Latest Posts in Mac 911

Bugs & Fixes: Screensavers in Snow Leopard

When Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) was first released, I noted that many (maybe even all) third-party screensavers would no longer work in the new OS. This was because 10.6 required 64-bit compatible screensavers, whereas existing screensavers were 32 bit.

Unlike for the similar problem affecting third-party System Preferences panes (which can be solved by having System Preferences relaunch in 32-bit mode) or plug-ins for applications such as Safari (which has an Info window option to open in 32-bit mode), there is no 32-bit work-around for screensavers. As a result, after upgrading to 10.6, I abandoned all of my old screensavers and went instead with one of Apple’s defaults: Cosmos. Not only are the outer space images impressive but, if you have two monitors, a different image appears on each screen.

Content with this arrangement, I stopped checking on the status of my former screensavers. Recently wondering what had happened to them, I visited their Web sites the other day. Pleasant surprise. All four of the screensavers that I had used the most in 10.5 have now been updated to work in 10.6. These are: 3D Weather Globe, My Living Desktop (formerly Serene Saver Pro), Fireflies, and Marine Aquarium 3.

All the updates except Marine Aquarium 3 were free. As I had Marine Aquarium 2.6, there was a $10 charge for the upgrade. I decided to pass on this.

The only install problem I had with the three remaining upgrades occurred with Fireflies. The Desktop & Screen Saver pane refused to install it, claiming it was still not compatible with 10.6. Quitting and relaunching System Preferences solved this glitch.

I had a bigger problem running Living Desktop: although it overall worked in 10.6, it did not randomly select a scene each time (repeatedly staying with the same Serene Saver default movie). Oddly, even though I had downloaded and installed the supposed latest (4.55) version, if I clicked the Check Now button for “Automatically download scenes” in Living Desktop’s pane, I was taken to a special Web page claiming that I needed to spend $14.95 to upgrade to a newer version. I could find no link to this option from the site’s Home page. Weird.

Before paying for this mystery upgrade, I tried the vendor’s troubleshooting advice. It had no effect. So I gave the upgrade a try. This did give me access to 5 new scenes, as promised, but otherwise offered no newer version of the software. The problem with random selection remained. I have still not resolved this issue.

If like me, you’d given up on and forgotten about your old screensavers, now is a good time to revisit them. They may now work, or at least mostly work, in 10.6.

Of course, many people have given up on screensavers altogether, having their Macs shift directly to display sleep (or even computer sleep) after a period of inactivity — in order to save energy. I haven’t gone quite that far yet. My screensaver kicks in after 10 minutes of idle time. Display sleep takes over after another 10 minutes. This way, I get to enjoy the screensaver for a few minutes before the screen goes dark.

Bugs & Fixes: LaunchBar causes an unexpected surprise

Step 1: Take one of the best utilities ever created for the Mac; one that I use every day. Step 2: Enhance its latest version with a promising new feature. What do you get? Not necessarily what you might expect.

You may wind up with seemingly inexplicable symptoms that lead you on a frustrating scavenger hunt until you figure out what happened. At least that’s what happened to me.

The utility in question is LaunchBar, an application launcher (plus much more) par excellence. The feature, newly added in LaunchBar 5, is called CipMerge. With ClipMerge, you can combine copy requests into one clipboard object.

The ClipMerge feature works like this: Select and copy some text, using Command-C. Now, before pasting anything, select and copy additional text, this time typing Command-C and C again (while still holding down the Command key). With ClipMerge enabled, both selections are now on LaunchBar's PasteBoard. You can repeat this multiple times to add additional selections. Whenever a ClipMerge copy occurs, LaunchBar provides audio feedback via what it describes as a “stapler sound.”

When you next paste, the combined selections appear. This could be helpful in a variety of situations. For example, if you want to copy several quotes from an online article, you could combine the separate quotes and use just one paste command to transfer them to another document.

In my case, however, three factors converged to cause problems regarding ClipMerge:

• I upgraded from LaunchBar 4 to LaunchBar 5 with only a brief glance at its list of new features. I didn’t notice the mention of ClipMerge. But ClipMerge was now active on my Mac (as I have LaunchBar always running). I accept responsibility for this oversight. If I had been more diligent in checking what was new, I would have known what to expect. But still…

• ClipMerge is enabled by default. It would be better to have it off by default. In my view, it’s not good practice to have a new systemwide feature enabled in an upgrade unless you explicitly turn it on. Otherwise, as in my case, you may fail to realize that your new “problem” is actually a consequence of the new feature.

