Latest Posts in Mac 911

Bugs & Fixes: Amazon forces a Delicious Library update

Back in June, Delicious Monster released an iPhone companion app to its Delicious Library application for the Mac. The app allowed you to sync the contents of your Delicious Library database directly to your iPhone, via Wi-Fi. Once synced, you could view the data on the iPhone, even without a Wi-Fi connection. Very nice.

Sadly, the app did not stay around for long. Delicious Monster was forced to remove the program from the App Store—because the app displays data obtained from Amazon.com and Amazon objected to this. The basis of the retailer’s objection was section 4e of Amazon’s recently revised API License Agreement, which states (edited for brevity): “You will not, without our approval, use any Product Advertising Content on any application designed for use with a mobile phone or other handheld device.” Amazon was not giving its permission here. So goodbye Library app.

One bright note: If you were lucky enough to have grabbed the Delicious Library iPhone app before it was ejected from the App Store, your copy continues to work—at least for now.

The Mac version of Delicious Library has long been connecting to Amazon. This continues to be done with Amazon’s consent. However, things just got a bit stickier. Which brings me to why I am mentioning all of this in Bugs & Fixes.

A new 2.2 version of Delicious Monster for the Mac is in the works (it may be out by the time you read this). While Amazon is not requiring that Delicious Library sever its ties to the Amazon database, it is instituting a new procedure for maintaining the link-up. “Amazon now requires all users of their data (e.g., Delicious Library) to digitally ‘sign’ requests for information.” The 2.2 update contains the code needed for Delicious Library to comply with this new requirement.

For Delicious Library users, the upgrade is essential. If you decide to pass, “you will not be able to scan in, update, or look up new items automatically as of August 15, 2009.”

P.S. The Delicious Library 2.2 update also fixes one of the unlikeliest bugs I have ever seen: “A display bug where ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (or any movie with the consecutive letters ‘umd’ in its title) would display as a Sony mini-disc.” Oh yes, it’s the old umd bug.

Stacks' hierarchical view

Reader Dennis Vogel needs some clarification on how Leopard’s Dock folders work and I provide that clarification tout de suite. He writes:

How can I make the spring-loaded Dock stack I have for my Application folder hierarchical? When I click on Applications in the Dock it previews the Applications folder and shows all the apps so that I can launch them, unless they’re in a folder. If an app is in a folder I can’t drill down and launch it. The Dock opens the folder. I want it to drill down into the folder so I can open the app itself, without opening a new Finder window.

Right. What you’re looking for is the nested hierarchy from the Good Old Days, which briefly disappeared when Leopard first appeared. It’s back now and works this way:

Click and hold on the Applications folder in the Dock and make sure that the Folder and List options are checked. That should result in the behavior you’re after.

Regrettably, whenever you drag a folder or volume to the Dock it will, by default, do things the old way. Folders or volumes that have just a few items will, when clicked on, display as a fan. Those with lots of items will display in a grid view. In order for you to see the hierarchical view that you (and I) prefer, you must choose these Folder and List settings for each folder or volume you drag into the Dock. (And if anyone knows of a tool for tweaking this behavior so added items always appear in this view, I’m all ears).

Mac 911 and the summer vacation

Just when I think I’ve got this summer-vacation-and-technology thing down, new lessons present themselves. Take this last week, for example, during which I learned:

My iPhone 3GS hates humidity. I spent an uncharacteristically muggy week near Newport Beach, California and it drove my iPhone nuts. The right side of the display (when in portrait mode) became either completely unresponsive (meaning I could tap icons along the right side of the Home screen with no results) or confused (typing the letter O on the keyboard produced a P or I and tapping Delete did either nothing or triggered the key multiple times). Once I moved to drier climes and let the iPhone breath for a few minutes it became its responsive old self.

To work around these liabilities I turned the iPhone on its side when I needed to type something, thus putting the “dead zone” at the top of the screen (thank you iPhone 3.0 software update) and used the Search screen to launch applications that couldn’t be opened by touch (ditto on the 3.0 thanks).

But that iPhone is darned useful. And it is because it’s a drag to drag a laptop around the house to find the sweet spot for the neighbor’s generously unprotected Wi-Fi network. Because Garmin wants subscription dollars to display congestion information when the iPhone’s Maps app offers it for free. Because, unlike my Garmin Nuvi, my iPhone didn’t demand that I get aboard a dagnabbed ferry to cross a tiny sliver of water when I could easily avoid the trip by driving an extra mile. Because Oakley’s free Surf Report lets you know that, spectacular though the Wedge’s freakishly giant waves may be to observe, they’re not the kind of thing you want to put your daughter in.

Demographics favor a tablet. This was an extended family vacation and the most senior member of our clan is Lew, who will become a centenarian in December. As you might imagine, his eyes aren’t what they used to be and he’s confined to reading the paper with a magnifying bar and can read only large-type books. He started one morning by saying “What about this Kindle thing? I hear you can change the size of the print. Would that be something I could use?”

“Absolutely,” I replied. “The Kindle DX, in particular, would be great for you because the larger screen lets you see more of the page.”

