Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category
Mac OS X: The Dock or Application Switcher stops working
Filed under: Apple, Mac OS X | Tags: application switcher, dock, Mac OS X
Comments (4) Today I tried to press the Command-Tab shortcut for the Application Switcher but nothing happened. Another thing that wasn’t working was moving the mouse to the edge of the display to make the hidden Dock appear. The keyboard shortcut to display the Dock wasn’t working either. If this happens to you, the way to fix all of these problems is to restart the Dock. Open the Activity Monitor (it’s in the Utilities folder), select Dock in the list, and click the Quit Process button (or choose View > Quit Process). In the confirmation dialog box that appears, click Quit. The Dock is one of those processes that restarts itself if it’s quit, so that’s all you should have to do. The Dock and Application Switcher should both work now.
Not everyone is aware that the Dock hosts many processes in Mac OS X. For example, in addition to running the Application Switcher, the Dock also runs all of the Dashboard widgets. That’s why the way to make all Dashboard widgets quit is to quit the Dock. (When you simply exit Dashboard, its widgets don’t actually quit—they keep running invisibly in the background, taking up RAM and CPU power.) You can see how processes run within each other in Activity Monitor if you click the Show pop-up menu at the top of the window and choose All Processes, Hierarchically.
Now, of course, you can also fix this by logging out and back in, or you can restart the entire computer. But I often work with a lot of programs and documents open, and that’s why I look for ways to fix problems without having to close all my programs and windows and then set up the entire workspace again.
Adobe Bridge: Workspace not saved on Mac OS X
Filed under: Adobe Bridge, Adobe Creative Suite, Apple, Digital Photography, Mac OS X |
Leave a Comment You want to save a workspace in Adobe Bridge in Mac OS X, but it won’t “take.” The next time you start Bridge, the workspace isn’t available or doesn’t apply when you select it. It just does nothing.
The fix is to open Apple Disk Utility, select your startup volume, and click Repair Disk Permissions.
Now, I know that in theory, repairing permissions shouldn’t fix it. You can count me among those who think that repairing permissions is generally voodoo and that you really oughta be going down other roads first, to fix a problem. But for this particular problem, repairing permissions has worked every time. One time a person walked up to me after one of my conference talks and asked this question and brought the laptop on which it was happening. We tried deleting Bridge preferences and all the other usual troubleshooting techniques, but saved workspaces simply didn’t work until I repaired permissions. It doesn’t make sense, but hey, don’t knock it if it works, right?
I know this is true for Adobe Bridge CS4 on Mac OS X 10.5. I’m not sure if the problem exists or if the solution works on other versions of either software.
Epson inkjet printers: Printer preset forgets settings
Filed under: Adobe Photoshop, Digital Photography, Epson Stylus Pro 3800, Mac OS X | Tags: 3800, epson, linkedin, preset, Printing, settings
Comments (1) If you use an Epson Stylus Photo/Epson Stylus Pro printer in Mac OS X and you save printer settings as printer presets (a recommended practice), there may be times when you choose a preset and realize that some of the settings mysteriously deviate from the way you saved them. For example, you might swear that you saved the Printer Color Management setting as No Color Management, but it somehow turns itself back on when you apply a preset. Other symptoms are finding the wrong paper type or color settings selected. And even more mysteriously, you might notice that sometimes it does remember the same settings that it forgot on another occasion.
I don’t know if this applies to all printers in OS X, but presets for Epson photo printers are quite sensitive to the conditions under which they were created—and unexpectedly, this can include the state of settings that are outside the Print dialog itself. Pay particular attention to the settings in the Page Setup dialog box.
For example, I once discovered that reason my Epson 3800 printer presets would not remember my color settings was that the current paper source did not match the paper source that was in effect when I created the preset! I’ve had to make two versions of my favorite presets: One preset for when I’m using the automatic paper feeder, and another for when I’m using the manual feed slot. The settings saved in each preset are exactly the same; the only difference is which paper feed is selected when I save each preset. Of course, I have to mention the paper source in each preset’s name, so that I know which one to select.
I have not yet tested if this behavior is the same in Windows.
This interaction between paper source and printer presets is yet another reason to make sure you always check the Page Setup dialog box before you print, and especially before you print a Photoshop document for the first time. In Page Setup, the selected printer, paper size, and paper source affect what you get to do in the Print dialog box. If you don’t get Page Setup right from the beginning, you’re setting yourself up for confusion when you print.
Lightroom. If you’re trying to get Epson printer driver settings to stick in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom on Mac OS X when you save a Lightroom printer preset, the trick is to not use the Epson printer driver presets. Instead, leave the printer preset set to Standard, make the printer driver settings, and then save the Lightroom printer preset.
