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.)

“Folder not found” error when batch processing in Photoshop

If you try to run a batch process in Adobe Photoshop (either from Photoshop or from Adobe Bridge) and you get an error message that says a folder wasn’t found, here are some things to check:

In the Batch Processing dialog box, look at the Errors section at the bottom of the dialog box. If you have the Errors pop-up menu set to Log Errors to File, click Save As and reset the error log file location. Pointing the log file to a disk or disk name that isn’t mounted or no longer exists can cause the error message. For example, maybe you renamed or deleted the folder that the error log was pointed to before.
Check the action you’re running, and if there any folder paths in any action step, make sure those paths are still valid. Folder paths can exist in can Open step, a Save step, or a Load or Save step. For example, you might have a step that loads a saved curve from disk into the Curves dialog box.
If you action calls other actions, check the folder paths in those sub-actions.

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 (or choose View > Quit Process), 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.

Photoshop CS2: Use Print with Preview

The File > Print with Preview dialog box shows you how your image fits on the printer and paper size that’s selected, and lets you position the image on the page. By double-checking the document in Print with Preview before printing, you can avoid just about all wasted print jobs caused by incorrect image size, paper size, or orientation. While you’re in Print with Preview, click Page Setup to confirm that the printer and paper size are correct. The margins you see in Print with Preview are supplied by the selected printer driver, not Photoshop.

The Print with Preview dialog box has a Print button, so you can go straight to the Print dialog box from there. For this reason, you might want to use the keyboard shortcut editor (Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts) to assign Command/Ctrl+P to the Print with Preview command instead of the Print command.

Note that in Photoshop CS3, the Print with Preview dialog box is now the default print dialog box.

Acrobat: Set default comment identity

By default, Acrobat versions 7 and 8 label your PDF comments with your login username, which may not have any resemblance to your real name. During a review involving several reviewers, this can make it difficult to figure out who made certain comments in a PDF.

Not only it is not obvious how to set the default identity, the preference that should make it happen doesn’t. But with a few trips to different areas of Acrobat, it can eventually be done.

To set your default comment identity:

1. Open the Preferences dialog box in Acrobat and go to the Identity panel.
2. Make sure the Name represents the name you want to use to label your comments.
3. Go to the Commenting panel in the Preferences dialog box.
4. Under Making Comments, make sure “Always use Log-in name for Author name” is disabled.
5. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog box.
6. Select any commenting tool, such as the Note tool, and add a comment. It doesn’t have to be anything important, because you can delete it after you’ve completed this procedure.
7. Right-click the comment and choose Properties. (This step seems to work only if the comment’s window is closed on the page.)
8. Click General and make sure the Author name is the name you want to use to label all of your comments, and click Close.
9. Right-click the comment and choose Make Current Properties Default.

That should do it. While it would seem that steps 2 and 4 should get the job done, the entire reason this procedure is necessary is that Step 4 never seems to work on its own.