Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

 
Spooky flashback time. Above is Leopard’s icon for a connected PC.

You Guys…

Mac applications tend to keep all of their components in one place; namely, their application packages (the icons you see within the Applications folder). You can normally discard an unwanted application simply by dragging it to the trash. However, there are normally some small configuration files left behind on other parts of your drive, like preference files. They are mostly harmless and quite tiny.

If you are really fastidious though, you might like to try AppDelete. When you drop an app on AppDelete’s icon in the Dock, it takes that application and any associated support files that it can find and moves them to the trash.

Afterwards you can leave AppDelete running while you check that other apps haven’t been affected by the file system changes. You can then simply press the Undo button to reverse the operation.

Even in the unlikely event that you encounter glitches further down the road — you will find when looking in the trash that AppDelete has stowed the suspect files in neat folders that represent where they were removed from.

All in all, a handy and safe method of removing all traces of an un-wanted app.

Learn more about AppDelete

OSX is famously proficient at keeping itself in good running condition. I’m not an expert on these matters, but I’m told it’s so efficient as a result of having been built on the very robust UNIX core.

Part of this UNIX legacy is a set of Cron scripts that run every day, week and month, completely in the background. They do things like clear away temp files, rebuild databases, free up memory; stuff like that.

Only problem is, they run at, like, 2:30 in the morning. It is possible to jump start these scripts and run them any time you like though. Why would you need to? A case in point might be when you rip a DVD using HandBrake; after the job (which is very CPU intensive) your CPU fan might be humming away and you’re left with only 30 megs of free RAM, instead of say, a gig of free RAM. This RAM will free up eventually but if you want things ship-shape now, you likely have three choices.

You can press Ctrl-Eject and choose to restart your Mac; do this though and you then need to launch all those apps you always like to have running and then re-open your documents.

You could invoke the necessary Cron scripts using the Terminal. When I was a Windows user, Mac people would scoff our DOS prompt, and I did too. When I switched I swore that I’d never look at a jaggy font with a flashing cursor in a command line window ever again.
 

 
Or, you can use something like MainMenu. As you can see, it does all of those arcane system chores, through a nice clean menu. To be honest, I’m scared to try most of the commands that it offers, but I do get great mileage from my Mac by running the daily, weekly and monthly maintenance scripts — from that menu — while my Mac is running (which it almost never is at 2:30 in the morning).

FolderGlance has a really helpful often overlooked feature that I thought I’d mention here. Its main party piece is the way you can “Glance” inside folders and other packages such as applications. The often overlooked feature is that if you right-click on documents and other such files, FolderGlance presents you with an extended “Open With…” Menu.

The standard OSX “Open With…” menu shows apps that are officially registered to open the selected file type. FolderGlance lets you populate its menu with any app you choose; you simply designate an “Open With…” folder and then for each of your favorite apps, you make an alias and then drop it there.

Andrew’s Mac Tips — Quick Review — FolderGlance

Funny thing about rounded corners. You either love them or you hate them; I’m quite schizophrenic on the subject. When I first built the Andrew’s Mac Tips site everything had rounded corners.
 

 
Lots of people liked them and wanted to know how I did it. I liked them too, otherwise I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble; but eventually I decided that they didn’t really serve any purpose, and they looked a little too “whimsical.”

Then I went all sharp edged and simple and square.

Mac OS windows have rounded top corners as a rule and I can understand that; there’s a lot of history to them, and they — in a subliminal way — suggest that if you want to resize a window: don’t look here, do it at the bottom-right corner.

As for the menu-bar: I was a little peeved — when I first saw Macs — that it too was rounded, but I came around. When Panther gave way to Tiger they went for a shiny title-bar, but it looked (and still looks) more like a smudge than a sheen to me.

Now Leopard has a new title-bar; all the focus has been on the fact that it’s semi-transparent. But look! No more rounded corners!
 

 
The Mac OS just lost its trademark. If the new title-bar reminds me of anything, it’s the title-bar of the iPhone. Are we slowly transitioning to the iPhone paradigm — one notch at a time?

I’ve started some Wordpress hacking to give this blog a new look with more of a Mac theme. The main pages are working out ok (gotta drop the size of that Header font though); it’s the comment fields etc. on the inner pages that still need a few days more work.

Wish me luck…

Dumb Revelation Time

It just occurred to me that I spent the last two hours modifying the Wordpress CSS file to do a kind of reverse engineered version of a perfectly good style sheet on my static site.

What I should have been doing is modifying the Wordpress HTML to simply refer to that style sheet on my site.

“If given a choice, go for changing the nouns rather than the verbs!”

Let’s say you download a podcast every week and with each new episode you find yourself modifying the same parameters in its metadata, in order that it will slot nicely into your way of organizing iTunes albums and playlists. Here’s an example: Every week I change the Artist for MacBreak Weekly to Leo Laporte, instead of Leo Laporte and whoever else is on the show (for neatness sake).

Automator has a nice reliable tool just for this sort of repetitive task. Here’s how you set it up.
 

 
Inside Automator, select iTunes and then drag the Get Selected iTunes Items action into the right-hand pane. Next, drag over the Set Info of iTunes Songs action. Then configure how you want the metadata overwritten. You can test the action by selecting a track in iTunes then pressing the Play button in Automator.

Once you’re happy with the action you can save it as an application. What I did in this example was to then find the saved application and drag it into Butler’s configuration pane, adding it to my iTunes menu.
 

 
Butler gave the menu item the ugly robot icon so I changed that to a musical clef from the Looks preference inside that item’s Inspector.
 

 
Two final things to add: Firstly, if you’re nervous about Automator chomping through your files, you can click the Options triangle when configuring an action and have it step through the action and ask you for parameters and confirmation every time it’s run. Secondly, you can of course add more steps to the action; in the example above I also invoke an AppleScript that makes the selected track bookmark-able, but that’s another post…

If you are viewing a playlist in Cover Flow or Album View mode and it’s sorted by album, you can drag that album cover to any destination on your Mac to copy the actual files there. Might be a quick way to load up a non-iPod music player.

For quickly looking up a figure of speech, an acronym, or just some phrase you hear a lot but don’t quite understand.

If you are using Sugudi inside Safari then you can use this code as a shortcut:

http://metaglossary.com/results/?query=@@@

MetaGlossary.com

Below is an example of the sort of iTunes controller menu that can be created using Butler, the donationware do-almost-anything software from Peter Maurer.

With this pop up menu I can manipulate iTunes, even when it’s hidden — calling it up with a Butler universal hotkey. In Butler you make new containers (essentially folders), and within those containers you add, among other things, so-called Smart Items; you then assign the new container a hotkey and choose for it to open as a menu, and you’re done.

Clicking on Leo Laporte in this menu will show all of his albums and tracks; clicking on MacBreak Weekly will show all the tracks in the current album. The Back and Forward entries with the squiggly icons are a little different — they’re applescript code. All of the actions in the menu can be assigned their own hotkeys that will be invoked regardless of the application that you currently have in the foreground.

I’ve seen a lot of apps that control one or two aspects of iTunes, or apps for app launching, or clipboard management and my first snarky reaction is always the same…

Butler already does that.