Doc_Babad’s Macintosh Tips - A Macintosh Tip or Three… March 2007 Edition By Harry {doc} Babad
Product and company names and logos in this review may be registered trademarks of their respective companies. The software related tips were tested on a 1 GHz dual processor PowerPC G4 Macintosh with 2 GB DDR SDRAM; running under Macintosh OS X OS X 10.4.8.

This month I continue sharing my occasional tip related finds with you. Many, but not all of the Tips I share come from — Paul Taylor’s Hints&Tips column http://www.mac-hints-tips.com and are used with his permission. Where I use any one else’s tips for this column, I acknowledge both their source and their contributors.

Oh, I almost forgot! Unless otherwise noted, all the tips and tidbits I share, where appropriate, work on my computer. If I don’t own the software but if the tip sounds interesting, I’ll so note at the end of that specific write-up.

Tips I’ve provided this month, as always in a random order, include:

• Changing from Safari to Firefox
• Function Key Assignments in OS X
• Reduce Wasted Menubar Space
• Safeguarding Travel Documents
• MS Word Tips - Indispensable Tips for Word Users
• Make Pasted Text Match in MS Word
• Save Document Images imbedded in MS Word
• MS Word Customization and Preferences
• Fixing Icons That Go Generic
• Top 10 Troubleshooting Tips

Changing from Safari to Firefox
Q: I have been using Safari for a number of years and have been very happy with it as a browser. That said Firefox has the ability to use some web pages that Safari cannot completely render. Is there an easy way to move bookmarks from Safari to Firefox, and similarly, can bookmarks by synchronized between the two applications? ~ Jonathan M

A: The first time you launch Firefox; you’ll be able to import your Safari bookmarks. After that, you can import bookmarks through Firefox’s Bookmarks Manager. Choose Bookmarks > Manage Bookmarks, and then choose File > Import. You’ll be able to choose Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera and From File. Choose Safari and click Continue, and your bookmarks will be imported. And if you want to synchronize bookmarks between Safari and Firefox, consider using Everyday Software’s Bookit 3.7 ($12; www.everydaysoftware.net/bookit). From: macHOME HotTips
January 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com

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Function Key Assignments in OS X
Q: In OS 9, it was a simple matter to assign the Function keys. I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it in OS 10.4. I would like F1 to open Safari. ~ Gene Reffkin

A: Apple has inexplicably left this OS 9 feature out of OS X. Thankfully; there are a number of shareware utilities that will do the trick. Beniot Widenmann’s AliasKeys ($15; www.widemann.net) is one of the best of the bunch. It allows you to assign any keystroke to files and folders (not just Function keys), so you can launch Safari with F1, Command/F1 or even Command/1.

macHOME Journal
March 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com

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Reduce Wasted Menubar Space
Way back in Mac OS 9, you used to be able to tell what application you were in by
looking at the application menu, which lived at the far right of the menubar.

But in OS X, this menu is gone. Instead, the full name of the active application displays
in the menubar, between the iconic Apple logo and the File menu. Usually that’s no big
deal. The File menu’s onscreen position might jump around a bit if the application name
is particularly long or short, but most people probably don’t notice this at all.

You might have noticed, however, if your screen real estate is limited. On a 12´´ PowerBook there’s usually plenty of room for short application names — BBEdit, Finder, Safari, iChat — but launch Photoshop Elements (or any other app with a longwinded name) and prepare to lose fully 15% of your menubar space — nearly 150 pixels from the 1024 available!

If you use even a few menubar icons and the menubar clock, you’ll quickly discover that the name Photoshop Elements causes icons to vanish. There’s just not enough room to display them, and the application menu has priority. If you could just shorten the application’s name somehow, you could recover a significant amount of menubar space.

No, you can’t work this magic by renaming the application in the Finder — all that will do is change the program’s name in the Dock and Command/Tab application switcher. You have to change the displayed name from within the program.

The easiest way to solve this problem is to purchase Unsanity’s $10 FruitMenu. This program not only lets you customize the Apple menu (another OS 9 feature that disappeared with the release of OS X) to your heart’s content, you can also choose to show the application’s icon in the menubar, in lieu of its name. This is a great space-saver that still provides you a visual clue as to the active application.

What are the downsides? Well, it’s not free, and you’ll have to install a preferences panel known as APE, or Application Program Enhancer, in addition to FruitMenu, APE, which installs itself in all running apps on your machine, lets FruitMenu (and the other Unsanity applications) do its thing. Some people don’t like running such extensions, though Unsanity has shown that APE is a stable, mature technology. ~ Rob Griffiths

LIMac Forum, Long Island, NY
February 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com

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Safeguarding Travel Documents
Going on a long trip? What happens if you lose important documents en route? Well, one way of keeping copies handy wherever you may be is to save scanned or photographed copies of them on your iDisk.

