We often hear people going on and on about how simply great Smart Mailboxes are in Mail and how useful iPhoto’s Smart Albums are. Well, their less-famous cousin—Address Book’s Smart Groups feature—sometimes gets overlooked, and it’s good for more than just searching. This function can actually help you find missing information in your Address Book cards and get everything all cleaned up, pronto. Melissa Holt’s going to walk you through things with her usual goofy panache, which you should all tolerate quite well by now.

In Melissa Holt’s line of work, you’ve gotta know a lot of keyboard shortcuts. And in this other line of her work, she’s gotta write about a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Fortunately, there are a ton to choose from in Mac OS X, but using the arrow keys and their modifiers to navigate through files and open folders in the Finder really takes the cake. Such a delicious cake it is, too. 

VMware’s Fusion 4.1 allows virtualization of client versions of OS X itself for the first time. The newest version of Fusion, which was released earlier on Friday, now allows users to install client versions of Leopard, Snow Leopard, or Lion, a feature that has heretofore been limited to server editions of the operating system.

Apple released Java for Mac OS X 10.7 Update 1 and Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 6 Tuesday, releases that bring Java SE 6 to version 1.6.0_29. That update includes fixes to several security flaws that existed in the previous version of Java.

The Mac Observer’s Melissa Holt spends endless hours poking and prodding OS X and her apps to find news ways to be more productive with her Mac. That means she doesn’t get to go outdoors very often, but the upside is that she’s always finding great tips to share — like how to use Safari more effectively with the Command key.

One of the more advanced tools that’s nice to have in your arsenal of “what to do if things go wrong” is a Terminal command called fs_usage. This will show you what your file system is doing at any particular time, and it’s pretty helpful if you’re trying to do some fancy power-user troubleshooting. Here’s how you use it and what options you have to do so.

Apple released Epson 2.8 Driver Update late on Tuesday. The update, according to Apple’s slim release notes, “the latest Epson printing and scanning software for OS X Lion and Mac OS X v10.6.”

Apple released QuickTime 7.7 for Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard, users on Wednesday. The update addresses several security-related issues, and is also available for Windows XP users.

The ITC has announced that Apple’s Mac OS X violates patents once owned by S3 Graphics, but the commission’s ruling cleared iOS of any infringement. Those patents are now owned by HTC, and will be brought to bear in the two companies ongoing fight over Android.