Latest Posts in Mac 911

Regarding dumb Smart Folders

Reader John Wawrzonek is more than a little frustrated by the limits of Leopard searching. He writes:

I have hundreds of very high resolution images with many variations of each image scattered among five large drives (total 2.5 TB). Smaller versions of these images are on a sixth drive.

On Panther I was using smart folders to beautifully find for me all versions of a certain type across all images (mostly searching for specific codes in the file name or for codes in the comments field).

However, since Apple took away the option in Leopard of specifying for each smart folder individually which disks to search, the smart folders have become almost unusable. Are you aware of any workarounds or, especially, applications that restore this “smart driver search” capability to Leopard?

I am. Before I provide that answer allow me to lay a sympathetic arm across your shoulder and agree that Smart Folders are not nearly as smart as they ought to be. In a situation where you want to designate multiple search sources—Drives 1, 3, and 5 but not 2, 4, and 6—Smart Folders is useless. Rob Griffiths, our resident Leopard critic, has written at length about issues like this and I agree with him. While Spotlight has improved immeasurably since Tiger, it seems like Apple’s Search Team considered the job done once Spotlight lost its lameness.

And now to the answer: Houdah Software’s €15 HoudahSpot.

Rob has written an extensive review of HoudahSpot 2.x, the current Leopard-compatible version of this remarkably flexible search application. I urge you to read it if you’re routinely frustrated by the limitations of Leopard’s search capabilities.

For the purposes of your question, John, you need know only that you can tell HoudahSpot exactly which areas of your Mac and its attached volumes to search and you can save your searches as templates or saved search documents that you can easily return to. And yes, just as with Smart Folders, HoudahSpot searches are dynamically updated. So, for example, should you add half-a-dozen of these high resolution images and have HoudahSearch configured to look for them, within a second or two of adding them, they’ll appear in HoudahSpot's results.

HoudahSpot

Also note that HoudahSpot installs a Finder menu item that includes any search templates you’ve created (as well as templates bundled with the application). This means that locating your files is just a click away.

Removing Address Book images in Mail

Reader Helga Beuing would like to depersonalize the email she sends. She writes:

I have discovered that there is a small picture of myself in the upper right corner of every email I send. I have no clue how that started and would like to know how to eliminate that picture.

The source of that picture is Apple’s Address Book application. When you open Address Book and choose your contact card (Card -> Go to My Card), in addition to your contact information you’ll see any image you’ve assigned to your contact.

Note that your picture is not being sent across the great expanse that is the Internet as an attachment. Others who receive your mail won’t see this image. Rather, you’re seeing it because it’s part of your Address Book card and Mail is displaying it because Mail displays pictures assigned to contacts in your copy of Address Book. Those you send messages to don’t have that image in their copy of Address Book (unless you’ve given them the image and they’ve assigned it to your card) and so it doesn’t display in their copy of Mail.

If you no longer wish to see the image when you look at your own messages, just open Address Book, select your card, and choose Card -> Clear Custom Image.

Note: The previous version of this answer was completely off the mark due to a caffeine deficiency. Apologies all around.

Bugs & Fixes: When MobileMe contacts refuse to delete

When I first gave MobileMe a spin months ago, I synced my Address Book contacts to the cloud. Recently, I wanted to clear those contacts from MobileMe. You might think this would be easy to do. You’d be wrong. After trying several dead-ends, I ultimately tripped over what is almost certainly a bug in Apple’s MobileMe software. I did come up with a work-around for the bug, but it’s a bit ugly.

Yes, you can delete all contacts directly from the MobileMe Web app, via commands in its Action menu. However, doing this risks having the contacts also deleted from your Mac on the next sync (although you should get a Sync Alert warning before any harm is done).

That’s why the preferred approach is to delete the contacts by modifying MobileMe’s settings on your Mac. In my first attempt, I unchecked the Contacts item in the MobileMe System Preferences pane and clicked Sync. Nice try, but no cigar. Doing this succeeded in disabling further syncing of contacts, but the contacts already present in MobileMe remained intact.

Undeterred, I clicked the Advanced button in MobileMe’s System Preferences pane and selected to “Reset Sync Data…” From the sheet that dropped down (pictured below), I opted to do a unilateral sync from my Mac to the cloud. As contacts were no longer being synced, I thought this might result in the contacts being removed from MobileMe. Wrong again.

Read more...

Mail's random and sequential signatures

Reader L.T. desires greater flexibility in the signatures appended to his email messages. He writes:

I have over 75 signatures in my Signature file and am always adding and deleting from that file. I would prefer not to be locked into the same signature time after time, and find it a nuisance going into the Mail Preferences each time I want to insert a different signature in my email. Is there a way to get, force, or program Apple Mail to automatically insert either sequential or randomized signatures from that Signature file each time an email is generated?

Yes, and it’s a feature built right into Mail. Just choose Mail -> Preferences and click the Signatures tab in the resulting window. As you’re probably aware, this is where you create your signatures. (And for those who aren’t aware, just click the Plus (+) button at the bottom of the window to create a new signature.) All your signatures are listed in the middle pane when you click the All Signatures entry in the left side of the window.

