Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category
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.
Select a menu command by typing
In Mac OS X, when a menu is open you can select a menu command by typing its name. You can actually go well beyond that, but most Mac users are not aware of how to do it. Running menus from the keyboard sounds like a minor feature, but in fact, selecting a command by typing can save you time when a very long menu is open, such as a font menu containing more fonts than will fit on the screen.
Another common example of this time-saving technique is when you’re checking out of an online store and you have to enter your state from a pop-up menu. Let’s say you live in Wisconsin, which is usually represented by its abbreviation WI. The normal way to get to WI in the pop-up menu is to tediously and carefully scroll all the way down to the name of their state, which is way past the bottom of the screen. If you accidentally release the mouse, you have to start over. The quicker way to do this is to open the menu and simply type “WI” which selects the command. Now press Return to confirm the command selection.
Long font menus are another place where typing the name is much faster than scrolling the menu with the mouse.
Compared to Windows users, Mac users are often less familiar with selecting commands with the keyboard, because the Mac generally emphasizes the mouse much more than the keyboard. In Windows, each command contains one underlined letter that you can press together with the Alt key to select that command. Because Mac OS X doesn’t have those underlines, many Windows users don’t think you can select commands with the keyboard in OS X. In one way, the Mac version is actually easier, because you only have to know the name of the command you’re typing, and type that. In Windows, you have to know which single letter selects the command, and that letter is often not one of the first couple of letters because so many commands start with similar letters.
The last missing piece in selecting commands with the keyboard is opening the menus in the first place, if you don’t want to open menus with the mouse. In Mac OS X, you can select the Apple menu by pressing Ctrl+F2. Once you’re there, type the first letters of the menu you want to select, press Return to drop the menu, and then type the name of the command. Once a menu is open you can also use arrow keys to navigate the menus, or abandon the menu by pressing Esc. If you think this is too many steps, see if the command has a keyboard shortcut listed to the right of the command on its menu, and just press that. If the command doesn’t have a shortcut, assign one yourself. Many Adobe and Microsoft products let you customize keyboard shortcuts, and for other products, you can often use the Keyboard Shortcuts editor in the Keyboard & Mouse system preference.
When you’re in a dialog box or palette, you can normally press Tab or Shift+Tab to move from one text entry field to another. To be able to select any control with the Tab key, including pop-up menus, radio buttons, and check boxes, open the Keyboard & Mouse system preference, click the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, and select All Controls. When All Controls is on, as you press Tab, a selected control displays a soft outline, and when a control is selected you can press the spacebar to select or toggle it. For example, if a pop-up menu is selected, press the spacebar to pop it open. If a checkbox is selected, press the spacebar to enable or disable it. You may not be able to use the Tab key to select dialog box and palette controls in applications that use special code to draw dialog boxes and windows, such as many Adobe products.
In Safari, you can use Tab to select controls on a web page. Open Preferences, click Advanced, and select Press Tab to Highlight Each Item on a Webpage.
Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop
Apple announced the new Mac Pro tower this week. For a Photoshop user, the Mac Pro’s quad SATA hard drive bays are just as useful as the quad cores of the two Xeon CPUs.
Why would a Mac Photoshop user need to use up four drive bays? Actually, it isn’t that hard. First, we know drive number 1 is the system drive that also contains all user folders and their documents. But I like to keep my photo archive on a drive other than the system drive, partly because it’s huge, but also so that if crazy things start happening to the system drive, my photo archive is less likely to be affected. This also simplifies backing up the entire archive to one of my external archive mirror drives. Right now my photo archive is on an external drive, but if I buy a Mac Pro then the photo archive can go to internal drive number 2 and get some clutter off the desk.
I would use drive number 3 as a Photoshop scratch disk. Photoshop has its own virtual memory that’s independent of the virtual memory that OS X and Windows XP use, and it’s optimized for how Photoshop must deal with image data. If you want the best Photoshop performance, in addition to having tons of RAM you should also have a separate, fast hard disk that’s assigned as a dedicated Photoshop scratch disk (set this up in Preferences > Plug-Ins and Scratch Disks). Again, another disk inside the machine instead of on the desk.