From any Internet-connected computer you can go to www.mac.com, log in, and click the “iDisk” button. This reveals the contents of your iDisk and you can download and print whichever items you need. This may be just the justification you need for getting a .Mac account.

AUSOM News, Melbourne, Australia
February 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com

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MS Word Tips - Indispensible Tips for Word Users

• Instant AutoCorrect — Right-click on a word that’s flagged as misspelled to display the Edit shortcut menu. If Word has a suggested alternative, AutoCorrect will appear on the menu. Choose AutoCorrect and then select the correct version of the word from the submenu to create an AutoCorrect entry.
• Marker display — Work with paragraph markers and tab marks displayed. Simply click the Show/Hide J button on the Standard toolbar. Displaying those normally hidden characters helps you avoid inadvertently deleting objects or changing formatting; it also helps you figure out funky alignment and extra white space problems.
• Clear a table — If you need to delete the contents of all the cells in a table, just select the table and press delete (not backspace).
• Jump quickly between documents — If you work with a lot of open, overlapping documents, here’s a quick way to cycle between them: Press Control/F6 to jump from one to the next; Control/Shift/F6 will jump you backward.
  TMUG Insider, Pleasanton, CA
  March 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com
  

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Make Pasted Text Match in MS Word — When you, paste text from Web pages
into Word, you’d probably like the pasted text to match the text in your document. In Word X, select: Edit > Paste Special > select Unformatted Text, and click on OK. This pastes the text without any formatting; it should therefore pick up the formatting of the location where you pasted it.

If you use Word 2004, paste the text and then click on the Paste Options button that appears below the pasted text (it looks like a clipboard). Select Match Destination Formatting in the resulting menu.

Kirk McElhearn Rule the Office (MS Word Hints Only) MACWORLD October 2006

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Save Document Images imbedded in MS Word —

If your Word 2004 documents contain graphics that you want to use elsewhere, you can drag the images to the desktop or to a folder, but they’re saved as picture clippings, which aren’t easy to share. Instead, just control-click on an image in a document, select Save As Picture from the contextual menu, and choose a file format from the Format menu.

Kirk McElhearn Rule the Office (MS Word Hints Only) MACWORLD October 2006

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MS Word Customization and Preferences — It is very easy to customize the toolbars, the menus and the shortcuts in MS Word. It is also easy to bring those back to the default settings created by Microsoft. No this is no a place for a tutorial on customizing the application, the MSW help files do that wonderfully well. --- You can make it happen by going to MSW Menu > Tools > Customize toolbars/menus. Really, check out the MS Word Help files. The files provide clear simple but explicit information on customization of both menus and toolbars. Hmmm. When was the last time you said something nice about Microsoft?

A word to the wise — If you share your computer with others, and MS Word is available to all users, you drive the crazy if as administrator, you do a hatched job on the shortcuts they’re used to. Toolbars can be visually checked, but shifting menu items around is also a pain to other users. Since I solo on my computer, I could care less. I’ve drastically customized my tool bars but only made a few shortcut changes. Another user checking the slightly modified dropdown windows in my MSW menus can decode these.

By the way, the preference file is where information for most applications store the details on how you’ve customized the user interface in MS Word also stores your registration information. In MS Word preference files are where all those custom toolbars and shortcuts live. [Users > Harry >Library > Preferences > Microsoft > com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist]. Restoring your settings can be tedious if you toss them. So to remember all the stuff in my custom tool bars, I save a screen shot showing my customization. [Its crowded but you can also take multiple clips to allow a large images.]

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Fixing Icons That Go Generic — Most experienced Macintosh user know the drill. Icons not appearing on the desktop, graphic icons turning generic, your finder actions or application gets twitchy… bad vibes from either the OS or an application. In OS X, there are a couple of simple things you can do to try to make things right, in order of simplicity.

• Restart the Finder [Option-Command Escape] – Most generic icons will revert back to their graphic, application related form.
• Restart your computer – If that fixes thing, good deal.
• Toss the Finder.plist in the Trash — [Your computer > Users > You > Library > Preferences > com.apple.finder.plist.] Each time you reboot an application including the Finder, It rebuilds the preference file. You will not be able to delete the old preference file until you reboot but a new replacement gets built in place of the one you removed.
• Toss the affected Application’s.plist in the Trash.
• If all else fails, delete [uApp or AppZapper] reinstall the application.
• If thing really go bad, alas you need to bother reinstall the OS and all your applications, but I really don’t want to think about that now on a lovely spring evening.
  

