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Autodesk is expanding assistance for Macintosh users by adding support for Boot Camp for select products in addition to offering native Mac OS products.

We all want our Macs to be labour-saving rather than labour-causing devices. Yet, even if you've been using a Mac for a long time, the thought, "There has to be a better of way of doing this," will probably come to mind on a daily basis.

John Detroye has posted his latest write-up of tips and tricks for managing Macs.

Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard includes QuickTime X which comes with a new QuickTime Player, offering a clean and uncluttered interface, easy media sharing, and flexible recording capabilities. Should you need it, a Snow Leopard-compatible version of QuickTime Player 7 is also available for use with older media or with existing AppleScript-based workflows. QuickTime Player 7 can be used to playback formats such as QTVR, interactive QuickTime Movies, and MIDI files. Also, it supports QuickTime 7 Pro registration codes for access to QuickTime Pro functionality.

VPN Tracker 5 includes connection profiles for over 300 tried and tested VPN devices and uses the industry standard IPSec protocol. It is compatible with nearly every IPSec-based VPN gateway on the market.

Using WireTap Studio, you can record the discrete audio output of any application, as well as all system audio, or record audio input from any microphone, line-in, or audio input hardware. If you can hear it, WireTap Studio can record it. Part of the $39 MacHeist bundle

Mac OS X only: GeekTool is a nifty utility that incorporates text files, the output of shell commands and images onto your Mac's desktop. GeekTool ranks up there with Quicksilver in my "Oh my God, why doesn't this exist for Windows" list. Especially indispensable for command line lovers, GeekTool is fantastic for keeping tabs on your system or tracking your life in .txt right on your desktop.

Macs in the enterprise aren't just cheaper to manage-they're a lot cheaper, according to a new survey released today by the Enterprise Desktop Alliance.

Using PMSET on Mac OS X, you can prevent your external hardrive from going to sleep (or spinning down). If you rock a notebook, and rely on an external enclosure, you probably know how annoying it is when your drive goes to sleep on you and it takes a good 30 seconds for it to spin back up again. More annoying is when Finder becomes unresponsive until this happens. If your drive is set to spindown every 15 minutes, then this ends up being downright maddening, and seriously cripples your workflow.

...basic instructions for using Console to check for clues that may help in troubleshooting

This extract from a chapter of our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X describes several ways to free-up space on your Mac OS X startup disk, also known as your Mac OS X boot volume.

OmniDiskSweeper is another quality product from The Omni Group, it's a Mac OS X utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks. OmniDiskSweeper makes this easy by highlighting the biggest files on your disks, and by noting which files are used by the system, so you don't accidentally delete important files.

GrandPerspective is a utility application for Mac OS X that graphically displays the disk usage of a file system.

WhatSize allows you to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. You would be surprised at how many useless files might be laying around on your hard disks. The files and folders are automatically sorted by size, with the biggest sizes first. WhatSize helps find out what files are taking up all of that space.

Apple added a "feature" to Leopard which restricts non administrator users from managing printers on their Macs. While this is desired behavior on a public machine such as a classroom, it is a problem for single user machines such as faculty, staff and 1:1 deployments. By default in Leopard, a non-admin user can not add or remove printers. They are also not able to hold or resume a print job. This is a problem if you want users to be able to add printers themselves, especially if they're bringing their laptops home.

One of the classrooms I maintain is comprised of 2.4Ghz iMacs (MB323LL/A) that are dual booted with Windows XP and Mac OS X. Sometimes when the workstations are restarted from XP to OS X the display brightness gets changed to its dim power saver setting. This requires the user manually increase the display brightness by pressing the F2 key, which is inconvenient. I haven't been able to determine the cause of this issue so I wanted to create a login hook to increases the brightness as a temporary fix. OS X doesn't ship with a command line utility that let's you change display brightness. Fortunately, Nicholas Riley has written a utility that uses OS X frameworks to accomplish this quickly and easily. Here's the code

A hidden user is a user that can login to the system, but the account will not be displayed in the Login Window, where all of the other accounts on the machine are listed. In lab or work environments, it's often desired to have a hidden user that has Admin rights for administrative functions and/or other special circumstances.