I have my Mac’s workspace down to a science– everything is exactly where I want it and tuned just exactly how I think it should be. And so, even though it’s a little silly, whenever a friend comes over and wants to use my computer, I always hesitate for just a second to let people invade my little workspace.

But now, those worries are over– reader Michael C sent us a tutorial he wrote up for how to make the best use of Leopard’s Guest account, and though he comes at it from a business’ perspective, it seems like the perfect plan for letting my guests use my Mac without messing up my stuff. Basically, Michael walks you through how to log into the Guest account, and then how to save the settings you implement after customizing it (usually, they’re wiped out on logoff, but his method has you backing up the defaults and putting your own in their place).

The only drawback is that any new accounts you create will use the same default settings at first, but I bet you could just load the backups and then create the new account and you wouldn’t have any problems. And that’s a very small price to pay to have a clean, configured guess account all ready to load up for anyone who happens to come over. Very nice!

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Apple releases Darwin 9.0, Unix foundation of Leopard

Back when the Intel Macs first appeared there was a delay from Apple in releasing Darwin 8, the open-source BSD/Unix foundation of Tiger. Crazy theories were adduced, and bad intentions attributed to Apple, but eventually Darwin 8 for Intel Macs was released. Apple seems to have moved even faster with OS X 10.5, and just a couple of weeks after the commercial release of Leopard, Darwin 9.0 is now available at Apple’s Darwin page. So if you’ve ever wanted to root around in the source for the foundations of Leopard, here’s your chance.

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Today is Apple.com 10th year-old birthday

Happy birthday to 10th year-old Apple.com. Apple.com first launched the US store on Nov 10, 2007. Selling then-current products, such as the beige G3 towers and Mac OS 8, Steve Jobs had yet to introduce the revolutionary iMac and iPod. Despite this, the online store generated 4.4 million hits and $500,000 in its first 12 hours of operation. In May 1998, the online store allowed Apple to move $1.9 million, and sold its first million through the education store. The first store was only available to US customers, but in May 1998, Apple had opened the first international store in the UK, with the Swedish store to follow in September. Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, and Italy were next, with the respective stores opened in January 1999. The store came to Japan in February of 1999, with the Austrian and Swiss stores in March of that year.