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Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

Mysterious application failures caused by delocalization

Posted in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Illustrator, Apple, Mac OS X on January 26, 2007 | 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 [...]

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Back up important preferences files

Posted in Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Mac OS X on November 19, 2006 | 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 [...]

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Spotlight: Speed search term entry by abbreviating

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on September 25, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

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 [...]

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Select a menu command by typing

Posted in Mac OS X on August 15, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

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 [...]

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Mac Pro: Why four hard drive bays are great for Photoshop

Posted in Adobe Photoshop, Apple, Apple hardware on August 10, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

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 [...]

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Apple Mail 2.0: Organize smart mailboxes

Posted in Mac OS X on August 4, 2006 | 3 Comments »

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 [...]

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Fix problems with menu bar utilities

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on July 26, 2006 | 4 Comments »

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 [...]

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MacBook: Won’t start, flashing sleep light

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware on June 1, 2006 | 175 Comments »

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 [...]

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Force shutdown / restart in Mac OS X

Posted in Apple, Apple hardware, Mac OS X on April 25, 2006 | 19 Comments »

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 [...]

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Safari: Open link as a tab in another Safari window

Posted in Apple, Mac OS X on April 25, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

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 [...]

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