Quick Tip of the Week: Dragging Files
On a Mac, you can drag a file from Location A to Location B, moving the file from its old residence to a new one. But what if you wanted two copies of the file: one at Location A and a second one at Location B? Or, here?s another option, what if you wanted the file to live at Location A but have an ?alias? live on the Desktop? Learn how you can drag yourself to all three outcomes by watching this week?s Quick Tip.
published on Thursday, the 25. September 2008, apple-hot-news
View PC files on the Mac while VirtualPC is running
To view your PC files on the Mac desktop while running Virtual PC with Windows running (or for just viewing your Windows files without launching Virtual PC), you need to first create a Mac alias to one of your Windows folders (created while running VirtualPC). Once that alias is created, when double-clicked, the Windows hard drive will show on your Mac desktop -- even if you're running Windows via VirtualPC at the time. [robg adds: I don't have VirtualPC, so I can't test this one.]
published on Tuesday, the 23. September 2008, macosxhints
Remove VMs from Parallels VM startup list
If you end up with unused virtual machines in your Parallels startup list, you can get rid of them by removing aliases from your ~/Documents/.parallels-vm-directory folder.Choose the Finder's Go to Folder command under the Go menu, paste in the above path and go. In the folder, delete the VM aliases you don't want. You may want to also delete the actual VM data, or maybe just find out where it lives. To do so, right-click on a VM alias and choose Show Original or Get Info from the contextual menu. You'll be taken to, or shown the path to that VM's files. The handy thing about only having one VM in the list is it's selected automatically when you start Parallels.
published on Friday, the 22. August 2008, macosxhints
Create a permanent sidebar entry for networked folders
If you're anything like me, then you probably access files within folders within folders on removable media (i.e. external hard drives, Flash drives). It can become quite a hassle (with a trackpad, anyway) to open the the media device, select the folder, navigate, select another folder, navigate, and then select the desired file or folder.I tried adding my commonly-accessed (but time consuming to reach) external hard drive folder to the Finder's sidebar, but whenever I took my MacBook somewhere and the folder wasn't present, the sidebar alias disappeared.So my solution was to make a local alias of the removable folder, put it in my Documents (or any other local) folder, then drag the alias to the sidebar. Now I can eject removable media without losing my sidebar shortcut. [robg adds: I thought we had run something similar in the past, but I can't find it now -- so if this is a duplicate, please let me know. Also, if you use this hint, you should be awa...
published on Monday, the 21. July 2008, macosxhints
Ease Mac OS / Windows Boot Camp switching
I use a 2.33Ghz MacBook Pro as the main workhorse for my production business, and I have Windows XP SP2 installed via Boot Camp to run some Windows-only software that I need to run natively (ie not in Fusion or Parallels). However, I soon tired of switching the boot disk from 10.5.2 to XP and back. So I came up with this little timesaver by putting shortcuts to the System Preferences Startup Disk panel (in OS X) and the Boot Camp Control Panel (in Windows XP) on their respective desktops and dock. It saves me a couple of steps and makes the rebooting process acceptable. In Mac OS 10.5.2, navigate to /System/Library/PreferencePanes, and find StartupDisc.prefPane. Create an alias of the StartupDisc.prefPane, and drag the alias to the Desktop or the Dock. I changed the icon to a Windows icon, and the text to Shortcut to Win XP. While in Windows XP, open the Control Panel, then right-click on the on the Boot Camp Control Panel item. Select Send to Deskto ...
published on Thursday, the 17. April 2008, macosxhints
Create a customized user-centric locate database
If you have ever used the locate command within Terminal to find a file of yours that, for instance, ends in .doc, you might find that you end up with more than 60,000 hits on your system that you didn't create, and didn't want to know about. Hence, it may be beneficial to create a user-level database for locate that searches only your local directory structure, so that you only see what belongs to you.To do this, and have my new database updated automatically, I modified a copy of the locate database update program that came with the Mac, set up a crontab to update this database hourly, and then created an alias for my local locate, called llocate. Now when I type llocate .doc , I only find 584 .doc files, and I can rest assured that they are all mine! Read on for the how-to... Step 1: Copy and modify database update program I first copied the original program to a new directory, with this command:
published on Tuesday, the 8. April 2008, macosxhints
Create sets of desktop images without duplication
I like the way Mac OS X lets you choose any album from iPhoto to use as a set of desktop background images. In particular, using iPhoto albums to create sets of images saves disk space because the same image can be displayed in multiple sets ("albums") even though it's only physically stored on disk just once. I had a number of images that I didn't want to store in iPhoto, but that I did want to use as desktop backgrounds in some sets and that I didn't want to duplicate. The solution turned out to be to simple but a little tricky. Using the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel, you can select any arbitrary folder to use for desktop backgrounds. If you fill this folder with Unix symbolic links that all have an absolute POSIX path specified for the link, Desktop & Screen Saver finds and follows each image. However, only symbolic links with an absolute path (or hard links, of course) work. Notably, Mac OS X "aliases" do not work. So, by way of examp...
published on Monday, the 31. March 2008, macosxhints
Open a copy of the current Finder window via AppleScript
Sometimes I find myself needing to open a second copy of the current Finder window I have open. There's no default way to do this in Mac OS X, so I wrote a small script to take care of it for me: try tell application "Finder" activate set this_folder to (the target of the front window) as alias set {x1, y1} to position of front window make new Finder window to this_folder set position of front window to {(x1 + 50), (y1 + 150)} --This offsets the new window more than the average Finder tiling does end tell end try I use Butler to assign this a hot key, which then opens these copies when I need them. [robg adds: This wor...
published on Friday, the 11. January 2008, macosxhints
10.5: An alias to ease screen captures of remote Macs
Given what I do for Macworld, I take a lot of screenshots. Sometimes I need to take those shots remotely -- for instance, to grab a screnshot of the login window, you must connect to a logged-out Mac via ssh, then use the screencapture command, as described in this older hint. With 10.5, though, the rules have changed, as described in the man pages for screencapture: To capture screen content while logged in via ssh, you must launch screencapture in the same mach bootstrap hierarchy as loginwindow: PID=pid of loginwindow sudo launchctl bsexec $PID screencapture [options] So to take a screen capture, you need to first get the PID of the login...
published on Thursday, the 20. December 2007, macosxhints
Apps: HierarchicalDock, Bin-it
HierarchicalDock 1.1 (donationware) an application which allows for hierarchical menus for folders in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)'s Dock. New in this version is the use of QuickLook previews for files instead of file icons (optional) and two new sorting-modes (by "last used date" and "creation date", additionally to alphabetical sorting). Alias files a...
published on Wednesday, the 5. December 2007, macintosh-news-network