• None of this would have mattered much except for what appears to be an intermittent bug. Although ClipMerge should only append a selection when you do Command-C-C, I found that it sometimes was invoked even when I did just Command-C. As a result, I started hearing the stapler sound, and wound up with unexpected and unintended combined items in a paste, initially with no idea as to why any of this was happening. Indeed, it should not have been happening. (Unfortunately, I cannot reproduce this bug reliably. Sometimes it happens, other times it doesn’t; I don’t know when or why.)

After posting a request for feedback on Twitter, my colleague Dan Frakes tweeted back with the suggestion that the symptoms could be due to LaunchBar 5’s ClipMerge. Indeed they were.

Explaining iPhoto Library size discrepancy

Reader Will Carter seeks insight into a suspicious iPhoto Library storage discrepancy. He writes:

I am trying to figure out why my iPhoto application shows I have 8,856 photos and 73 movies sized at 7.2GB, but, in the Finder, my iPhoto Library is 20.91GB. There is nothing in the trash in iPhoto.

Ah, but there is a lot more to your iPhoto Library package than meets the eye. Control- (right-) click on it and choose Show Package Contents. When you do you’ll find that it holds a wealth of items not counted within the iPhoto application but that consume quite a bit of space.

For example, my 98GB iPhoto Library contains an iPod Photo Cache folder that weighs in at just over 20GB. A Modified folder houses 15.4GB of data. And the Originals folder holds over 59GB of stuff. So, as London’s constabulary is so fond of saying, what’s all this then?

When you sync photos to an iPod or iPhone, iTunes creates this iPod Photo Cache folder and places in it the scaled images that are synced with your iPod or iPhone. Each file is 1.5MB. If you sync a lot of photos, over time this folder is going to be mighty bulky, as it is in my case. If you toss it out, iTunes will recreate it.

That doesn’t mean tossing it isn’t a good idea, however. That 20GB iPod Photo Cache folder of mine likely has images in it that I have no desire to ever place on an iPod or iPhone again. Chucking the folder gives me a fresh start (though it will take longer to sync the iPod or iPhone when I next want to add photos to one of these devices because iTunes will once again have to create the converted images).

As for the Modified folder, when you edit an image with iPhoto, it keeps the original in an untouched state and creates a modified copy. That’s why you can select an edited image and choose Photos -> Revert to Original (or Reprocess RAW, if you’re working with a RAW file). These copies appear in the Modified folder.

And I don’t think I need to explain what the Originals folder is for.

Bugs & Fixes: What bugs Mac OS X 10.6.2 tackles

Mac OS X 10.6.2 came out Monday, and while Macworld’s Dan Moren detailed the changes in this latest update to Snow Leopard, I wanted to check out which bugs cited in previous Bugs & Fixes entries have been eradicated by Mac OS X 10.6.2.

First up, Mac OS X 10.6.2 remedies the Guest account bug that, if you fell victim to it, could eradicate your entire Home directory.

Second, Apple informs us that the update fixes “font duplication issues” and an “issue with some PostScript Type 1 fonts not working properly.” With a bit of luck, the former fix resolves problems such as those described in Font Duplicate Misadventures. The latter is almost certainly a fix for a frustrating font bug that especially afflicted QuarkXPress users.

Apple tells us that there are improvements in “automatic printer updates.” This is a bit vague, but I am hoping that it includes better support for older printer models, an issue I detailed in this article on Ethernet-networked printers and Snow Leopard (although the main issue covered in that article is not something that would be addressed by 10.6.2).

Finally, although I never mentioned it in a Bugs & Fixes column, an important issue came up in e-mail and Twitter discussions I had with several readers: You could be suddenly and unexpectedly logged out, returned to a blue screen and logged back in. Apple claims that this too has been fixed by Mac OS X 10.6.2.

This is hardly a complete list. Mac OS X 10.6.2 fixes over two dozen other problems, as Apple details in a support article. The point of this column is simply to show that there are happy endings to at least some of the stories of bugs reported in this space. Of course, we win battles, but the war goes on. See you next time.

Speed-up iMovie clips

Andy Milder (aka Dean Hodes on Showtime’s Weeds), sends this question:

While filming Weeds last year, I borrowed a Flip recorder to record my makeup transformation into a Black man (African-American doesn’t seem to fit…who knows what I was…). I wanted to edit it and then speed it up, so you could see me go from lily-white to much darker in mere seconds. One problem: I have no idea how to do it. Help?

iMovie ’09 can do the job. Like so:

Plug your Flip camcorder into your Mac. By default iPhoto will launch and the Flip camcorder will be selected. (The FlipShare software may also launch but choose iPhoto instead.) Select the clip you want to import and click the Import Selected button. The clip will import into iPhoto.