“What about the Internet? I can’t operate a computer but maybe this could make it easy for me to look at things on the Internet.”

“That’s not something the Kindle does, but there are rumors that Apple may release a tablet computer that operates like an iPhone. If that’s true, there are sure to be some developers who understand that this kind of technology could benefit not only technophiles, but seniors as well.”

Taking your kid kayaking is more rewarding than Disneyland. Trust me on this one, her memory of first paddling her father around Newport Bay is going to stick with her far longer than the 20-minute wait for Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

Bugs & Fixes: Don't worry if CoverScout stops responding

I own Equinux’s CoverScout 3. It’s a useful program for adding album cover art that may be missing from the songs in your iTunes Library. As a registered user, I received an e-mail from Equinux this week. It contained a bit of bad news and good news.

The bad news was that “Our busy buddies at Google have made a few changes to Google Images. Unfortunately one of those changes can cause CoverScout 3 to stop responding.”

The good news was much better: A new version of CoverScout that fixes the problem would be out shortly. And if you couldn’t wait for the update, Equinux had a simple work-around: “Just uncheck Google Images under: CoverScout 3 -> Preferences -> Search.”

Even if you were not a registered user, the same announcement showed up when you next launched the application (assuming you had a connection to the Internet at the time). Very effective. It’s unlikely that any CoverScout user will get blindsided by this problem or be mystified as to what to do about it. There are many other software companies that could learn a lesson in customer relations here.

As to exactly what was going on, the folks at Equinux informed me that it was “nothing serious. Google just changed something in their API that forced us to change the way we’re handling requests within the application.” Technically, I suppose this doesn’t even qualify as a bug, as “bug” would imply an error in the CoverScout code. This is more of an “unavoidable temporary incompatibility.”

In any case, the needed update was released within 48 hours of the e-mail, as promised. You can install the update automatically, right from CoverScout itself. If you aren’t alerted to the update when you launch the program, simply select Check for Updates… from the CoverScout 3 menu.

Bugs & Fixes: Failure to launch bugs

This week, Apple released updates to its Final Cut and Logic products. (Macworld has extensive coverage of the new features in Logic as well as the Final Cut Studio suite.)

If you install these programs on your Mac and later use Migration Assistant to transfer your data to a new Mac, you will likely find that these apps no longer open on the new Mac, crashing on launch instead. What happened? As explained by Apple, “Final Cut Studio (2009) and Logic Studio (2009) install a newer version of the ProKit framework, which the Mac OS X 10.5 Migration Assistant does not migrate.” Oops. Fortunately, the fix is simple: Go to Software Update and install the ProKit update that should appear there.

This is just the latest in a string of similar issues that can and often do result from using Migration Assistant. Almost the exact same problem occurs with Aperture 2. And, as I noted several weeks ago, iLife ’08 and ’09 applications may not launch after a migration because the latest version of the iLife Media Browser does not migrate. The solution here is to install the latest iLife Media Browser update.

Also released this week was Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 (12.2.0). As is typical, you install it via the Microsoft AutoUpdate application. While installing the update will not result in any of the Office applications failing to launch, Microsoft confirms that it may prevent the programs from opening certain Office files.

The problem primarily occurs with documents saved in the XML format. As this is the default format used by all Office 2008 applications (Word .docx, Excel .xlsx, and PowerPoint .pptx or .ppsx), this is hardly a trivial matter. However, as Microsoft further explains, the symptom occurs only with XML documents that attempt to “abide by an interpretation of the ISO29500 Office Open XML (OOXML) standard” (see this Wikipedia page for more on exactly what this means).

The specific symptom is that, when you try open any of the affected documents, an error message pops up claiming that: “You may have to download the latest updates for Office for Mac.” As you’ve just installed the latest update, something clearly seems amiss. Still, Microsoft advises checking again for a possible update. (Perhaps the company is working on one right now.)

Otherwise, the workaround is to resave the file in a “format other than Open XML. For example, you can save the file in the .xls, .doc, or .ppt file format.” Of course, if you can’t open the file, you can’t resave it, so the advice is a bit of a Catch-22. Potential solutions are to open and resave the file on a machine running a Windows version of Office or use a Mac program that can open Office files (such as using Numbers to open problem Excel documents).

Hiding the menu bar

Reader Desmond Biss would like an even cleaner Desktop. He writes:

I use our living room’s LCD TV as a monitor for our Mac mini. Within System Preferences one can set the Dock to automatically hide and show. Is there any way to set the menu bar on the Desktop to also automatically hide and show?

With some help, yes. That help takes the form of Chieh Cheng’s free MagicMenu 2, a collection of AppleScripts that work a little plist magic, likely along the lines described by our own Rob Griffiths in early 2007.

Just run the Finder MagicMenu On script, log out of your account, log back in, and the menu bar behaves much like the Dock when you have the Hiding feature turned on. The menu bar is absent until you place your cursor in the area once occupied by it. At this point it appears.

To undo this, simply run the Finder MagicMenu Off script, log out, log back in, and your menu bar remains omnipresent.

