

Are you using the latest version of Mac OS X efficiently? Try our tips and watch your productivity soar.

Don't let you Mac fall asleep

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.

Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) 3 is the latest release of Apple's desktop management software, enabling administrators to distribute software, manage assets, and remotely administer Mac OS X systems via a network. ARD 3 takes advantage of innovative technologies in Mac OS X Tiger such as Automator. Automator is built on the concept of actions - discrete tasks such as opening a file, cropping an image, or sending a message. With Automator users can string together a series of actions into a single Automator workflow document. Much like a script, a workflow document can be executed, triggering each action and passing any data generated by the action to the next action in the workflow. Using the Automator actions installed with ARD and custom actions you create, you can develop workflows to automate repetitive system administration tasks. For example, workflows can distribute software, create detailed software and hardware reports, and remotely configure systems using ARD.

Ultimately, I was foiled by the security features of the Mac. I found that SSH attempted to log me in as the account owner of the Mac itself, rather than letting me to supply my own log-in name and associated password. In effect, I couldn't log on as anyone except the owner of the Mac account, at least by default. Because I didn't have an account on that Mac and my friend with the Mac didn't have an account on my Linux box, I couldn't log in.

When you think of the Apple Macintosh, you might think of a smooth-running, elegantly designed, though comparatively expensive, laptop or desktop computer that is used largely in homes. But can Macs also play a part in the workplace? The answer seems to be, increasingly, yes. For instance, the Orange County, Calif., Sheriff's Department recently purchased 175 iMacs and MacBook laptops, which will work within the department's Microsoft Windows environment. "They are used in regular office space for all types of assignments," said Assistant Sheriff James McDonald.  "We also use them in the training room and we use some for video editing and podcasting."

As a Mac sysadmin, I've had the need to manipulate the dock on hundreds of systems at a time. I used to cobble together terrible shell scripts to do the job, but now thanks to plistlib and python, plist manipulation is really easy. I am releasing this utility free under the Apache 2.0 license. Hopefully some other sysadmins will find it useful. dockutil is a command line utility for managing Mac OS X dock items. It can add, replace, list, move, find, and delete dock items. It supports Applications, Folders, Stacks, and URLs. It can act on a specific dock plist or every dock plist in a folder of home directories. It is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Add Item to Dock is a flexible, open-source tool, released for the benefit of system administrators. Add Item to Dock provides an interface to the defaults program, allowing you to add items to the dock via the command line.

EazyDraw provides a full editable vector import of AppleWorks 6 drawing (*.cwk) files. Complete editable vector graphic import that conserves, colors, patterns, wallpaper gradients - all native content and accents. The only thing you will notice is how much better the drawing looks when produced with EazyDraw and the full capability of the OS X Quartz graphic engine.

OS X has a number of options for handling disk images-settings for such things as automatically opening them, moving Internet-enabled images to the trash after opening, verifying checksums, and more. You control all of these options (and a few more) in Disk Utility's preferences panel. If you change these settings often, though, you may tire of launching Disk Utility and opening its preferences panel. As an alternative-and with a side bonus of gaining one additional option-you can install a hidden System Preferences panel to make accessing these options a bit easier. There are two ways to install this panel; one requires Terminal, and the other uses just the Finder. If Apple were to update the panel at some point, the Finder method wouldn't reflect those updates, while the Terminal method always insures you're seeing the latest version of the panel.

The Omni Group on Tuesday decided to make three of its apps available as freeware. The applications are available for download with no restrictions. "We've been thinking about this for OmniWeb for a while because every other browser is free," Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group, told Macworld. "We didn't feel comfortable charging for something that we are not updating as frequently as some other apps." The Omni Group said OmniWeb, OmniDazzle, OmniDiskSweeper, and OmniObjectMeter are all available with no licensing restrictions and are fully functional. The company said none of the applications are currently under active development.

I'm really fond of OmniDiskSweeper - a great utility! When disk space is tight, I've had too many clients throw away dozens or hundreds of little files they could have left alone. DiskSweeper quickly pinpoints that one, singularly big video file or non-essential folder that can free up gigs of space. It deserves a place in everyone's Utilities folder.

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Using the Finder in Tiger to burn data to CDs and DVDs has never been easier.