Mac OS X Hints

Choose How to Allocate Your .Mac Storage

When Apple increased storage for .Mac accounts from 100MB to 250MB, it didn’t clearly explain how to change the way that space was divided between iDisk and your .Mac e-mail. Start by logging in to your account at www.mac.com. Then click on your login name in the top menu (right next to Log Out); .Mac will ask you to enter your password again, and then it’ll take you to the Account Settings page. Click on the Storage Settings button, and you can then use the Manage Your Storage pop-up menu on the next screen to control how your 250MB is divided—choose a ratio that makes sense for your needs. As a general rule, you’ll probably find that the minimum allocation of 15MB is more than sufficient for e-mail; this leaves 235MB free for all your glorious photo galleries.

See Warnings for Unspecified Domains in Apple’s Mail Application

In Mac OS X 10.3’s Mail app, you can visually differentiate outbound messages that are headed for a domain other than one you specify (as long as the recipients are in your Address Book). This can be useful if, for example, your company requires that you add a confidentiality signature to e-mail messages bound for people outside the office. To enable the option, just select the Mark Addresses Not In This Domain option in the Composing tab of Mail’s preferences. Type in the domain you want to use as the control, and press the enter key. From now on, if you address a new message to recipients outside your control domain, those addresses will turn red as soon as you tab out of the To field.

While this is quite useful, what if you want to specify more than one safe domain? Although Apple doesn’t clearly document this feature, you can add multiple domains to the option’s field—just enter each one and follow it with a comma. Even though you can’t see all the domains, Mail will include them—a message composed to any domain not on the list will result in the same red address in the To field.

Change the Order of Folders Sorted by Kind in List View

If you use List view and sort a folder’s contents by Kind, you’ll see that any folders within the folder are alphabetically sorted right into the middle of the mix—since their kind is Folder. To most people, however, folders are special entities and shouldn’t be sorted with other files in the folder. Here’s how to make all your folders go to the top (or bottom) of the list when sorted by Kind.

The hardest part of this hint is navigating to the file you need to edit. In the Finder, go to System: Library: Frameworks: ApplicationServices.framework: Versions: A: Frameworks: LaunchServices.framework: Versions: A: Resources. Whew. Within that folder, you’ll see the English.lproj folder. Highlight it, and then select File: Get Info. In the Ownership & Permissions area, click on the Details triangle, click on the lock icon, and then click on the Owner pop-up menu and set it to your user name (enter your password if asked). Leave this window open; you’ll be changing it back in just a minute.

Inside the English.lproj folder is a file named Localized.strings. Drag it onto TextEdit. Find the line that reads

"Folder" = "Folder";

and insert a space before the

F

in the second

Folder

. To sort folders to the bottom of the list instead of the top, you’ll have to use one of four special characters: μ ( mu), π ( pi), Ω ( omega), or  (the Apple-logo character)—see Mac OS X Hints, November 2004, for more information). Save the file, approving any dialog boxes that may appear. In the Get Info window that you left open, change Owner back to System and then close the window.

Now you need to restart your computer—these values are read only at startup, so a simple logout and login won’t do the trick. Once you’ve restarted, you’ll be rewarded with improved sorting.

[ Contributing Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Panther Edition (O’Reilly, 2004) and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site. ]

Apple’s Mail can warn you when you’ve addressed a message to a domain other than those you specify as your controls. Add a space to the Folders line (highligted in red) in this deeply buried system file, and your folders will float to the top of lists sorted by Kind.

Check It Out: Create a Fully Functional Drive Pop-Up Menu in the Dock

You can use any folder you store after the divider mark in the Dock as a navigable pop-up menu. Just click and hold on the folder, and a new window showing the folder’s contents will appear; any folders within that folder will pop open when you roll the cursor over them. This works fine—for everything except your Volumes folder, which contains all your hard drives, CD-ROMs, and other mounted media devices (you can open this folder in the Finder by selecting Go: Go To Folder and entering

/Volumes

). If you try putting your Volumes folder in the Dock, you’ll find that your boot disk is hierarchical and that other volumes and CD-ROMs are not. But by using the power of Folder Action Scripts, you can easily create a self-updating, fully navigable Dock pop-up folder.

Start by creating an empty folder called MyDrives in your Documents folder (you might also want to give this folder a nice hard-drive icon from www.xicons.com ). Next, download the Update Drive List script. Double-click on it to open it in Script Editor, and replace

usernamehere

in the first line with your user name. Save the script and click on the Run button. Then move the script to your user’s Library: Scripts: Folder Action Scripts folder (create the last two folders if necessary). This script takes care of updating your MyDrives folder when you insert or remove an ejectable drive, such as a CD-ROM or FireWire device.

In the Finder, choose Go: Go To Folder, and enter

/Volumes

. Control-click on the Volumes folder and choose Configure Folder Actions. In the dialog box that appears, make sure that the Enable Folder Actions option is selected, and then click on the plus-sign (+) button at the bottom left. In the Open dialog box that appears, press Command-shift-G, enter

/Volumes

again, click on Goto, and then click on Open. You’ll see a pop-up list of scripts to attach; select the script you just put in the Folder Action Scripts folder (it should be near the top), and click on the Attach button. You can close the Folder Actions window when it reappears.

Drag your MyDrives folder into the Dock, and you’re done. You’ve now got a fully navigable pop-up folder that will always show your currently mounted drives. Note that every time the script runs, it sends the old aliases to the Trash. So if you often mount or unmount CDs, FireWire drives, and the like, your Trash will get pretty bloated.

Unix Tip of the Month: Utilize Extra Space on CD-Rs

When you burn a CD-R from the Finder, you may be wasting precious space. Many CD-Rs today ship with 700MB of capacity, yet the Finder will only use 670MB of that space. How, then, can you use the extra space? It requires a quick trip to Terminal, but the answer is pretty simple.

Start by creating a new folder in the Finder, and then drag in all the items you wish to burn (up to 700MB). Open Terminal and type

cd ~/Desktop

; then press the enter key (this changes Terminal’s active directory to your user’s Desktop folder). Now type

hdiutil makehybrid -o myburn.iso

(note that there’s a space after the

o

in

iso

), but don’t press enter. Instead, switch to the Finder, drag and drop the folder you just created onto the Terminal window, and press enter. Terminal should fill in the full path to the folder, and the enter key will then execute the command. What have you just done? You’ve just used the

hdiutil

Unix command to create a hybrid disk image named myburn.iso (you can choose whatever name you like, but use .iso for the extension). You’ll see the message “Creating hybrid image” in your Terminal window, as well as an indication of the task’s progress. When finished, you should see a disk image called

myburn.iso

on your desktop.

You can now either use Disk Utility to burn this image, or you can just type

hdiutil burn ~/Desktop/myburn.iso

in Terminal—insert a blank CD-R when prompted, and then just sit back and wait. When it’s done, you should have a burned CD-R with nearly 700MB of data on it. Create an autoupdating Dock folder that contains your mounted volumes to navigate to anything, anywhere, with a simple click-and-hold.