I really love the new Google Mobile App. It has an amazing voice function, and it’s not a bad looking App. Google, however, has a few tricks up their sleeves in regards to the App. They’re going to reveal more of them during Macworld 2009, but today they’ve unveiled an “easter egg” in the App that allows you to customize a few additional settings including Theme Color, Sounds, and you can turn on two options including Live Waveform and Open Links in App.

To access them you have to go the main Settings then scroll down to the “About” button and continue to scroll down further. Do this two or three times and a “Bells and Whistles” option will pop up and allow you to access the new screen.

Apple’s Mobile Me service has had its ups and downs since it launched, but for the most part recently it’s been running fine. I have a Mobile Me account, and after the multiple extensions Apple gave me because of those initial problems, the account is now up for renewal.

I don’t use the Mobile Me service all that much - but I do want to keep my email address, so it’s time to renew. I do not, however, want to pay $99 for it - which is what Apple will charge me if I just renew it on me.com.

That’s ok, though, because there are plenty of options to get Mobile Me cheaper than that.

If you want to buy from a retail store you can get it from Amazon for $79.99 for a single user license, and $92.99 for a family pack. That will save you $20 right there (as long as you choose the free shipping option).

Or, if you want to go even cheaper, you can head to eBay, and find some great deals on brand-new copies of “Mobile Me”. The cheapest deal I’ve found so far is a copy of “Mobile Me” for $54.99 with free shipping included. You can check out the eBay auction right here. If that’s expired by the time you read this you can check the seller’s profile, who seems to sell copies of “Mobile Me” a lot.

You can find many “Mobile Me” auctions on eBay by doing a quick search, and someone is always selling it a a steep discount. So if you’re looking to save a few bucks on your renewal, or for trying it for the first time - a little research will go a long way.

You may have noticed that Apple Mail does not play the “new mail alert” message every time you get a new email. This is an issue that has been present since the first release of OSX 10.5, but it has never been fixed by Apple.

Thankfully someone over at MacOSXhints has solved the problem. All you have to do is turn off the IDLE command (which is what Mail’s IMAP is using sometimes to discover a new message). In Mail open Preferences, then go to Accounts>Advanced. In all your mail accounts turn off the “Use IDLE command” feature. Now go to Preferences>General, and set “Check for new Mail every minute”.

Now you should get the new mail alert sound every time you receive a message.

The Mac Giving Tree is a promotion from the team behind MacHeist to get more people on their mailing list for when the next MacHeist launches. If you don’t mind getting a few emails, you can get some really great free software from them today, tomorrow, and on Christmas Day.

Right now Synergy and Enigmo 2 are available for free if you sign up, and there are two more presents that you’ll be able to unwrap on Christmas Day. If you refer two friends, you can also get two additional apps on the 25th as well.

All you have to do is head over to MacHeist.

The iPhone’s predictive text can be annoying - especially if you’re spelling an odd street name, or a person’s name that isn’t spelled in a traditional way. After the recent iPhone update, there is a way to keep this from happening according to MacOSXhints.

All you have to do is capitalize the first letter of any word that isn’t the first word of a sentence. If you do that, the iPhone will not attempt to correct the spelling, no matter how you spell it.

We often like to have our folders arranged either by name or by kind or by date, but Mac’s right click(two-finger click) allows you only to arrange the files once. After that any new files you add just keep piling up at the end. There’s a neat trick to keep your folder arranged in a particular way. After the right click, just hold the OPTION key. It changes the ‘Arrange by’ to ‘Keep Arranged by’ and then you can choose how you want to keep your folder organized.

via Ankit Agarwal

Cameron Spear writes in with a great little tip for those of you that can’t figure out why your browser is skipping checkboxes and radio buttons.

He writes:

I couldn’t figure out why it was skipping checkboxes and radio buttons on Firefox and Safari. I thought it was a browser configuration, but I found it in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts and there is a little place to check that you want to Tab through all Controls and not just Text Boxes and Lists Only at the bottom (default shortcut: ^fn F7). I found this super helpful and wanted to share.

Dave writes:
Pages, Keynote and Numbers all have alignment guides to help us place objects in perfect alignment with each other. The problem is that sometimes we don’t want to have them perfectly aligned, but the applications snap to an aligned position whenever you get near it.

I discovered that the command button can temporarily disable the guides. Simply begin clicking and dragging (without command pressed) and hold the command key when you find the guides snapping the object into the wrong position.

Thanks to David for the tip and for the great screenshots!

Hey everyone,

For the past few days I have been seriously under the weather with a sinus infection that’s just been awful. Things are getting better, and I’ll be back with a MacTip tomorrow - but I wanted to post a quick request.

We need your Mac Tips! It’s difficult finding new and interesting tips every day for the Mac, and if you have a tip you’d like to share, we’d be happy to post it. Just send your tips to michael (at) applegazette (dot) com with “Mac Tip” in the subject line.

If you have a site or podcast you’d like to promote, we’d be happy to plug it in return for some top-notch tips.

Spotlight is a vastly under-used feature of OSX. It has numerous benefits beyond simply searching (much in the same way Google does).

The Apple Blog recently posted an article highlighting some additional uses of Spotlight. My favorite of which, is the calculator and dictionary functions.

To use Spotlight as a calculator all you have to do is type in an equation. You can do simple math, or complex equations using mathematical terms like square roots and so forth.

To use Spotlight as a dictionary, all you have to do is type in the word that you’re looking to define. The definition will pop up as a top search result. Simply select it and the full dictionary will open giving you the full definition of the term you’re searching for.