For you pre-Thanksgiving shoppers, the Apple retail store on Friday announced a way to get a jump on your holiday list. The Reserve And Pick Up option will let you choose hardware products online and swing by your local store to collect them between December 15 and 24. Currently, the line-up of offerings includes iPods, iPhones, MacBooks, Mac Minis, iMacs, and Mac Pros. To make a reservation, you sign in with your Apple ID and select a store location. Payment is due only at the time of pick-up.

Other retailers have had store pick-up options for some time. Apple’s program is clearly aimed at adding value to its stores’ vaunted customer experience. Shoppers who make their reservations online can avoid the disappointment of finding something out-of-stock at the retail store. And in theory, the purchasing and pick-up process should be more efficient than waiting in long holiday lines. In many cases, items can be wrapped in the “signature gift box,” too.

It’s worth noting that Apple already offers free shipping on many hardware products purchased online, and includes gift wrapping options as well. So I wonder how many customers will prefer to reserve something online, and actually drive to the store to for pick up instead of simply ordering and waiting at home for their goodies to arrive. Apple may be counting on the fact that some shoppers will like the convenience of pick-up, and might buy a few additional accessories when they come to the store. That might be just the boost the stores need. In the most recent quarter—which was otherwise quite strong—average revenue per retail store was down a little more than 6.5 percent compared to last year.

If you do choose to reserve and pick up a shiny, gift-wrapped MacBook or iPod for your nearest and dearest this year, you can look forward to major kudos. But don’t forget: the Apple store can’t do everything. You’ve still got to, you know, add a card or something.

Brian Kendall has released an updated version of xGestures for Snow Leopard, which allows you to drive your Mac with "mouse gestures"—a particular combination of mouse movements that triggers a menu item, keystroke, or AppleScript. For example, I'm constantly hitting the wrong function key on my MacBook when I try to view all Spaces; with xGestures, I can hold the control key and flick up and down on my trackpad, and xGestures will zip me into the all Spaces view. Users of recent MacBooks with multi-touch trackpads may also want to check out Macworld's recent review of Jitouch, which does similar things with multi-touch gestures.

xGestures installs as a preference pane and, unlike Jitouch, you have to define all of your gestures from scratch. Getting started with xGestures was a bit frustrating; you have make sure that "Enable xGestures" is checked under Options and then click the "Start xGestures" button on the same pane.

xGestures requires a mouse button or keyboard press to start listening. I used the Control-Shift keys along with "hold down key while gesturing" since this combination doesn't conflict with any of my other utilities. The Command or Option keys, though, could easily trigger a gesture when I don't wish to. You can also set xGestures to change the mouse pointer and draw a line on the screen when it's active, both of which I recommend for testing out the software.

Once you're set up, you can define either global gestures or specific gestures for each application. For my testing, I made my Spaces actions global, but I set up different gestures for Web-browsing which were specific to Safari. xGestures provides a drop-down menu of actions which a gesture can trigger; the most useful of these are probably "Perform Keystroke" and "Choose Menu Item." (Note: to assign a keystroke, you may need to turn it off first. Assigning F8 to my Spaces gesture didn't work so long as Spaces was intercepting it.) Be sure to click on "Apply Settings" whenever you set up a new gesture—skipping this led to some frustrating moments during my testing.

xGestures requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher, and costs $5 after a 15-day free demonstration period. I'm on the fence about it, but if I find myself using gestures frequently in two weeks, the price makes this a no-brainer purchase.

MacHeist threw a curveball this year by offering six Mac apps for free (well, in exchange for your name and email), so other developers got motivated to launch a good ol'-fashioned sale. Running in the same time frame as "MacHeist nano," the One Finger Discount (OFD) features a growing number of Mac developers who are selling their fine wares at 20 percent off.

OFD is open to any Mac developer; it's being organized by Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software, maker of MarsEdit, FastScripts, and other apps. Jalkut says any developer is invited to participate, and so far more than 25 have signed up. You can now get some great apps like NetworkLocation, Today, Linkinus, and more, all at 20 percent off their original price. Shoppers simply need to use the coupon code "OneFingerDiscount" where applicable.

"Everybody loves a deal," Jalkut said in an e-mail. "We're banding together to give customers a price break, and to spread the word about Mac software they may not have heard about."

Some users on Twitter have raised questions about the "One Finger Discount" name, however, suggesting it has a negative connotation. "The name is just something that came to mind when I was making the coupon code for my own store," Jalkut explained. "It is entirely inspired by 'five finger discount,' and it only occurred to me afterwards (with the help of Twitter followers) that it had a potential negative connotation. MacHeist jokes with the idea of software thievery, so I thought I'd play along."

