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Mac 911 Tips, tricks and solutions for your Mac problems
Locating and dispensing with old applications
Reader Chas Hamilton has come down with a case of spring-cleaning fever. He writes:
I was just looking at my Applications folder that contains hundreds of apps and realized that there are a lot of old things in there that I never used. I came up with the clever idea to sort my applications by the date they were last opened so that I could toss out old apps. (I figured that if I hadn’t touched something in the last two years I wasn’t likely to.) I’m running Snow Leopard and the problem is that when I open my Applications folder and choose View -> View Options, the option to view files by Last Opened is grayed out. Is there some way to make it active?
You’re correct, Apple disabled that option in Snow Leopard. I’ve attempted to edit the com.apple.finder.plist file in order to make it active with no luck (though you can edit this file to enable other view options). But where there’s a will (or, at least, a Chris), there’s a way.
Open the Applications folder and then press Command-F. In the resulting search window click on Applications at the top of the window so that you’re searching that folder. Configure the pop-up menus at the top of the window to read Last Opened Date is Before X/X/2010 (a data approximately two years ago). Click the Plus button to create another condition. Configure this one to read Kind is Application. (You do this because your Applications folder may contain files that haven’t been opened in the last two years.)
Use OS X's Find feature to locate old applications
The list below should contain only those applications that you haven’t opened in the last two years. If you don’t see a Last Opened column in this window, press Command-J to bring up the view options window and enable the Last Opened option (which, in this case, does work). With this column visible you can then sort the list by date, making it easy to locate those applications that you really, really haven’t used lately.
Sync services gone crazy!
Reader Dale Creekmur has been ferreting around in Activity Monitor and finds an entry that concerns him. He writes:
When using Activity Monitor I find that my Mac’s CPU activity increase greatly when something called Microsoft Sync is running. I quit that process, and CPU activity returns to normal. My questions are: What is this process? Is it needed/useful? And how can I (or should I) eliminate it entirely from my iMac to prevent its returning?
For the benefit of readers who are unaware of Activity Monitor’s many glories, the lowdown: You use Activity Monitor (found in /Applications/Utilities) to see how your Mac is occupying its time—the processes its running, the amount of memory (both real and virtual) consumed by various processes, and etcetera. If your Mac is running slowly, it’s not a bad idea to fire up Activity Monitor, click on the %CPU heading, and see which processes (or applications) float to the top. If one process/application appears there almost constantly and is eating up several dozen digits of your CPU, you could have a problem (though if that process/application is churning away on something serious—rendering video, for example—that’s to be expected and the churning will stop when the job is complete).
With that out of the way, on to your questions.
1. With Microsoft Office 2008, Microsoft introduced the ability for its email client, Entourage, to synchronize contacts with Apple’s Address Book, events with iCal, and Entourage Notes with MobileMe. The process tasked with doing this was called Microsoft Sync Services. It would do this noble work if you opened Entourage’s preferences, clicked on Sync Services, and enabled any of these three syncing options.
Gifting Mac App Store apps, emailing videos, and more
It's time to flush out the latest collection of too-short-for-a-full-entry Mac 911 questions and answers. We start with reader reader SuSu:
Gifting Mac applications
Is there a way to gift an application from the Mac App Store as you can with the iOS App Store?
No. Unlike with the App Store on your iOS device or in iTunes you won’t find a Gift This App link on the Mac App Store. What I suggest you do instead is to launch iTunes, click the iTunes Store link, and then click the Buy iTunes Gifts link on the store’s home page. On the resulting iTunes Gifts page click the Buy Now link in the Email Gift Certificates area, purchase a gift certificate that covers the cost of the application you want to gift, and then issue the gift certificate to the object of your affection.
Gently suggest how an iTunes gift might be spent
Then open the Mac App Store, select the application you want to send as a gift, and from the price pull-down menu choose Tell a Friend. In the Tell a Friend window that appears, enter the giftee’s email address and in the Message field enter a message that strongly hints that you'd like that gift certificate to be used for the purchase of this application.
Teach a man to fish…
From reader Jake Tesler:
Empty the #$&@! trash already!
Reader Jim Young has a trash that’s starting to stink up the place. He writes:
I found that I was running out of space on my hard drive so I located some large files and tossed them in the trash. But when I tried to empty the trash I received a warning indicating that the trash couldn’t be emptied because of a –8003 error. I really need to empty the trash but it won’t respond. What can I do?
I wouldn’t bother trying to learn what that specific –8003 error means. The Mac can throw up all kinds of error codes and very few of them make sense (or have much published about them). Instead, just assume something’s mucked up and go from there.
We’ll start with general muckage. Launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), select your startup drive in the left side of the window, click the First Aid tab, and click Verify Disk. Disk Utility will perform a check of your startup volume looking for any obvious errors. If it finds any errors, boot from another volume (in Lion this can be the Recovery HD partition, in earlier versions of the Mac OS, boot from the latest OS X installer disc). Again, run Disk Utility from this new volume, select your regular startup volume, and click Repair Disk.
With luck, everything will be repaired, you’ll return to your startup drive, and be able to empty the trash. Without that luck, you may have to turn to a sterner utility such as Alsoft’s $100 Disk Warrior.