At the bottom of the window you’ll see a Choose Signature pop-up menu. When this menu is active you’ll see that you have the option to choose signatures At Random or In Sequential Order. These are the options you’re looking for.

People sometimes get confused, however, when they discover that this pop-up menu is grayed out. This occurs when you select either the All Signatures entry or any account that doesn’t have a signature attached to it.

And why wouldn’t an account have a signature attached to it? Because you either haven’t selected an account and clicked the Plus button to add a signature to it (which, by default, will be your name followed by that account’s email address) or dragged a signature from the All Signatures area to one of your accounts. Users new to Mail are routinely confounded by this.

Be confounded no more. Just be sure an account has at least two signatures attached to it and you can put the At Random and In Sequential Order options to good use.

Changing iMovie '08 movie dates

Reader Simon Tanner would like some assistance in going back in time—or, at least, finding a way for his recently imported movies to go back in time. He writes:

I have home movies recorded from 1996 - 2005 that I’ve recently imported into iMovie ’08. Unfortunately, they appear in the order in which I digitized the original tapes. Is there any way I can redefine/rearrange these calendar folders and their contents so they reflect the time when they were originally shot?

Sure. But it might help to understand why this is happening. iMovie sorts those movies by creation date. And that’s why you see them in the order you do. As far as iMovie is concerned, these movies didn't exist prior to the time you imported them to your Mac. In order for them to appear by the date you originally shot them, you need to change that creation date.

I’ve stumbled across numerous suggestions for ways to make this happen—from diving into Terminal to resetting your Mac’s date and time and creating copies of the movies. But the easiest solution I’ve found is Frank Reiff’s $15 A Better Finder Attributes. With it you can batch-change the creation date of any files you throw at it. (And yes, this is also helpful for photographers who’d like to catalog images that don’t include the correct creation date in their EXIF data—as would be the case with scanned slides.)

In the case of iMovie you’d use it this way:

In iMovie ’08, right-click on the movie you want to work with and choose Reveal in Finder from the contextual menu. In the Finder a folder will open that contains your movie clip along with iMovie Cache and iMovie Thumbnails folders. If you like, change the name of the clip to reflect the original creation date—something like clip-2004-09-26 15;12;07.dv, for example.

Quit iMovie, launch A Better Finder Attributes, select all the items in the folder that contains your movie, and drag them into ABFA’s queue panel. From the Action popup menu choose Change Creation Date and in the area below, use the calendar and clock to change the creation date to one that more accurately reflects when the movie was shot, and click Change. The creation date for all those items will now change.

Launch iMovie ’08 and you’ll find that it’s created a new heading for the year you chose and filed your movie under that heading. When you change the creation dates of additional movies they should appear under the year-appropriate headings and in the chronological order you designated.

Bugs & Fixes: iPhone connect errors and audiobook crashes

A pair of iPhone problems grabbed my attention this week. Let’s jump right in.

Error 0xE8000035 prevents iPhone connecting to iTunes

Most of the time, syncing an iPhone proceeds as smoothly as silk. You connect the iPhone to your Mac in iTunes and hit the Sync button. A minute or so later, you’re done.

Unfortunately, this process may occasionally get derailed at the very first step. That is, the iPhone fails to even show up in iTunes Devices list. While there are several variations of this symptom, I want to focus on just one: When you get an error message stating that “iTunes could not connect to iPhone…because an unknown error occurred. (0xE8000035).”

As an aside, you would think that Apple, of all companies, would have more user-friendly error messages than ones that identify a problem simply by a cryptic number. Apparently not.

Regardless, the most likely fix is a simple one. If you connected your iPhone to a USB hub, a keyboard, a monitor or any other USB peripheral: unplug it. Instead, plug it directly into one of the USB ports on your Mac. That should do it.

If that fails, there are several other potential fixes, such as the ones outlined in this Apple article. As a last resort, you’ll need to restore your iPhone.

Audiobooks crash?

A new Apple article reveals that the iPod app on an iPhone (and the Music app on an iPod touch) may crash when attempting to play an audiobook if you have synced 20 or more audiobooks to your mobile device.

One work-around is obvious: sync less than 20 books. Another solution is to create a playlist for all your audiobooks in iTunes and sync this playlist to your iPhone or iPod touch, rather than use iTunes’ built-in Audiobooks playlist. Expect Apple to eradicate this bug in a future update.

Customizing the login screen

Trendy reader Paul Mauro would like to tattoo his Mac’s login screen. He writes:

A couple years ago you published a tip on putting a personal note on the login screen. I implemented this on two machines as an SOS in case I lost my computer and a kind soul found it. It said the computer was mine and how to contact me. But I have upgraded to OS X 10.5 and I can’t get it work now. Could you check it on 10.5 and tell me what I should do now?

I have and I will. Although you could use Terminal and a hunk of text to do the job, why bother when you can simply download Titanium Software’s free OnyX?

OnyX performs any number of tricks, including checking the viability of your hard drive, sweeping out old log files and caches, and customizing the Mac’s interface in ways not possible without some stern Terminal twiddling. One of these customization options allows you to place a personal message in the Mac’s login window.