Cannot read CD or DVD from Windows Vista
If you get a CD or DVD from a Windows user and it seems blank, or you can’t read it on your Mac (or non-Vista version of Windows), and the Windows user swears the disc was burned successfully, the Windows user probably burned it using the default settings in Windows Vista. With the default settings, the disc may not be readable on older versions of Windows or on non-Windows systems such as Mac OS X and Linux. Bear in mind that the files may actually be there, but they may not be visible on the unsupported system.
If you are working with a Windows user who knows how to re-burn the DVD with different settings, have them re-burn it using Mastered Format instead of the default Live File System. Mastered Format is more compatible with the rest of the computing world. (So why does Microsoft make Live File System the default in Vista? Apparently it has some useful features that make DVD burning a little more flexible than it is on other systems.)
An alternative to wasting another disc is to open the disc in a copy of Windows Vista or Windows XP running in virtualization on your Mac (such as in Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion) and then drag the files over to the Mac side. That’s ultimately what I decided to do; I was able to see the invisible files in my up-to-date version of Windows XP running under Parallels Desktop.
Or, if you happen to have a PC that you can reach over the network from your Mac, you could also try putting the DVD into the PC and grabbing it over the network from the Mac.
Mac OS X: Keyboard shortcuts to launch any application
Some of the search queries that land people on this blog seem to be looking for shortcuts for applications. With Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you don’t need to create or even learn shortcuts for applications. They’re already there, but not in the form you may be expecting.
The key is Spotlight, the search utility built into OS X. Spotlight makes a decent application launcher. Just hit the Spotlight keyboard shortcut (Command+spacebar unless you changed it), type the first few letters of the application’s name, and if the application’s name is the Top Hit, press Return to launch it. (In OS X 10.4, you need to press Command+Return; In 10.5, Apple simplified it to just Return.) If it isn’t the Top Hit, use the usual Spotlight shortcuts to get to it in the list: Use the up and down arrow keys either alone, or with the Command key to jump categories.
So for example, if I want to use Activity Monitor, I press Command+spacebar, then type “act” and boom, there it is. Depending on which files and applications are on your computer, Activity Monitor may appear before you get to the third letter.
If you’re annoyed because you have to type a few letters before Spotlight narrows it down to the application you want to launch, have patience. At least in my experience, if you keep picking the same item from the search results, OS X will eventually turn it into the Top Hit, and over time you’ll need to type fewer and fewer characters to get it. (You can accelerate searching for multiple words through abbreviation; read about it here.)
By now I’ve got my Mac trained so that after pressing the Spotlight shortcut, Safari becomes the Top Hit as soon as I type “sa”, and Photoshop shows up as soon as I type “ph”. Yeah, it’s more than a single keystroke, but on the other hand, to get this feature I didn’t have to modify my system, spend an hour configuring shortcuts, or add a utility such as LaunchBar. Spotlight is already capable of launching any application on your system without any further setup.
There’s a second benefit to leaning on Spotlight for this purpose: You never have to dig down to open an application or utility that isn’t already in the Dock. You don’t even need to know where it is in your hard disk! Using Spotlight as an application launcher can also let you reduce the number of application alias icons littering your desktop or Dock.
Of course, if you really do want to manually define system shortcuts, you can open System Preferences, click Keyboard & Mouse, click Keyboard Shortcuts, and edit the list of shortcuts.
And yes, before OS X 10.4 came out with Spotlight, I used to be a devotee of LaunchBar, and I tried Quicksilver. The problem is that even if a launcher app is free, the second indexing engine drags on the system and adds complexity, another database to store and manage, and removes another set of keyboard shortcuts from the pool. When Spotlight came out, I realized that it does most of what I need, and well enough. The things Spotlight can’t do that the other utilities can do I’ve mostly covered by having Spotlight trigger AppleScripts…but that’s a subject for another entry.
Update: There are so many Web searches that come here looking for an Activity Monitor shortcut that I have to add this: If you frequently want to monitor Mac system status information, you should download iStat menus and simply have all of that CPU, RAM, disk, network, etc. information right up there in your menu bar. Ultimately, iStat menus is why I don’t need to open Activity Monitor.
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac: Free a stuck Help window
The Microsoft Office Help window’s title bar can sometimes get stuck under the menu bar. When that happens, you can’t move the Help window, and you can’t close it because the close button is part of the title bar. Because the Help window is more like a palette than a window, it doesn’t respond to any Close Window keyboard shortcut or the arrangement commands under the Window menu, and it floats above all other windows. It basically blocks your document window until you restart the application.