Automatically zoom Safari pages on launch
Reader Ted Adams would like to make Safari a little easier on the eyes. He writes:
When I open Safari on my 27-inch iMac, the image only takes up a third of the screen width, making reading the small print difficult. I use the “Smaller/Bigger” icons in the menu bar to enlarge the image, but I have to do this every time I open Safari. Is there a way to make Safari open in the “Bigger” format automatically?
I'll offer two ways to approach this one.
If you simply want pages to display larger fonts, you can do that by choosing Safari -> Preferences, clicking the Advanced preference, and enabling the Never Use Font Size Smaller Than option that appears next to the Universal Access heading. Choose a font size such as 14. When you do this, fonts on pages you visit should appear at a size of 14 point or larger. (Should is important here. Not all pages respond to this setting.)
Using Safari's Advanced tab you can ask that fonts meet a minimum point size
If you simply want Safari to automatically open at a particular zoom setting you can do that too. Taking a cue from our very own Mac OS X Hints, this tip describes the process.
Bugs & Fixes: When Outlook searches fail… and more
Recently, after selecting to do a search in Microsoft Outlook, I got a “No Results” message. I was certain the email I was seeking existed in the folder I was searching. So I did a few tests. Sure enough, I discovered that any search I now attempted came back with “No Results.” Uh-oh.
This led me to check Microsoft’s Answers site. Here I found a thread precisely describing my symptom. This, in turn, led to another helpful Answers page. The postings on these pages contained several potential solutions. While no one solution worked for everyone, there was agreement as to the most likely road to success. It’s a road that may surprise you: Outlook depends on OS X’s Spotlight database for its searches. Therefore, anything that causes problems between Spotlight and Outlook may prevent Outlook’s searches from succeeding.
The top recommended solution is to re-index the relevant Outlook data in Spotlight. To do this:
1. Open System Preferences and select the Spotlight pane.
Software » Mobile » Navigation
Pinpoint your location
Reader Catherine Bailey is interested in marking her territory. She writes:
When I’m out with my iPhone I sometimes need to mark locations nearby. I try to do that by dropping a pin in the Maps app, but I can drop only one pin. Can I add more?
The ability to drop only one pin is a regrettable limitation of the Maps app, but you’re not entirely out of luck. In Maps drop your first pin by tapping and holding on the iPhone’s display. The familiar purple pin will drop down.
Tap on the blue > button on the right side of the small label that appears and in the resulting Dropped Pin window tap Add to Bookmarks. In the Add Bookmark window that appears, enter a name for your pin and tap Save.
Repeat this process for any additional pins you wish to drop. When you need to locate one of these locations, tap the Bookmarks icon in Map’s Search field, and tap the appropriate entry. Maps will place a red pin at that location.
Remotely transfer iPhoto images to iPhone
Reader Robert Zavod would like greater access to his photos from his iPhone. He writes:
When using my iPhone on the road, I’d like to access my iMac and its iPhoto library and move some of the images in that library to my iPhone. Is there a way to do that?
Yes. There are a couple of ways to approach this. The first is the dead-simple way (recently suggested to me by reader @snaab via Twitter) and the second is my original method, which can be more broadly helpful for communicating remotely with your Mac but is more complicated. We’ll start with the simple solution.
On your iPhone download a copy of Tunaverse Media’s free Blinq Photo app. On your Mac, travel to Tunaverse’s website and grab an equally-free copy of Blinq for Mac. Fire up the Mac client and create an account (this requires that you create a username and password and enter an email address). Once your account has been created you’ll be asked whether you’d like Blinq to use your iPhoto or Aperture library. Choose iPhoto.
Restarting a remote Mac
Reader, tech dabbler, and Weeds actor Andy Milder, occasionally contacts me for technical advice. In exchange, I drop his name. I'd additionally like to drop this bit of advice in response to his latest query:
I want to restart my Mac remotely from another Mac. Is there a way to do that?
Absolutely. If you want to do it via the Mac’s GUI, move to the remote Mac, launch System Preferences, select the Sharing preference, and enable the Screen Sharing option.
When you want to shut down that Mac remotely, sit down in front of another Mac on the same network, select the remote Mac under the Shared entry in any Finder window, click the Share Screen button in that window, enter that Mac’s administrator’s name and password, and click Connect.
The remote Mac’s screen will appear on the local Mac’s desktop. Treat it like your local Mac and, within that window, choose Restart from its Apple menu. It will do as you’ve commanded.
Using FTP with an iPad
Reader Gregg Andrews has an iOS device here and files there and wonders how to bring the two together. He writes:
My company keeps a lot of work files on an FTP server. When I travel I’d like to take just my iPad rather than both an iPad and a laptop, but I need to access those files. Is there any way to do that?
Sure. All you need to do is install an FTP client on your iPad and you’re (mostly) good to go. (I’ll get to the mostly in a bit.)
Just as you would with a program like Transmit or Fetch on your Mac, you fire up your iPad’s FTP client, enter the address for the FTP server, and your username and password and you’ll see the server’s files.
The App Store features a load of FTP clients. I use LessIsMore Development’s $2 FTP Client Pro as it’s easy to use, allows me to view compatible documents within the app, and, if it can’t open some files, lets me download and then open them in a different app. It doesn’t support SFTP or FTPS and its interface is really bare bones, but it satisfies my mostly meager needs.
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