What about the fourth drive bay? At the moment, I could leave it empty. But when Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes along sometime in the spring of 2007, it will include the Time Machine continuous backup feature, which requires a dedicated volume. Why not stick a drive in bay 4 and make it the Time Machine backup drive? That would be perfect.
And that’s it…all four internal bays of a Mac Pro quickly used up to help optimize Photoshop and also OS X 10.5 when it gets here. With all the drives that won’t have to sit in external cases on my desk, I might be able to get rid of a whole power strip.
Apple Mail 2.0: Organize smart mailboxes
Just as you can organize mailboxes into mail folders, you can organize smart mailboxes into smart mailbox folders.
In a mail window, I had been frustrated by the inability to sort Smart Mailboxes in folders like you can with normal mailboxes, so I had left all my smart mailboxes at the top level of my mailbox folder hierarchy. It turns out that there is a separate command, Mailbox > New Smart Mailbox Folder, which creates a folder that you can use to organize your smart mailboxes. And just like normal mailbox folders, you can nest a smart mailbox folder inside another.
I think the reason I hadn’t seen the New Smart Mailbox Folder command before is that I usually click the buttons at the bottom of a mail window to perform a command instead of looking in the menu bar itself. The New Smart Mailbox Folder command appears only under the Mailbox menu.
UPDATE: Sometimes the New Smart Mailbox Folder command is unavailable. If this happens, you need to select an account under Inbox, and not select Inbox itself. (Selecting Inbox displays messages from all accounts, while selecting an account displays only the messages inside that account.)
Fix problems with menu bar utilities
When an item on the right side of the menu bar isn’t working right (Spotlight, the Airport icon, or something you added to the menu bar), you can often fix it without having to restart the computer.
Menu bar utilities are handled by a process called SystemUIServer. If you restart that process, everything on the right side of the menu bar reloads, which usually fixes any problems there.
To restart SystemUIServer:
1. Open Activity Monitor (It’s in the Utilities folder).
2. If you don’t see the Activity Monitor window, choose Window > Activity Monitor.
3. In the list, select SystemUIServer. If the list is long and SystemUIServer is hard to find, enter the name into the Filter box at the top of the Activity Monitor window.
4. With SystemUIServer selected, click the Quit Process button, and then click the Quit button.
You’ll see SystemUIServer reappear in the list, because OS X restarts it automatically. The items at the right side of the menu bar should disappear, and then reload. In most cases, the problematic menu bar item should work correctly now.
If that doesn’t work, try logging out and then back in.
If that doesn’t work, try restarting.
The reason I don’t suggest logging out or restarting as a first course of action is that if you’re like me, you’ve constantly got multiple documents open in multiple applications and you don’t want to close it all down and set it all back up if it isn’t necessary.
Today I clicked on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar and it highlighted, but the Spotlight search menu wouldn’t appear. Restarting SystemUIServer fixed it, as usual.
Activity Monitor is a good place to quit or restart any process that doesn’t have its own Quit command.
And a final tip…you can rearrange most menu bar items by Command-dragging them. (Some menu bar items that appear at the left end may be put there by applications and can’t be rearranged.) You can also remove a menu bar item by Command-dragging it off the menu bar.
MacBook: Won’t start, flashing sleep light
If you turn on a white or black MacBook when it’s completely powered off (not sleeping), and instead of starting up, the screen remains dark and the sleep light is blinking, the MacBook’s RAM might not be installed properly or might have worked loose. I found this out when re-seating the RAM of a friend’s MacBook to try and fix a problem. I thought I had pushed the RAM modules far enough into their slots, but after the MacBook failed to start up I took another look and found out that you really do have to push firmly and carefully past some initial resistance until the RAM goes in all the way. You may have to push harder than you think is normal, but seriously, you have to push pretty hard.
And don’t use the levers to do this. Remember that the levers are only for popping out the RAM, not inserting it.
I wasn’t able to find a tech note at the Apple site about this, and that’s why this entry exists. In case it helps someone.
(Update: I don’t know if this applies to the newer unibody aluminum MacBook.)
