If you have multiple stacks in the dock, it is helpful to be able to quickly identify them. Unfortunately, in 10.5 the way in which Stacks work causes, for example, Address Book (or whatever your first app in Applications is) to be used as the icon for the Applications folder in the dock. This makes it hard to identify your docked folders at a glance.To work around this, open Automator and create a new fake Automator project -- it can be completely empty, in fact (choose Custom from the selector when Automator launches). When the project window appears, choose File -> Save, set the Format to Application, give it a name that comes very early in the alphabet -- AAA or similar. For the save location, point to your Applications folder and save it there.Back in the Finder, Get...
I found a way to change Spaces that is not mentioned in Help. I have Mail set up in its own Space. You do not have to use keyboard strokes to move to a Space that has an open application. Just click on that application in the Dock (in this case Mail) and the Space with that application will just slide into view. Very slick. You can go back to the previous Space in the same manner. I have Safari open in the first Space. Just click on the Safari icon in the Dock and back you go.
One of the cool new features of Mac OS X Leopard is the search field in the Help menu of each application. Entering a search term in this field will pull up not only help topics related to your search, but anything that appears in the current application's menus (this includes history and bookmarks in Safari). As you highlight each menu item in the search results (using the arrow keys), that menu item gets pulled down automatically and highlighted with a colored floating pointer. You can then hit enter to activate that menu item. When I first saw it, I wondered if there was a shortcut key for the help menu, so I didn't have to use the mouse (like hitting Command-Space to do a Spotlight search). Well, there is: Command-? (i.e. Command-Shift-/). This shortcut key is documented in the Mac Help system (under Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts), but it is so awesome, I had to s...
Like many others, I've just installed Leopard on my computer and I've been very eager to try out all the nifty new features. I think I've discovered a bug as well as a work around -- so if the following happens to you, at least you will have a recovery mechanism until Apple fixes it. I created a To Do item in iCal, then launched Mail, only to have it crash after about 20 seconds. I examined the crash report logs, and found an exception where Mail was attempting to assign a To Do to a non-To Do-enabled mailbox. To fix the problem, I deleted the To Do item from my calendar and restarted Mail. In Mail's Preferences on the composing tab, there's a selector box that enables you to assign your To Dos to a particular email account. Mine was set to "Last Viewed Mailbox." I changed that to my dotMac account, and Mail has been stable since. [robg adds: I can't con...
X11 has changed in 10.5 to an xorg-based Xserver. Also, /etc/X11 no longer exists. The X11 startup list is now in ~/Library » Preferences » org.x.X11_launcher.plist. This file gets created if it's not there, or if the format is wrong. To stop xterm from starting, simply change it to run xhost: defaults write org.x.X11_launcher app_to_run /usr/X11/bin/xhost [robg adds: This hint was submitted with app_to_start as the key name, but that didn't work for me. When I opened the prefs file, I found the key was app_to_run. When I tried it with the new key name, it worked as expected.]
I have been waiting for an easy way to convert my vacation videos for AppleTV use. Well now I can, using Automator in 10.5. There's lots of neat new stuff going on in Automator, but I want to focus on converting movies. Here's how to do it -- note that you'll need to have QuickTime Pro for this to work. Open Automator, and choose a Custom project. In the Library column, click on Movies. In the Actions column, select Ask for Movies and drag it to the work area. Next drag the Export Movies action to the work area, and change the Format pop-up in its box to AppleTV. Set the Save location to whatever you'd like to use. Now run the script; you can select multiple clips and even preview them in Automator. [robg adds: You could also save this as an application when done, or with a bit of work (use the Finder -> Get Selected Files action) tu...
After upgrading to Leopard, you'll probably find something missing when you first launch Terminal: "Welcome to Darwin!" For some reason, the file that generates this message, /etc/motd, is not included in Leopard. This means no message of the day in Terminal, or any other app that picks up on the motd file. You can create a new one, though, using your favourite plain text editor in Terminal. For example, sudo vi /etc/motd. Press a to switch to add mode, then type whatever you'd like for a welcome message -- I went with "Welcome to Leopard!" but I guess "Welcome to Darwin" would have been more appropriate. When done, press Escape, then :w to write and :q to quit. Next time you open a Terminal window, you'll see your new message of the day.