Just launch OnyX, let it do its startup things—checking the S.M.A.R.T status of your hard drive and verifying that drive—enter your Admin password when prompted, and then click the Parameters icon. Click the Login tab within the window that appears and enable the Show Message in the Login Window option. Now just type a custom message in the field below—Property of Paul Mauro, pmauro@example.com, 555-555-1212, for instance—quit OnyX, and log out of your account. When the login screen appears you’ll find that custom message near the top of the login window.

Back up and restore Boot Camp partitions

Reader Dave Bradley is trading up, but would like to take his Boot Camp partition along for the ride. He writes:

I’m planning to replace the hard drive in my MacBook Pro with a higher-capacity drive. On that MacBook Pro I have both a partition for my Mac stuff and a Boot Camp partition that has Windows on it. I’m going to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the Mac partition to an external drive I have and then restore it to the new drive, but how do I make a copy of the Boot Camp partition?

I’ll begin by saying that it’s possible. I’ll follow that by suggesting that unless you’ve spent days configuring Windows you might be better off with a fresh install of Boot Camp and Windows. I don’t think I’m telling secrets out of school in saying that it takes Windows very little time to get completely junked up. Sometimes starting over is the best course.

But if that means hours and hours of additional work, then cloning and restoring may be your preference. To do that, grab a copy of Two Canoes Software’s free Winclone. I used it last week to perform an operation similar to the one you’re about to undertake and it worked beautifully.

Just launch Winclone, choose your Boot Camp partition from the Source menu, and click the Image button. As the button’s name suggests, this creates an image of that partition and saves it on the Mac side of the drive. Now clone the Mac partition and then swap the drives. Once you’ve swapped the drives and restored the Mac side, launch Winclone on the new drive, click the Restore tab, drag the Boot Camp image into Winclone’s Restore Image field, and click Restore. Winclone will create a new Boot Camp partition on your drive and restore its contents from the image you created earlier.

Note that thanks to Microsoft’s Draconian Windows activation scheme it’s highly likely that you’ll have to activate Windows again. When I did this, online activation was a bust as Microsoft believed that I was trying to exceed my activation limit (because Windows was tied to my old hard drive). Go immediately to phone activation, as telling the nice automated operator that you’ve installed Windows on only one computer seems to satisfy her to the point that she’s willing to cough up the seemingly endless string of numbers that allow you to activate Windows.

Bugs & Fixes: When updating Microsoft Office fails

It happened with the recent 12.1.3 update to Microsoft Office 2008. It will inevitably happen again with the just-released 12.1.4 update. In fact, it’s a long-standing glitch in Microsoft’s update process, one that plagued numerous versions. What happens is this:

The Microsoft AutoUpdate application notifies you that an update is available. You select to download it and run the Installer. And that’s about as far as you go. The Installer complains “No version of the software found on volume” and the installation halts. You scratch your head, fully aware that the relevant software is indeed available, and wonder what went wrong.

The most likely cause is that, to save disk space, you previously removed unwanted language-specific files in Office. You can do this with utilities such as Macaroni. Having done this, the Microsoft Installer no longer recognizes the Office software as updatable.

If this describes your situation, the most straight-forward solution, albeit a time-consuming one, is to reinstall your initial version of Office and re-update, this time without deleting the language files.

A reader comment on VersionTracker, however, suggests a quicker but riskier work-around (as I have not tried it, I cannot confirm it works):

1. Download the update installer from the Web, rather than using AutoUpdate. For example, you can find the 12.1.4 update here.
2. Using the Show Package Contents contextual menu item, open the update package file and navigate to Contents -> Resources.
3. Using a text editor (such as TextWrangler or even TextEdit), open the file named package_updatable and delete the two lines that read:
   

   if not found_valid_version:
   sys.exit(48)

4. Save the modified file. The Installer should now succeed.

MacInTouch has posted an e-mail from Microsoft Technical Support that offers some other potential causes and solutions for this symptom. Most notably, it claims that the symptom may be triggered either by having an external drive attached or by having Parallels software running. If so, the obvious suggested solution is to disconnect the external drive and/or quit Parallels.

By the way, the new 12.1.4 update is a minor one that appears to address just one specific bug: “This update fixes a calendar issue in versions of Microsoft Entourage that were updated with the Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update. The issue prevents Exchange accounts in Entourage from sending meeting invitations and responses. This issue can occur when an Entourage identity is configured with more than one mail account.” In other words, installing the 12.1.4 update requires that you have first installed the 12.1.3 update (the version that causes the problem).

Exporting Address Book to a spreadsheet

Reader Kerry Schleyer offers this simple Address Book question:

Can you tell me how to export my Address Book into an Excel or Numbers spreadsheet? You’d think there would be an easy way to do this.

There is, but that easy way isn’t built into Address Book, which lets you export contacts only as vCards and Address Book archives. That easier way is David Martin’s free (though a donation would be welcome) Address Book Exporter.

It’s a simple utility that takes selected groups of contacts and exports them as a single tab-delimited plain text file. This file will open beautifully in any spreadsheet application you throw it at.