Force shutdown / restart in Mac OS X
First see if it’s just one program, or the whole machine. If the foreground program is unresponsive, before you force a restart check to see if other programs still work, because a lot of times, only one program is stuck and the rest of the system is OK. It’s actually very rare for all of OS X to freeze up. Try switching to the Finder or another program in the Dock or by pressing Command+Tab to use the Application Switcher. If these work, your whole system is not frozen, only the foreground program is.
Forcing just one program to quit. Use the Force Quit command from the Apple menu (or press Option+Command+Esc) to select the unresponsive program and quit it.
Forcing the entire system to shut down. If you cannot switch to other programs and you can’t choose the Shut Down command on the Apple menu, force a shutdown by holding down the Power button for several seconds until the machine powers off. To verify that it really is shut down, press one of the keys that lights up, like Caps Lock or Num Lock. If the key’s LED lights up, power is still on. When the machine is fully off, press the Power button to start up normally. For an emergency restart on a notebook while the machine is still running, press Command+Ctrl+Power. Using either method, any unsaved changes in open documents will be lost.
Holding the Power button to force a full shutdown works on many kinds of Macs and PCs. Use this technique only in an emergency.
In normal use on a notebook, pressing the power button without holding it down is the same as choosing Shut Down from the Apple menu; you see the same dialog box. On a desktop, the shortcut is Control+Eject.
Failing to wake up from sleep mode. If a Mac doesn’t wake from sleep when it should, or pressing the Power button doesn’t start up a Mac that appears turned off, the computer may be in a state where the screen is blank but it’s still running. This sometimes happens when something’s gone wrong while a Mac was in or waking from sleep mode.
First press Caps Lock to see if it lights up. If it does, the machine is still on. In that case, press the Increase Screen Brightness button to make sure it’s not because the screen backlight is off. If none of that brings the screen to life but you know the machine’s getting power, your machine is in a sort of coma. You might as well do an emergency shutdown at this point.
Safari: Open link as a tab in another Safari window
The shortcuts for opening a link in another tab in Safari are fairly well known. But you can also view a link in a tab in another browser window. First, arrange both browser windows so that you can see the tab area in the second window. Then, simply drag and drop the link into the tab area in the other window. You can also replace the contents of a tab by dragging a link onto the tab.
Deep-calibrate your PowerBook lithium-ion battery
Lithium-ion (li-ion) batteries work best when you partially empty them and then top them off. They don’t like to be emptied every time you use them. There is one exception: You should run your battery all the way down to empty about once a month. This ensures that the circuit that measures the battery capacity has an accurate idea of what “full” and “empty” are for your particular battery, since charge capacity decreases over time.
The standard advice for taking care of lithium-ion batteries comes from Apple and batteryuniversity.com.
When doing this kind of maintenance, most Apple laptop users simply use their laptop until Mac OS X automatically puts the computer into sleep mode. I’ve found that this doesn’t always leave the battery meter with an accurate reading of the battery capacity. However, I have found a way to empty and calibrate the battery more effectively.
I’ve noticed that my PowerBooks, when on battery power, run much longer when the iTunes visualizer is running full screen. When iTunes is in that mode, Mac OS X somehow seems to let iTunes bypass the usual automatic battery cutoff level, and forces sleep much later. To try this battery calibration method:
1. When you see a low-battery warning or when the battery level drops to around 5 minutes remaining, start iTunes.
2. Start playing your music library. It should be a long playlist (like the entire library) so that the playing time is definitely longer than the battery’s remaining time.
3. Make sure the Full Screen command is enabled under the Visualizer menu.
4. Choose Visualizer > Turn Visualizer On.
5. Wait.
You’ll probably find that iTunes keeps playing many minutes longer than the remaining time indicated by the battery meter. Eventually, Mac OS X will sleep the laptop. As a result of the longer runtime, the battery meter should indicate a longer life than it would have if you hadn’t extended the runtime with iTunes. Using CoconutBattery, I’ve confirmed that the number of milliAmp hours assumed by the Power Manager is higher after this procedure.
I don’t know why Apple keeps two different cutoff levels for sleep when on battery. It’s a mystery.