Put spare hard drives to work

Reader Bill Robertson, like a lot of us, has accumulated quite a collection of hard drives. He writes:

I have the original Mac Pro that I loaded with four 250GB SATA drives. That 1TB of storage filled up faster than I thought it would and so I replaced some of them with 500GB drives. Things are getting tight again and now that prices have come down, I’m thinking of 1TB drives. The problem is that I have a lot of old SATA drives that are sitting around. What should I do with them?

As we deal with larger files—pictures, audio, and video—we need places to put them. The CDs and DVDs that once seemed so expansive just don’t have the kind of capacity that many of us require. That leaves us with hard drives. And because hard drives fill up, we increasingly find ourselves in situations such as yours—swapping out lower-capacity hard drives for more capacious drives.

It’s silly to toss out these perfectly serviceable older drives. So allow me to suggest three ways to put them to use.

Drobo.

Read more...

Bugs & Fixes: Safari bug confounding Apple Support searches?

Here’s an odd little problem with no sure solution.

The other day, running Safari, I searched for a Knowledge Base article at Apple’s Support site. I entered a query into the Search Support text box; a list of articles soon appeared. However, when I clicked the link for one of the articles, the following error popped up:

Request Entity Too Large. The requested resource /kb/index does not allow request data with GET requests, or the amount of data provided in the request exceeds the capacity limit. Apache/1.3.33 Server at support.apple.com Port 80.

This type of error may occur in a variety of contexts, all related to a browser attempting to access an online database. However, in my particular case, the error seemed restricted to Safari. When I tried Firefox instead, I had no trouble loading the article via the same link.

Not surprisingly, the problem appeared limited to the database URLs generated by the Search Results, such as:

Read more...

.

iCal and shifting time zones

Reader Eric Brown has unwillingly traveled in time and is displeased. He writes:

While traveling recently, I stumbled upon an iCal feature that took me by surprise, and not in a good way. Changing the computer’s time zone (in the Date & Time system preference) changes the time stamp of every item—past and future—in my iCal calendar. Since I use iCal for my time sheet, it’s pretty strange to look back and see that a 10 AM meeting in Vancouver is now logged as a 1 PM meeting, just because I’m now in New York. And when I log my 9 AM New York meeting, it’ll show up as a 6 AM meeting when I return home and reset the time zone. Is there a way to set iCal items so that the current time zone setting leaves past events unchanged?

You’re not the first to be perplexed by this issue. Fortunately, Apple’s got your back on this one.

Launch iCal, choose Preferences from the iCal menu, click the Advanced tab, and enable the Turn On Time Zone Support option. When you do this, a pop-up menu appears in the iCal window’s upper-right corner. This pop-up menu displays the time zone configured within the Date & Time system preference.

When you change time zones within Date & Time, your events will shift, just as you’ve observed. To shift them to display in a different time zone, simply click on this pop-up menu and choose the time zone you'd like. If an appropriate one doesn’t appear, select Other and, in the sheet that appears, choose the time zone you want and click OK.

Ah, but what if you want to display Vancouver events in Vancouver time and New York events in NY time? Easy enough. Select the event, press Command-E to cause the event edit window to appear, and choose the time zone you desire from the Time Zone pop-up menu within the edit window (it appears just above the Repeat entry).

A survivor's guide to family Mac upgrades

While pacing the office floor, wracking my brain for something to fill this space, I found this note slipped under the door:

Dear Beloved-Yet-Interfering Husband,

Apparently you’ve been at it again—updating my iMac without telling me. My computer is now a misery to use—my email client demands passwords that I no longer recall, I can’t print, Safari insists on haunting me with a wall of websites I’ve previously visited, and I can’t even manage to shut the damned thing off because something called “HP Printer Firmware Update” (which is nowhere to be seen in the Dock, thank you very much) has allegedly interrupted shut down.

Before others follow your scatter-brained advice and upgrade their spouse’s computers on the sly, perhaps you could counsel them how to do the job properly.

Your Devoted Wife

P.S. Thank goodness you have no inclination or talent for working on cars.

If you’ve received such a paper-lashing (and have recovered from the shame of same) you know that, even with the best intentions, we sometimes leave these jobs undone. So that I may avoid a week on the couch, let me offer some general pre- and post-upgrade advice for those working on a loved one's computer.

Get the passwords. If your victim is like most people, they will have entered an e-mail password once and then promptly forgotten it. Before performing a major upgrade, ask them if they know their e-mail password(s). If not, ask for their administrator’s password and have a look around the Mac’s keychain, making note of the e-mail passwords you find.

Also, travel to ~/Library/Keychains, make a copy of the login.keychain file, and tuck it away in a safe place (on a USB key drive, for instance). Should you need to rummage around in it later because some password didn’t survive the upgrade, you can move some of its passwords or other login information to the new login keychain. (I’d do this by renaming the old keychain file, opening it in Keychain Access, and dragging the needed items from the old to new keychain. You’ll need the Administrator’s password from the old account to do this.)

Read more...