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Top 10 Troubleshooting Tips — I hope you never need to you more that the top four. [doc_Babad]

1. Make sure you have the latest version of the software available. If you have older software, it may not work with newer versions of the Mac OS X operating system. Never trust anything that comes on a CD — even a new program or printer you haven’t even taken the shrink-wrap off yet — may have buggy software, so I always check www.versiontracker.com or the manufacturer’s own website for a software updater.

2. Preference files can get damaged rather easily. The program usually can rebuild a fresh one at startup. Under Mac OS 9, these were mostly stored in the System Folder > Preferences folder. Under Mac OS X they can be found in ~/Library/ Preferences (where “~” is your home folder). They are now mostly called “.plist” files; before they had names of the program plus Prefs, Preferences or Settings.

3. You may have installed some conflicting software that opens at startup. Under Mac OS 9, you would use the Extensions Manager control panel, or better yet, the now discontinued Conflict Catcher, to find out which was the problem. Under Mac OS X, I’d suggest creating a new administrative user and log out and back in as the new test user and see if the problem is resolved. If it is, the problem is not system-wide, just user specific, so you can look in the Home Folder > Library for the culprit rather than the Root folder/Library folder.

4. Permissions for various folders and files can get set wrong, sometimes by the installer of the program itself. It’s a good idea to run Repair Permissions with Disk Utility to clear up any problems. As a precautionary procedure, before and after you install an Apple System update, say from 10.4.2 to 10.4.3, repair permissions before installing and again after. Also because of limitations of the smaller delta updates like this, it’s recommended strongly not to allow Software Update download and install the update, but instead to download yourself the larger combo update and install that. The delta update might miss some things.

5. Restart your Mac to clear a memory leak. That is caused by a poorly written program that does not release memory after it’s done using it. This does not fix the problem permanently; only a program update can do that. Remember that programmers are human, too. But they need feedback, so send them an e-mail alerting them to their errors.

6. Rename bad files with generic icons to give them the proper file name extension. Mac OS 9 users have not gotten in the habit of using file name extensions. Assign programs to open specific file types by getting info on a sample file and change the “Open with:” pop-up menu and then clicking the “Change All…” button and confirming.

7. If an external device stops working, check to see if the computer even recognizes that it’s connected. Do this by going to the (Apple) System Profiler found in your Applications/Utilities folder. (Mac OS 9 users will find it in the Apple menu) click on USB, FireWire, or SCSI category to get a list of recognized devices. You can refresh the list as you check the plugs. Sometimes you need to unplug and reconnect the device to get it to be shown. Sometimes, particularly for some printers, you have to actually pull the power cord to reset the machine — just using the power button is not enough.

8. You probably know about the Force Quit window, from the Apple menu or invoked with Command/Option/Escape. It only lists major applications. To get to the nitty gritty of what is running, you need to go to the Utilities folder for Activity Monitor. Make sure it’s listing “All Processes” in the pop-up near the top. You can force quit almost everything there, but be careful — you could force quit something important and lock up your Mac. I’d view the list by % CPU to see what is hogging your resources, but listing by real memory can be a real eye-opener too.

9. Internet Explorer has been discontinued by Microsoft, but people still use it. It recently developed a nasty little problem that is really not its fault. The default home page is www.msn.com. The problem is msn.com recently changed its programming which no longer works with the last Mac version of Internet Explorer. As the program hangs up as it starts up, you can’t seem to do anything. Deleting preferences or re-installing the program won’t help. You need to disconnect from the Internet by pulling your Ethernet cable or changing your settings in System Preferences > Network. Then it can’t load the home page and gives up. So you can then go to the preferences and change the home page to something that does work, like www.google.com/. Quit the program and restore your Internet connection and startup IE for a test. Problem solved.

10. There are so many things that can go wrong that can be fixed by the free OnyX, software you’d be amazed. You may have problems like duplicates in your Finder’s contextual menus, so use OnyX to reset the LaunchServices database. It can even do a quick check for damaged .plist preference files. You can do the daily and weekly (cron) maintenance scripts assuming your computer is not on at midnight when they are set to run. You can clean all kinds of caches not included in the above scripts. It’s worth real money, but it’s free from Titanium Software.
LIMac Forum, Long Island, NY
February 2007 — Hints & Tips website address: www.mac-hints-tips.com

PS: Also Checkout the, November 2005 macCompanion Issue: “The Mac Attack” - Mac Tips, Tricks, and Hints” Keeping your Mac running it’s best by Steve Stanger. Steve covers comparable ground from an equally valid but different perspective.
http://www.maccompanion.com/archives/november2005/Columns/MacAttack.htm

That’s all folks…
Harry {doc} Babad

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