Short answer
Throw out the file com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist, or if you want to be more precise, instead of throwing out that file, open it and increase the value for Help/Help_Top so that it clears the menu bar.
Long answer
Or, how I figured this out:
The usual suggestion for a problem like this is to delete an application’s Preferences file. I didn’t want to throw out the Preferences file because I’ve heavily customized my Office installation (toolbars, etc.) and I didn’t want to reconfigure everything from scratch. I suspected that there must be a setting in a preferences file somewhere that controls the position of the Help window, and if I could change that one thing I wouldn’t have to throw out the baby with the bathwater. And so I went looking for that setting.
First I tried AppleScript. I used the Script Editor to open the AppleScript dictionary for Excel, where I was having the problem, but I couldn’t find any commands that controlled the Help window.
I then started looking in the Preferences folder, in my Home/Library folder. You can read these files in TextEdit, but it’s nicer to use the free utility Pref Setter, which lets you view and edit the contents of a preferences file in a clean, easy, point-and-click way. I guess you could also use your favorite XML utility.
Now to find that window preference:
I looked in the file com.microsoft.excel.plist, but found nothing that looked right. While many Microsoft and Adobe applications have a preference (.plist) file at the top level of the Preferences folder, it turns out that these usually contain only information for the Open and Save dialog boxes. The real preferences files are usually buried deeper. But how was I going to find it? I typed “excel” into the Find field in Pref Setter’s Open Domain Quickly window, and it revealed a list of files inside the Preferences folder with Excel in the title.
Unfortunately, I still didn’t find what I was looking for. I thought to myself, maybe it isn’t specific to Excel…if it’s Help, maybe it’s an Office-wide preference. To test that, I typed “microsoft” into Pref Setter’s Find field and it turned up many more files, including some in a Microsoft sub-folder.
I opened com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist. It’s a long list of preferences, and I wasn’t sure I could find the one I wanted. But there’s a Find field in the com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist window, so I typed “help” into it to try and narrow down the list.
Aha! That revealed several preference settings:
Assistant\AsstWithHelp
Help\Help_Bottom
Help\Help_Left
Help\Help_LeftPaneWidth
Help\Help_Right
Help\Help_Top
Help\Help_ZoomedOut
Bingo.
Help\Help_Top was set to 22. I was pretty sure that was a vertical offset from the top of the screen, and guessed that if I set that to a much higher number, the window would move down. I changed the number to 100, saved the document, started Excel, and opened Excel Help.
Fixed!!!
I hope this serves as an example of how to locate application preference settings with the help of a utility like Pref Setter.
Stuttering video playback on Mac notebooks
If you experience stuttering, jerky video playback on an Apple notebook, it might be because of the settings in your Energy Saver system preferences.
Open your System Preferences and click Energy Saver. In Energy Saver, click the Options tab. Now check the setting for Processor Performance. If it’s set to Reduced, change it to Highest or Automatic. Video playback may be smooth now. (I have these options in my PowerBook that has a PowerPC CPU, but I’m not sure if these options are on the newer notebooks that use Intel CPUs.)
If you’re running on battery, be sure to change the Processor Performance setting back to Automatic or Reduced when you’re done watching video. The Highest setting drains the battery the fastest. Note that on a notebook, the Energy Saver preference lets you save different settings for Battery and Power Adapter.
You might see the effect of the Reduced setting any time you perform processor-intensive tasks such as audio or video rendering, or gameplay. In those situations, you’ll want to set Processor Performance to Automatic or Highest.
If you set Processor Performance to Highest and you still see choppy performance, the cause may be another application that’s using processor cycles. Open your Activity Monitor utility, view the CPU tab, show all processes, and sort the list by %CPU to see if any applications are using an unusually high percentage of CPU cycles.
Keywords: iBook, PowerBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro, laptop
Mysterious application failures caused by delocalization
Filed under: Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, Apple, Mac OS X |
Leave a Comment OS X supports a large number of world languages, but if you only understand one language, you’re hauling around many megabytes of files you don’t need. Many Mac users try to free up some disk space by using a utility that removes versions of files for languages they don’t want. This has given rise to a class of utilities that hunt down and delete all the files for specified languages. Some of these utilities are:
Delocalizer
Macaroni
Monolingual
Youpi Optimizer
Nearly all of my applications run fine after delocalization, but there are a few that don’t like to have their localized resources deleted, and they refuse to run without them. These applications might not display a specific error message for this, so all you see is a general error message that leaves you guessing.
The applications that I know about that don’t like to be delocalized are:
Adobe Illustrator CS2 (the 12.0.1 updater fails to install the update)
Adobe Acrobat 7 (Macaroni users update to Macaroni 2.0.6 or later)
Adobe Acrobat 8 (application will not launch, says “A required component was not found.”)
