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?

Apple recently announced at Macworld 2008 that they would start renting movies from ALL the major motion picture studios. With all the excitement many people forget that you can still buy movies on iTunes. Movies are for sale from Paramount, Lionsgate, MGM, as well as all the studios currently owned by Disney.

Paramount seems to have the largest library. All of these studios are also renting some of their features while just offering others for sale. Fox, Sony, and the other major studios have started to allow rentals through iTunes (requires version 7.6) and these movies will be viewable on the computer, ipod, iphone, and apple tv.

To access movie rentals open the iTunes store and go to the movie section. There will be a number of areas advertising movies for rent. Feel free to browse through the available movies by content categories or searching for a title that you hope is currently available. The library is continually being updated so you may have to wait to watch a certain movie on your new iPod Touch while riding public transportation into work.

Besides all of the really useful features that makes OS X stand out from Windows, there is also the spoken user interface (also known as speakable items). This nifty (big) little feature gives demonstrates how well polished the operating really is. The spoken user interface was developed mainly to assist people with disabilities, but since most macs also have built in microphones, anyone can use it. Instead of interacting with the computer using the keyboard and mouse, you can speak commands. The commands range from the simple telling you what day it is, to sending an email to someone in your address book (it will recognize their names too).

You can activate the spoken user interface under the “Speech” section of System Preferences. The system preferences screen looks like this:

Your first task is to enable speakable items by clicking the “on” radio button next to “Speakable Items”. Normally, this will enable your Mac’s internal microphone to start listening for voice commands as well as display the Speakable items interface window. I’ve noticed the microphones that come with macs are very sensitive to background noise so once you turned on speakable items you will want to click on the calibrate button to adjust the mic’s sensitivity as well as test your Mac’s “ears”.The calibration screen looks like this:

The speech recognition software can adapt itself to the person speaking and so calibration helps your mac “learn” your voice. The phrases to the left are actual commands your mac understands (there are lots more). Go ahead and calibrate, it’s a great moment when your mac hears you for the first time.

With speakable items on, you’re probably noticed a new little window appear that looks something like this:

This is the speakable items interface. The “Esc” means that I have to press the Escape key in order for my Mac to listen for voice commands. You can change that to another key in Speech Preferences. Also, you can have your mac listen for a special word instead of pressing a key. The little down arrow will bring up a menu where you can open a list of available speech commands or go to the speech system preferences. There is an impressive number of commands to help you accomplish tasks simply by using your voice. My personal favorite is still “Tell me a joke”. You really haven’t experienced all that OS X has to offer until it tells you a joke (or two).

If you’re like me and have a number of songs or mp3 files in your iTunes library that are missing the name, artist, and album and you’re not sure who sings it you need to look no further.

ieatbrainz is an application for Mac OSX that uses the sounds from the song to help it determine what song it is and then updates the meta data information for the file.

To update your iTunes library, download ieatbrainz and then after launching the application, select the songs you want to update the information on and it will scan the files, compare them to the musicbrainz database and then display what it has determined to be the name of the song you’re looking up.

Be sure to look at each songs because sometimes it will offer a number of options that are potential matches. After you accept the suggested changes from ieatbrainz it will update your iTunes Library with the additional information.

After you’ve added the missing information, be sure to have iTunes go out and get the related album artwork so that you can browse your library in Full Screen mode on the latest version of iTunes.