One Finger Discount is adding more developers to the sale daily; the offer ends on November 13, the same day as MacHeist nano.

Blacktree Software has released Secrets 1.0.6, a Snow Leopard-compatible version of their preference pane which exposes hidden features on your Mac.

If you've ever read a Mac tip that starts, "Open a Terminal window and type 'defaults write...'", it's highly likely that you can save yourself that effort with this preference pane. Secrets provides handy checkboxes to turn these features on and off, and doubles as a menu of secret settings. A "Top Secrets" entry shows a list of popular options, but many more options for various applications can be selected from the application sidebar.

Clicking on any of the listed features will show you a short description of what it does in the bottom of the window; click on the More Info button for a detailed description.

A few caveats before you go too nuts with the Secrets features: many of the features in Mac OS X that aren't official remain "secret" because they're not entirely debugged. You can expect to see some odd behaviors if you turn some of these on, so don't tick every checkbox at once; try out a change to see if you like it (and can live with any side effects) before you go on to something else.

The Secrets preference pane requires System Preferences to run in 32-bit mode, and will prompt you to relaunch if, as per Snow Leopard default, it's in 64-bit mode when you launch it. If this is happening with several of your third-party preference panes, you can set System Preferences to stay in 32-bit mode by selecting the System Preferences.app in the Finder, choosing Get Info, and ticking the "Open in 32-bit mode" checkbox. All of your Apple 64-bit preference panes will work just fine.

Secrets requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later and is a free download.

[via TUAW]

The newest MacHeist bundle is out, at the lowest price ever: free. For the cost of an email address (and not your Twitter account, this time), MacHeist is offering licenses for Hordes of Orcs, Mariner Write, ShoveBox, TinyGrab, Twitterrific, and WriteRoom. Mariner Write won't be included in the bundle until 500,000 downloads are reached—but at this price point, I'm not expecting them to fall short.

At press time, you can sign up for the bundle, but the receipt page which is supposed to give you your serial numbers isn't providing them; a graphic instead reports that it'll be a "little while longer" until they come through. (This might be server load; their home page reports over 1,000 downloads since I started writing this post.) The offer expires "in 6 days" without saying exactly when that is; by my count, get over there before November 10th or 11th to sign up.

If the size of your Google cloud is starting to look like Act IV of A Perfect Storm, you'll probably be interested in the company's latest feature, Google Dashboard—a one-stop shopping overview of all your Google cloud services, with links to preferences and privacy settings for each. (The Dashboard link is somewhat buried on your account settings page, so you might want to bookmark google.com/dashboard.)

Dashboard requires you to log in even if your browser is already logged into your Google account—a thoughtful security precaution considering how many services are collated here. On my Dashboard, I have an overview of my usage of twelve different Google services, ranging from Gmail to YouTube, with nine more services helpfully collected at the bottom of the page as "not yet available" in Google Dashboard. Seeing how much data you have stashed on Google servers in one go can be somewhat mesmerizing—and if you're so inclined, you might want to go back into moribund services and either clean them out and make them useful. (Somehow, I don't think I'll ever need immediate Web access to my calendar from July 2006.)

I'm a fairly early adopter of most things coming out of Google Labs, so while I don't know that this is a canonical list, here's what I currently see in Dashboard: Account, Alerts, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Gmail, iGoogle, Reader, Talk, Voice, Web History, and YouTube. (No, I don't have a Wave account yet. Hint, hint.) Services not included: Analytics, AdSense, FeedBurner, Google Base, Google Groups, Maps, News, Page Creator, and Subscribed Links.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go look up a few of those and remind myself just what the heck they do.

Steve Jobs has been down this year—the leave of absence, the liver transplant—and he’s been up—his triumphant return, Apple’s continued success. Fortune clearly thinks that over the past ten years, his ups outweigh his downs; the publication has named Steve Jobs its CEO of the decade.

While the article spends most of its time rehashing the story of Jobs returning Apple to profitability and beyond, it also points out some impressive facts about the Apple CEO, such as the impact he’s had on multiple industries:

In the past 10 years alone he has radically and lucratively reordered three markets — music, movies, and mobile telephones — and his impact on his original industry, computing, has only grown.

Remaking any one business is a career-defining achievement; four is unheard-of. Think about that for a moment. Henry Ford altered the course of the nascent auto industry. PanAm’s Juan Trippe invented the global airline. Conrad Hilton internationalized American hospitality.

Fortune isolates 2001 as Apple’s turning point. Though Jobs had already been back for four years at that point, 2001 saw the release of several of Apple’s defining products: iTunes, the iPod, and Mac OS X. The launch of the iTunes Music Store in 2003 and the iPhone in 2007 round out the company’s successes nicely.