I noticed that 10.5 doesn't like my GUID anymore (the one with the same name as my username), as apparently 10.5 doesn't use such groups anymore. But I wasn't sure if it was still on the system or not, so I wanted to find a list of GUIDs. But it turns out /Applications » Utilities » NetInfo Manager.app is no more, and all the ni* applications are gone from Terminal as well. Thus, we must now use the ds* (directory services) applications in Terminal. As of right now, I don't know of any GUI application equivalent of NetInfo manager, only the applications like dscl, dscacheutil, dsenableroot, and so forth. As an example, here's how to print out all the user accounts: dscacheutil -q group Hopefully there will be some GUI interface to these tools developed as time goes on.
Splash screens annoy me, so I tried to disable the one in Quicksilver using its preferences. But there is no option there to do so. Then I came up with a simple solution to remove it -- and this should work on other programs with splash screens you'd like to remove. Here we go: Quit Quicksilver. Navigate to where your Quicksilver application is (normally the Applications folder). Control-click on Quicksilver and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Go to Contents » Resources and trash (or rename) the QSLigature.png file Relaunch Quicksilver. No more splash screen! These steps are related to the version 3813, but should work on older versions as well. Make sure to duplicate Quicksilver before following thsese steps just in case anything goes wrong -- or you could just download it again.
I'm a big fan of using SuperDuper (or CarbonCopyCloner or even Disk Utility) to make bootable clones of my startup volume as an important part of my backup strategy. In fact I like to not only keep a most recent clone, but several historical ones as well. So I was delighted when I recently discovered I could buy 500GB and 750GB external FireWire hard drives for under $200, and assumed I could simply format them into multiple boot-volume-sized partitions into which I could place clones, as I had so often and easily in the past. However, I eventually became dismayed when I later discovered that while I could use SuperDuper and other programs to create multiple clones, the only clone that I could actually boot would be the first bootable clone in partition order encountered on the drive. With a hint from an Apple Genius, I eventually discovered the source of my diffi...
While attempting to get rid of the gaudy pink and purple Aurora login picture, I found that it is no longer enough to simply rename your picture of choice to Aurora.jpg and drop it in Desktop Pictures a la Aqua.jpg in previous releases.To change the picture behind the login panel in 10.5, one must name the picture of choice DefaultDesktop.jpg, and drop it in to /System » Library » CoreServices. Doing this as the admin user is required for authentication purposes.[robg adds: It's the simple things that can make using one's OS of choice more pleasant :). I used Terminal to create a backup of the original image first, just in case. After cding to the CoreServices directory, I then did sudo mv DefaultDesktop.jpg DefaultDesktop_old.jpg, then moved my new image in.]
In 10.4, you had to use Chax to allow auto-acceptance of chats in iChat (there is a way to auto-accept video chats, but that's it).In 10.5, there's a new "Run AppleScript" feature in the Alerts section of iChat's preferences. I was going to use that to write a simple AppleScript to press the Return button in the dialog that appears when you receive a chat invitation. After checking the box to enable AppleScripts with text chat invitations, I got a surprise when I clicked the drop-down menu: Apple's already done the work!When you enable the Run AppleScript feature, you'll see you can pick from three already-created AppleScripts: Auto Accept, Auto Reject, and iTunes Remote Control. Pick the event you'd like to modify (text, audio...
If you are wondering, like I was, about how to modify user-created Smart Folders, here's the trick. Select the Smart Folder to see its results, and then click the Action (gear) icon in the result window's tool bar. From the drop-down menu that appears, select Show Search Criteria.[robg adds: This option doesn't appear in any menu other than the Action icon -- it took me forever to find it, too, as I usually remove the Action icon from the menu bar. In 10.5, though, I'm forced to keep it present if I want easy edit access to saved searches. I filed this as a bug against 10.5, but I don't know if that will do any good or not.]
Whenever you decide to open (or save) a file from within an application, a sheet or dialog box will display. New in 10.5, the icon view push button at the top left of the sheet/dialog box can be held down to give you a menu with the ability to change the Icon Size between 16x16, 32x32, 64x64 or 128x128, and change the Label Position to either Bottom or Right:Also new is the MEDIA section in the sidebar of the sheet/dialog, which gives you quick access to Movies, Music and Photos. The Photos item, for example, lets you peruse Aperture and iPhoto libraries and events, etc.
I discovered a general technique to enable input managers in Safari 3.0 in 10.5, and used it to enable Inquisitor, David Watanabe's great auto-complete web search plug-in. Here are the steps:Install Inquisitor if you don't already have it. No, it won't work until you complete the following procedure, but it must be installed first.Move the plug-in from your user-specific input manager folder to the system-wide input manager folder, using Terminal:sudo mv ~/Library/InputManagers/Inquisitor /Library/InputManagersChange the ownership of the entire plugin directory to root/admin:sudo chown -R root:admin /Library/InputManagers/Inquisito ...