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.

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

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.

This is one of those tips that I have written about in the past on Apple Gazette - but after searching the archives here on MacTips I didn’t find it anywhere, and its an important one - so I’m writing about it here too. If you do stumble across it somewhere in the archives of the site, feel free to add the links in the comments.

Every once in a while you may find that you have a CD or DVD stuck in your Mac that just refuses to eject. If it happens - it’s frustrating. There are a few things that you can do to force you Mac to eject the disk.

1) First, try iTunes. Sometimes the iTunes eject button will work, even if your Finder eject button, or keyboard eject button won’t.

2) Open Terminal.app and type “drutil tray eject” - this will eject the disk tray most of the time.

3) If you’re still having no luck, you can restart your Mac and hold down the mouse button. Keep your finger pressed down until the disk ejects, or the login screen appears.

If you’ve tried all three of these, and you’re still having trouble - you may want to call Apple Support.

The drag and drop nature of OSX is great - but sometimes just dragging an application into the trash doesn’t truly get rid of all the associated files. That can leave unwanted remnants laying around your Mac.

There is an application out there, however, that can take care of this for you. It’s called AppZapper, and it’s only $12.95.

If you’ve ever looked at lists of “essential mac apps” you’ve probably seen AppZapper near the top of almost every one of them. The reason for that is simple - AppZapper does a really great job completely deleting applications for you.

You can try AppZapper for free by clicking here.

Leopard has some really great tricks up its sleeve for PDFs. You can save just about anything you can think of as a PDF document (this works in Tiger too), and you can then compile your PDF documents into one multi-page PDF file if you want using Preview.

For example, let’s say you wanted to save a web page as a PDF file. All you have to do is load the page then select:

File>Print…

Once the Print Window opens up you’ll see a PDF button in the lower left hand side of the screen. There you’ll see a variety of options about what you can do with your PDF file.

Select Save as PDF…

Now you can repeat the process by going to another webpage. Once you have two PDF files you’d like to make into one multi-page document simply open the first one that you want to use into Previews then drag the next item you want into the document into the Sidebar.

Once you’ve added everything you’d like to be in your document, and organized how you’d like it to appear Save the file - and BOOM - done.

When a website asks you to “Choose File” or “Browse” for a file that you need to attach or upload, you can click it and search for the file that you’re looking for…but if you already have the file handy on the Desktop or in a Finder Window, you can actually just drag and drop it right onto the button.

Many users of iTunes 8 have reported that their HD TV Show downloads are being overwritten by the SD copies of the shows that download with the HD versions. The reason for this appears to be because the files have the same name. Once the SD download starts it over writes the HD version.

This can be upsetting - particularly if you’ve just downloaded an entire season of HD content, only to find that once its finished you only have SD versions of your shows.

Apple has acknowledged this issue, but they have yet to offer an official fix for the problem. Until they do offer an official solution there is one thing you can try to keep both your HD and SD files.

First make sure that “Allow Simultaneous Downloads” is checked in your Downloads tab.

Now, Immediately after purchasing a show from iTunes, click over to the Downloads section and pause the SD download of the show. Pause the download of the HD file, and let the SD file download completely. After this is done, navigate to your iTunes folder, then the TV Show that you are downloading and rename the downloaded file.

You can simply add “SD” to the end of the file name by control+clicking (or right clicking) on the name and selecting “Get Info”. You can then change the name under the “Name and Extension” tab.

I have read in a few other places that you can pause your SD download then restart iTunes and it will rename the file for you, but I have had no success making this happen after trying it twice.

Splashup.com is a free Photoshop alternative that may be a perfect solution for those of you that need to edit images for the web, or make quick changes to images. The web-based software does a great job of importing both small and larger files very easily.

In this video we quickly go over the features of the site and how it can work for you. It’s not going to replace Photoshop for those of you working in the print industry, and it certainly has limitations, but it does have a place between a basic Paint program and Photoshop.

Organizing your dock can help you get things done much more quickly and easily. In today’s screencast we’re covering how to do that using Stacks.

With Stacks you can create a stack of your favorite applications that appear bundled together until you select the stack. Then they will fan out allowing you to select the application that you want to use.

To do this you need to Create a New Folder, then drag aliases of the Applications you’d like to have in your stack into that folder. Holding Command+Option while dragging the application will create an alias of it in the folder you’re dragging it into.

After you have dragged the Apps that you want to appear in that stack into the folder, drag the folder itself onto your dock and BOOM - Applications Stacks.