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For all the Mac-carrying students who are either already back at school or very close to heading back, here’s a nice little tip that can come in handy. For anyone worried about prying eyes or simply worried about people poking around in their machines, there’s an easy and quick way to make that less easy to do.

By heading over to the Security preference pane in the System Preferences app, there’s an option to “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver”. When this is checked, you’ll be prompted to enter your password every time you wake from sleep or try to return to the main screen after the screen saver has been active.

A while back, a set of “drawers” icons spread like wildfire across the internet. The icons, which were meant to make stacks in Leopard’s dock more attractive, looked pretty nifty, but getting them to work properly involved Terminal use and some other tinkering. However, with “Stacks in Da Place” from MacXeagle, getting your stacks looking nice and organized is even easier.

Upon opening, Stacks In Da Place automatically detects your currently set up stacks and shows you the default icon. Adding an icon (such as one of the various “Drawer” icons) is as simple as dragging and dropping. (You can find the “Drawers” here)

With the plethora of apps that offer you instant access to notifications and functions directly from the menubar, things can get pretty crowded pretty fast. However, it’s super easy to get rid of most of the items in your menubar, and it’s only a click and drag away.

On most Apple apps, simply command clicking will allow you to take the icon right off the menubar so that you have some more screen real estate available. You’ll see the familiar “poof” effect once it’s gone.

The blogs have been buzzing as of late about Google’s introduction of the CalDAV protocol into its Google Calendar service. For those of who who live on the planet Jupiter, Google Calendar is the excellent free online calendar service that resides in the cloud. One of the major trends in technology is maintaining a connection between apps in the cloud, and apps on your physical machine. With the introduction of CalDAV to Google Calendar, it’s never been easier to keep iCal and Google Calendar in sync, let alone for free.

Along with the birth of Firefox 3.0 came the unfortunate death of Google Browser Sync, the incredibly popular Firefox extension that allowed users to keep their bookmarks in sync across computers. While this is still possible with .mac and Safari, the space for a new cross platform solution is vast. (As a side note, I know that you can use Safari on Windows, but it still hardly has any marketshare compared to Firefox and IE). But the lack of a major browser sync tool for Firefox 3.0 may finally have a solution; it’s called Weave and it’s straight out of the Mozilla Labs.

With the introduction of iWeb in the latest versions of Apple’s iLife suite of media/lifestyle applications, making and publishing your own website has never been easier. The incredibly straightforward design tools offer a true WYSIWYG web-creator tool, and a highly customizable one at that. iWeb does, however, have its limitations and lacks some capabilities that many people would like to see available. Enter iTweak, a nifty freeware app from Guimkie, that offers a handful of powerful and useful features that can help make your iWeb site that much better.

We at MacApper are big fans of Fluid, the Site-Specific Browser (SSB) creator application from Todd Ditchendorf. This handy little app, which we’ve discussed before, allows you to take your favorite websites and turn them into applications in and of themselves. Basically, you get a fully functioning browser without all the clutter of toolbars and icons of your conventional browser (although you can get that stuff back if you want it). However, with the latest version of Fluid 0.9.2, a couple of new very useful features have been added. In this MacApper tutorial I’ll be explaining how you can create your very own SSB, which you can choose to put in your Menubar as a menubar item or actually on your desktop. Click on after the jump to see how to get started.

With the introduction of the latest iteration of Mac OS X Leopard, Apple also changed the visual appearance of your Mac’s main application launcher, the Dock. Since Leopard has been on sale, people have started to take advantage of the new way that the Dock is controlled, including tweaking Dock images and controlling what the Dock looks like. Numerous different apps have sprung up to make Dock switching easier, and one of my favorites is the aptly titled Dock Library.

These days it seems like iTunes controllers are a dime a dozen, and for the most part, that would be right. However, not all iTunes controllers are created equal, a principle perfectly demonstrated by Cover Stream, an awesome app from the people over at SNARB.TK. This awesome app takes all of the best features from a bunch of other iTunes controller apps and rolls those features into a streamlined, functional application that will make browsing your music a pleasure.

The oft mentioned Quicksilver from the awesome folks at Blacktree Software is arguably one of my favorite apps on my entire Leopard MacBook Pro. The sheer simplicity, intuitiveness, and function of this remarkable app allows me to work more productively than ever; launching an app, controlling something, or finding something is just a keyboard shortcut away. However, some of the built-in appearances that ship with Quicksilver when you download can leave much to be desired, especially when running on the shiny new Leopard desktop. Here’s a bunch of new appearances to change that up.

One of the most frustrating features of iTunes is the fact that you may be able to share your library with others on your network, but in the later iterations of the popular music-organizing app, it’s been virtually impossible to “share” your tunes with those other users…until now. Mojo for Mac (and Windows) allows you to connect to your friends’ iTunes libraries and help yourself to their songs to supplement your own library.

As an avid study-guide making student, I’m constantly making PDF files out of the various documents that I encounter and create. While it’s great to be able to “Print” to PDF directly from within most apps, the manipulation of said PDFs has never been as simple — until now. Enter PDFLab from iConus. This excellent freeware app is chock full of tools that make PDF manipulation, and specifically merging, super easy on your computer, without the need for chunky, expensive applications like Acrobat.

How many times have you been listening to music on iTunes through your headphones in a quiet location and you inadvertently pull them out of the plug only for the music to continue blasting away through the speakers of your Mac portable? Well personally, this has happened to me a slew of times and the feeling is truly embarrassing. However, Breakaway from [[Alloc]Init] is the simple application that can prevent this from ever happening again.

The lightweight (<6mb) app can make itself at home in your menu bar or in your dock. When it's activated, a tiny icon appears as a menu bar item (by default) in the top part of your screen. Two different icons can tell you if Breakaway senses that your headphones are plugged in or not. In addition, if you have Growl notifications installed on your machine, Breakaway will tap into Growl and you will get a little notification about the status of your headphones.

Although it used to be considered “odd” or “weird” to speak to your computer, the increased availability and accuracy of voice recognition software has encouraged the practice for more and more people. Up until now, though, it has been difficult to find a solid option for Mac OS X. However, with the introduction of MacSpeech Dictate at Macworld 2008, the game has truly changed. This program not only does the obvious service of speech to text, but it does a whole lot more. Read along to see what else this very powerful application can do.

From the makers of Quicksilver, the indispensible launcher for Mac OS X, comes Secrets. This preference pane add-on allows you to tweak hundreds of hidden or “secret” preferences on your Mac to make it work even better for you. Although we’ve mentioned many other apps that can do similar things, such as MacPilot and LeopardMOD, Secrets is a fresh take on the best way to customize your Mac.