Now, with $34 billion in the bank and what seems like record-breaking profits almost every quarter, it’s hard to see how Apple could fall to such lows again. But it’s a company whose success is based largely on innovation, and constant innovation is a tall order for any company. Add to that Jobs’s illness this year, which is a reminder that nobody lives forever.

Still, at just 54, Jobs has plenty of time left to remake three or four more industries. We look forward to seeing him picking up another “CEO of the decade” trophy for his shelf in 2019.

Were it not for Ken Segall, you might be going to the Apple Store to buy the new 27-inch FlatMac, the latest in a line of Apple consumer desktops that started with the iconic Apple Gumdrop and continued on to the System 9 Desk Lamp. Instead, Segall’s team convinced a reluctant Steve Jobs to go with the name “iMac,” despite his initial resistance.

That’s the story which emerges from an interview with Segall, a former TBWA\Chiat\Day executive, by Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac. TBWA\Chiat\Day was also responsible for the “Think Different” campaign, which it apparently embraced itself with the ungrammatical use of backslashes in its business name. (It’s the right punctuation. Google them if you don’t believe it. I didn’t.)

According to Segall’s reminiscences, Jobs unveiled the first Bondi Blue iMac for the TBWA team and asked them to come up with a name on very short notice: the boxes had to be printed within a week. Jobs had a name himself, which Segall calls “blood curdling” and then uncharitably refuses to share. (Just speculating here: MacUdder? Big Blue Mac? I Can’t Believe It’s Not Got a Floppy Drive?) Jobs rejected the name “iMac” at first, but changed his mind after he liked the way it looked when engraved on the side of the unnamed computer.

Moral of the story: next time you’re in a product meeting with Steve, make sure you bring your industrial-strength laser pointer to burn your suggestions directly into the prototype. That’ll win him over, every time.

Do you wish your iSight were more like the unblinking, ever-vigilant Eye of Sauron? Then you might be interested in Ben Software’s new RemoteSight, an application that turns an iSight camera into a CCTV-style security camera, accessible over a network via Web browser. RemoteSight can act as an integrated camera source for Ben Software’s SecuritySpy, which aggregates video feeds from multiple cameras into a heads-up multi-video display.

RemoteSight captures both audio and video from the host Mac’s iSight camera (or any attached video input device), and streams it out through an integrated Web server; video is accompanied by a live timestamp. The Web server also provides an option to remotely view what is happening on the Mac’s monitor as well. Any Web browser has the ability to connect to the Web server across an internal network, and Internet remote viewing should be possible if the nonstandard additional ports used by the Web server are opened on the router to allow this traffic. Administrative users can turn off monitoring feeds individually, and you can protect all connections to the Web server by username and password registration.

RemoteSight runs as a faceless application, with no indication in the Dock that it is operating; however, a menu-bar item appears that cannot be easily removed, and (where available) the iSight LED light is turned on to indicate that the camera is in use. RemoteSight costs $27, and a fully functional demo is available as well, so you can give it a try.

System requirements call for OS X 10.4.11 or later, 512GB of RAM (I’ll assume that’s a typo and you only need 512MB), and a video input device, such as a built-in iSight camera or external FireWire or USB camera.

Looking for an ideal holiday gift for that brooding philosophy student in your life? Check out Lose/Lose. It’s reminiscent of classic arcade games like Space Invaders, but with a sobering twist: Each time you destroy an alien, the game deletes a file from your Mac. Forever.

Created by Zach Gage, a digital artist in New York City, Lose/Lose puts the player in the position of shooter as aliens rain down from above. Get touched by an alien, you lose. Kill an alien, you score points—but you also vaporize a random file from your home directory. If your ship is destroyed, the game deletes itself from your hard drive.

The game is clearly intended to be food for thought rather than mindless entertainment. Above the download link on his site, Gage issues a warning—in large, red, all-capped lettering—that Lose/Lose permanently deletes files from your hard drive. It’s not meant for hardcore gamers. Or maybe it is.

“By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions,” Gage writes on his site. Gage himself doesn’t seem entirely clear on what those bigger questions are. He meanders through a few ideas, including the value of data versus the value of real objects and the question of what the real point of the game is.

“[T]he aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission … Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?”

If it’s the latter, you don’t have to be a great thinker to know that Lose/Lose won’t go viral anytime soon.

Symantec, the Maytag repairman of the Mac software world, says it considers the game a potential security threat and will begin detecting it as OSX.Loosemanque.

That hasn’t stopped people from downloading it. A list of high scores on Gage’s site includes a few “Losers” who claim to have eclipsed 4,000 points.

If nothing else, it’s a way to kill time while you reformat a hard drive.