(NOTE: Macaroni 2.0.8 is now available, and according to its release notes, it will no longer delocalize any Adobe applications. This should prevent future Macaroni delocalization problems with Adobe apps.)
If you run a delocalizer and those applications or their updaters stop working, you must reinstall the application. Then you have a choice: Either see if your delocalizer utility has a way to exclude specific applications, or don’t delocalize again. Read on for why that second option might be realistic.
Nobody likes to have something not work, especially if it’s just one pesky app that breaks after delocalization when all the other apps are fine. And delocalization can benefit users with small hard disks. But you may not need to delocalize if you have an up-to-date computer. Today’s hard drives, now typically 100-500GB, are so large that a hundred or so megabytes of localized files are unlikely to be the major cause of a full hard drive. If your Mac hard drive is filling up, you’ll probably get a lot further by moving unneeded movies, photos, and music to another drive. One hour of miniDV format video from is around 13GB, many times larger than all your localized files. Also, the digital audio and graphics samples that come with multimedia applications such as GarageBand, Apple Soundtrack, and Apple LiveType take up several gigabytes on their own, so you might want to clean house there unless you need those samples.
Back up important preferences files
Filed under: Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Mac OS X |
Leave a Comment When an application isn’t quite working right, sometimes the cause is a preferences file that’s gotten corrupted, so a common troubleshooting step is to delete an application’s preferences file. That’s easy to do, but with many of today’s more complex software programs, preferences are key to your workflow, and when you lose your preferences, the program may no longer do what you expect it to because it’s reverted to the factory defaults. If you’re trying to get jobs out fast, reset preferences can slow you down until you get all of them back to the way they were.
Let’s take Photoshop, for example. The preferences control everything from how keyboard shortcuts work to which disks are used for scratch files. If you’ve changed 24 preference settings and then one day you have to delete the preferences file to solve a problem, it’s hard to remember all of the options you changed. Keyboard shortcuts, units of measure, tool defaults, printer profile choices, and scratch disk locations can all be changed to settings you aren’t used to.
Here’s an easy way to restore your preferences easily in case you have to delete your preferences. After you get preferences set up the way you want, and before a problem happens, just create a .zip archive of your preferences. Whether you use Mac OS X or Windows this is easy and just takes a second.
First, find the preferences file you want to preserve.
Then, on Mac OS X, select the file and choose File > Create Archive Of (the filename).
On Windows, right-click the file and choose Send to > Compressed (Zipped) Folder.
You can just leave the zip archive next to the original preferences file because the program that uses that file will ignore it if it has the .zip filename extension instead of its normal one. Because the zip archive is created in the same location with a nearly identical filename, you don’t have to fish it out of a backup somewhere; it’s already in the right place.
When you have a problem that requires deleting preferences, delete the actual preferences file and then simply extract the backup preferences from the zip archive by double-clicking it. On Mac OS X, the file appears in the same place you zipped it, which should already be the right place if you zipped it in its proper folder location. On Windows, you may have to go through the extra step of dragging it out of the containing folder that the Extraction Wizard creates and then deleting that extraction folder. On either OS, the zip archive remains in place so you can easily extract the backup again in case you have another problem in the future.
Some applications have entire folders of preferences, or additional folders in the Application Support folder on Mac OS X or the Common Files folder in Windows. If those folders contain presets or other files that can’t be reinstalled from the original disks because they’re unique to you, it can be a good idea to back those up in place too.
Spotlight: Speed search term entry by abbreviating
If you’ve used both Spotlight and one of the third-party file indexers/launchers that came before it, like LaunchBar or QuickSilver, you know that entering a search takes a little more effort in Spotlight. LaunchBar and QuickSilver can find a file using very short abbreviations, they learn which abbreviations you prefer, and they interpret abbreviations very intelligently. For example, LaunchBar knows that if I type “wrd” I want my network location named “Linksys Wired”. Spotlight can’t do that because it only abbreviates starting from the beginning of the search term; it won’t find an abbreviation that doesn’t match the beginning of the term. (On a side note, Spotlight also can’t bring up network locations. I wish it would.)
However, Spotlight will find matches starting from the beginning of each word, and it doesn’t necessarily need the whole word. If I want to find “meeting minutes,” I only have to enter “mee mi” and they’ll be found.
I think this is important to mention because some people think you have to type the entire search term from the beginning, but you don’t have to. Just the beginning of each word can be enough, and taking advantage of this shortcut can make Spotlight search term entry significantly faster and more convenient.