Now launch iMovie ’09. In the Event Library area select iPhoto Videos. Your Flip clip should appear in the iPhotos Videos section at the bottom of the window. Select the clip and drag it up into the Project pane.

Double-click the clip in the Project pane and in the Clip tab of the Inspector window that appears, click the Convert Entire Clip button. (You have to do this before you’re allowed to adjust the speed of a Flip camcorder’s clips.) When iMovie finishes converting your clip the Inspector will show a speed control slider in the Clip tab. You can drag this as high as 800-percent.

However, you can make the clip even faster than that simply by entering a higher value in the Speed field. Optionally, you can tell iMovie how long you’d like the clip to play by entering a value in the Duration field below the Speed field—2:00, for example, if you’d like the clip to last 2 minutes.

Now just export your project using a command in the Share menu and you’re good to go.

Loved the drawer bit with Kevin Nealon, btw.

Bugs & Fixes: Magic Mouse loses its way

I am now on my second Magic Mouse (Get Best Current Price), having returned the first one within days of getting it. It looks as if I will soon be returning the second one. Why? Because of two irritating symptoms.

First, the mouse’s tracking speed periodically drops down to a snail’s pace. There are occasions when I can move the mouse across the entire width of my desk and the cursor will move less than an inch. This makes the mouse almost impossible to use at these times.

Increasing the Tracking speed in the Mouse System Preferences pane is of no help. Installing MouseZoom (as suggested in a Mac Observer article) may lead to some slight improvement, but is not a cure. The tracking surface appears to have no effect on the speed; for example, whether or not I use a mouse pad is irrelevant.

The second symptom is much worse: the mouse will occasionally drop its connection altogether. When this happens, a “Connection Lost” message briefly pops up on the display. This can occur even while the mouse is sitting idle. Typically, the mouse re-establishes a connection on its own, but there is no telling how long this will take. The lost connection may last a few seconds or several minutes. While the connection is lost, unless you have a second mouse available, there is pretty much nothing you can do to get things working again except wait.

A MacFixIt article on this subject offers several possible software-based cures, such as reinstalling the latest Magic Mouse update and/or re-pairing the device. I’ve tried them all. None has worked.

Perhaps you are thinking that the problem could be with the Bluetooth hardware in the Mac (a 2009 Mac Pro in my case) rather than the mouse. Doubtful. I also have a wireless Mighty Mouse (Get Best Current Price), Apple’s previous Bluetooth model. I have never had these symptoms with the older mouse. In fact, I can have both mice active at the same time. When doing this, the Mighty Mouse continues to work just fine even while the Magic Mouse drops its connection.

On the theory that I wound up with a fluke defective mouse, I returned my first one and got a second. They both have the same symptoms.

Based on feedback I have received, not all Magic Mouse owners have these symptoms. It remains possible that the symptoms are due to some interaction between the mouse and certain Mac models (such as my Mac Pro). Still, the evidence indicates an inherent problem with the Magic Mouse. Perhaps it will be fixable via an update to the mouse software. I hope so, because I don’t see the mouse as amenable to hardware fixes. Until this is resolved, if you buy a Magic Mouse and have these symptoms, I recommend returning the device before your 14-day grace period expires.

Shifting large media libraries

Reader Remo seeks a way to store media files in a location other than a user’s Home folder. He writes:

My brother’s family 24-inch iMac has a hard drive of 500GB and it’s filling up pretty fast with pictures, movies, music, etc. Usually I would just replace the hard drive in a computer with a larger one, but we would be voiding the warranty on his computer, which isn’t something we want to do.

I want to have their home directory or certain folders on their iMac to serve as a representation to where these files are actually being saved to, which is an external hard drive. I have been a long time Mac user, but I don’t see an easy way of doing this. Is there a way within MacOS X (10.6) to accomplish this?

I see several ways to approach this one.

If all you’re after is a larger startup drive for storing files, just use an external hard drive as your boot drive. Find a fast FireWire drive, clone the contents of the internal drive to it using a tool such as Bombich Software’s donation-ware Carbon Copy Cloner (making the external drive bootable in the process), and designate that external drive as the startup drive. Done.

Or, if you simply want to store media files on the external drive, this can be easily done as well. For pictures, copy the iPhoto Library file from your brother’s Pictures folder (found inside his user folder) to the external hard drive. Hold down the Option key and launch iPhoto. A dialog box will appear that asks “What Photo Library Do You Want iPhoto to Use?” Choose the copy of the iPhoto Library file you just copied and click the Choose button. iPhoto will now read and write to this iPhoto Library rather than the one on the internal drive.

