Since Maciverse loves to show people wonderful ways to use their new Apple products it would be silly of us not to point out how kind Apple is in creating video tutorials for us.

They’ve recently updated their Mac section of their website to include Find Out How, a video tutorial section that helps show users how to use their new Computer. Find tutorials on how to navigate around OSX, iLife, and iWork. While all the tutorials aren’t in video format they will help you quickly become comfortable with your Apple computer.

Check out how to add RSS feeds to Mail, Capture Screenshots, or Share your photos over a network.

Thanks to the follows over at lifehacker.com for pointing out how simple it is to customize your own keyboard shortcuts for the various applications you work with in Mac OS X.

1. Navigate to System Preferences for Keyboard and Mouse

2. Select the Keyboard shortcuts tab

3. Click the (+) and then add the application, the menu bar item, and then assign the keyboard shortcut you’d like to apply to that command.

Its that simple! You can head over to lifehacker.com to view additional comments on the process of creating a keyboard shortcut for any menu action in any program.

I know that one of the frustrating things about switching from one computer to another is the process of moving things like your address book may gets lost in the shuffle. Moving from a PC to a Mac could complicate the issue even further. For me this was a major reason why I went to web based email as I knew that I could keep my contacts forever and never have to worry about moving them. But despite the ease of web based email, its just not as powerful as system based email applications. Thankfully to Google and Apple I can now have the best of both worlds!

QUICK AND EASY EXPORT

While in the past there have been a number of methods to get your Gmail contacts into your Mac Address Book, most required a third party application and for some reason something always complicated the process. Thanks to the ever increasing friendship between Apple and Google it seems that with the latest updates to Gmail, exporting contacts in to an Address Book Format is quick and easy.

After logging into a Gmail account navigate to your contact list. From there you can export all your contacts or create a contact group that includes the addresses you want included into your Address Book on your Mac. After creating a group simply click export and then select the group from the export drop down menu. Be sure to pick vCard format as the export format and save the download to your desktop.

IMPORT IN TWO EASY CLICKS

Open Address Book and select File >> Import >> vCards. Select the downloaded .vcf file and confirm the import and your Gmail/Google contacts will now be included in your Address Book and accessible from all your other Mac Applications. You can repeat the process if you update your Gmail contacts often. Address Book will only import the new contacts and/or update edited information.

The shared contact list and the new IMAP feature of Gmail makes it a great tool to use with Mail on your computer and on your iPod/iPhone.

Read this to Import Address Book Contacts to Gmail.

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Our home wireless network has undergone several changes. We adopted early to a pre 802.11n router provided by Belkin. I refer to those as the bad old days where our wireless signal would drop at the slightest hint of traffic. Eventually, we replaced our Belkin router with a new Airport Extreme wireless base station. What a difference it made. Not only did it bring the real wireless experience to our home, but I could also plug in my 500GB usb drive too (and our printer). The only drawback now is my MacBook Pro is an early model and doesn’t have 802.11n capability.

So I finally get the new base station paid off and now there is a new gadget in town, Time Capsule. Somehow, the Apple engineers managed to shoe-horn a “server grade” hard drive into what appears to be the existing Airport Extreme base station. I say appears since you won’t be able to get your hands on one until February. Anyway, would it have been worth the wait to have an integrated device rather than the two (base station and external drive) I have now? Again, it’s hard to say since I can’t compare the two. However, I am leaning towards no.

Foremost is portability. I can take my drive and MacBook Pro (and external drive) with me to work, home, or wherever. You can’t do that with Time Capsule, unless you want to haul around your base station wherever you go, and risk family or roommate mutiny when they can’t connect to the internet while you’re out. Also, if you just plunked down $299 or $499 (which is a pretty good price for a base station and storage), you’re going to want to do more with all that drive space than just backups, especially if you decide a MacBook Air is right for you, and you just can’t be as mobile when all your data is tethered to a base station.

Coming in a close second is bandwidth. Most external drives ship with USB 2.0 as a connection. The USB 2.0 spec has a maximum throughput of 480 MegaBytes per second while 802.11n maximum bandwidth is theoretically 540 Megabits per second. The astute reader will notice that megabytes and megabits are not quite the same. Geeks will know that 8 bits is one byte, meaning that the maximum bandwidth of the 802.11n spec is about 64.3 megabytes per second and all wireless base stations, be Apple or otherwise, will never be anywhere close to the maximum. That means the first time Time machine syncs up your 250GB iMac drive it’s going to take a much longer time than if it were plugged in via USB.

Finally, there is the issue of replacement. Replacing my current external drive would be simple and only involve the cost of a new drive. What happens if when you fill up the storage on time capsule, or if the “server grade” hard drive fails? Either your base station spends some time at the Apple certified repair center or you get the opportunity of getting a new base station.

But you can run time machine using Time Capsule, which you can’t do at the moment with a regular Airport Extreme base station. However, the software that ships with Time Capsule (assuming that doesn’t change) is the same software that ships with the Airport Extreme base station. I would bet that by February, us Airport Extreme owners will also be able to use Time Machine on our drives. Otherwise, it’ll be back to the bad old days of not having the complete wireless experience.

One of the many great features of Apple’s new OS X 10.5 Leopard that gets overlooked or under used is the ability to quickly and easily create custom dashboard widgets of areas of websites that you visit often or check for important information. You may have noticed a new button in Safari that includes a dotted square line and a pair of scissors. Clicking this will allow you to select a section of the current website you’re viewing and then clicking the “add” button that will appear to place the selected portion of the website on your dashboard widget.

Dashboard was something added in previous versions of OS X but not often used by many Mac owners. Personally, I never used Dashboard before the ability to created widgets of information that I often access. I us it to check sports scores and news information and simply clicking the Dashboard keyboard function to get updates on game scores saves me the time of browsing to the site itself to check the score.

I also live close to the movie theaters and the widget I created from google’s movie listing for the local theater has been useful a number of times. Don’t forget to make widgets of those sections of the web that you visit often and the information you seek will now be just one click away. How have you used the new widget creation function? What widgets have you made?