For the music and movies that iTunes uses, dig down into your brother’s Music folder (also inside his user folder), open the iTunes folder, and copy the iTunes Music folder to the external drive. Launch iTunes, choose Preferences, click the Advanced tab, and click the Change button in the iTunes Media Folder Location area. Also enable the Copy Files to iTunes Media Folder When Adding to Library option. iTunes will now use this folder as well as add new media to it.

Or, you can place your brother’s user folder on the external drive. My colleague, Dan Frakes, explains how to do that in this tip from Mac OS X Hints. (Note that you no longer need to use -rsrc to do this.)

Power and the international Mac

Internationalist Paul Carpenter asks a question commonly posed by modern border-crossers. He writes:

I’m a teacher who decided to take off and teach internationally; thus I had to forfeit the beloved MacBook issued by my previous school. I’m now in Indonesia and considering purchasing a Mac mini or a MacBook. If I travel back and forth to the US and Indonesia (and elsewhere), would I be able to buy a power cord for 120V American-style outlets and a power cord for 220V Indonesian style outlets and just use the appropriate one in each country? Or is the power processing within computers customized based on where they are sold?

This one routinely confuses people who take their Macs abroad. Macs and their power adapters are—and have been for as long as I can remember—built to support 110 – 240 Volts. So, out of the box, you can jack your Mac mini or MacBook into just about any outlet you come across without fear of melting the thing. Where the country-of-purchase makes a difference is in the kind of plug that appears at the end of that power adapter. And that’s what you need to change.

Apple sells the $39 Apple World Travel Adapter Kit. This contains six power adapters that slip on to a MagSafe power adapter and older USB iPhone and iPod power adapters. If you don’t want to go the Apple route, you can find power adapters that allow you to convert the power plug from Country X to a plug that fits the outlets in Country Y. These aren’t converters. They're simply adapters to change Plug A to Plug B because, again, the Mac can handle voltages from around the world.

Note, however, that if you also take peripherals along with you that require power, you'll want to examine them very carefully to see if they're as world savvy as your Mac. If not, purchase a transformer appropriate for your destination.

Bugs & Fixes: Snow Leopard's Spelling Ignore button is ignored

After updating to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6), I noticed an odd quirk in the Spelling Checker built into Mac OS X. This is the checker used by applications such as TextEdit and Stickies. Namely, the Ignore button in the Spelling and Grammar dialog is itself ignored. That is, when a word is flagged as potentially incorrect and I click the Ignore button (indicating that I want the word to be treated as correct going forward), the word continues to pop up as incorrect for the remainder of the document. This never happened to me under Mac OS X 10.5. This bug may not show up on all Macs running Snow Leopard, but it showed up on all three of mine.

After some investigation, I determined the cause: the Automatic by Language option. You’ll find it in the popup menu at the bottom of the Spelling and Grammar dialog. It’s the default selection. This is a new option in Mac OS X 10.6, replacing 10.5’s Multilingual item. Automatic by Language determines what language you are using and automatically shifts to the the appropriate spelling dictionary. For whatever reason, it also appears to cause the Ignore bug. If I switched from Automatic by Language to U.S. English, for example, the Ignore function worked as expected.

A easily-solved related problem was that, each time I quit and relaunched an application such as TextEdit, the selection reverted back to the Automatic by Language default. To fix this, go to the Language & Text System Preferences pane. From the Text tab, access the Spelling pop-up menu and select U.S. English. This makes your selection the new default. Now the Ignore bug should be gone for good.

The remaining problem is: What should you do if you really want to use Automatic by Language? In that case, you’ll either have to wait for a Mac OS X Update that fixes the bug or learn to live with being ignored by Ignore.

How to provide tech support for your family

I’m the tech support person for my extended family. My guess is that because you’re reading this blog, you fill that same role.

My mother has been having problems with her iMac—the onset of horizontal lines on the monitor after running the computer for an hour or so, which strongly hints at a hardware problem. I helped with the purchase of that computer and, dutiful son that I am, told her that AppleCare was a must.

So, two years in, and the iMac gets funky. “No problem,” I tell her. “Just call Apple and they’ll take care of you. You’re far enough away from an Apple Store that they’ll surely send you a shipping box for its trip back to the repair depot.”

But no. It was off to the Apple Authorized Dealer a few towns away. Fair enough.

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