Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

How to fix Drop Box permissions issues in 10.5

If you have multiple Macs in your home, and you’re running OS X 10.5, you may run into a permissions problem with each user’s Drop Box. For those not familiar, the Drop Box folder (in your user’s Public folder) can be used to copy files and folders between machines and users without logging into the remote machine. When connected as a guest, you have rights to add files to—but not see the contents of—any user’s Drop Box. This makes the Drop Box a fast and easy way to move files from one machine to another, as you can do so without logging in.

If you receive something in your Drop Box, you should be able to access it like any other file in your user’s folder—you should be able to modify it or delete it, for instance. But some users have been having troubles with this—if they open a file that was placed in their Drop Box, it will open as Read Only, indicating they don’t have rights to make changes to that file. You are more likely to experience this problem on a machine that’s been migrated from 10.4, but I’ve also talked to someone who saw it on a brand-new iMac, so it’s not exclusive to those who upgraded to 10.5.

Why does this happen? It’s a long story, some of the details of which are beyond my comprehension, but it’s related to (in some cases) differences in 10.4 and 10.5’s handling of users and groups, and the fact that 10.5 uses access control lists (ACLs) to control how items placed in the Drop Box are handled. If you’re experiencing the problem, the likely cause is that your user is missing an ACL for the Drop Box. There are two fixes for this problem—a one-time fix, and a permanent fix.

Recover from a misplaced Character Palette window

Here’s a situation you may run into if you occasionally use your Mac with an external monitor, and use the Character Palette (Edit -> Special Characters in many programs, or via the flag icon in your menubar, via the Show Character Palette menu item. Here’s what happens…you connect your external monitor, open the Character Palette, and drag it to your external monitor. You close the Character Palette when you’re done with it, then later, disconnect the external monitor.

The next time you open the Character Palette—depending on how you had the external monitor positioned when it was attached—you may find that the top of the Character Palette is above your menu bar, making it impossible to move the window. So how do you fix this, short of installing a utility like MercuryMover? There are a couple ways to solve this problem, and both involve quitting the application that’s displaying the Character Palette.

If you’re not Terminal-adverse, it’s the quickest way to solve the problem. Open Terminal, then type killall CharPaletteServer and press Return. The other way to quit this program is by using Activity Monitor (in Applications -> Utilities). Click on the Process Name column header to sort by process name, then look for CharPaletteServer in the list. Click once on it, then click the Quit Process button in the toolbar. This will open a new dialog box; click Quit in that dialog to stop the CharPaletteServer process.

Permanently set startup disk at boot time

If your Mac has multiple bootable disks—via either a partitioned internal disk or external FireWire drives—you’re probably very familiar with the Startup Disk System Preferences panel. As you’d guess from its name, this panel controls which of your bootable volumes is used when you boot your Mac. You’re probably also familiar with the Startup Manager, which appears if you hold down the Option key during startup. The Startup Manager allows you to override the default boot disk and choose another to boot from for the current session—but doing this won’t change the default boot disk.

But what if you want to permanently start booting from the selected volume? Typically, you’d let the Mac boot from your chosen disk, then go into the Startup Disk System Preferences panel and set that same disk as the startup disk. Here’s a shortcut that may (or may not) work for you, depending on which particular Mac you own. Boot your machine with the Option key down to invoke the Startup Manager, then hold down the Control key prior to clicking on a volume to boot. (You may have to use the left and right arrow keys to select a volume first.)

If this trick is supported on your Mac, you’ll notice that upward-pointing arrow—the one that points to the selected disk—will change into a circular arrow instead, indicating that the chosen disk will not only be used to start your Mac this time, but that it will also become the default boot disk. I tested this on my 2006 MacBook Pro, and it did not work. It did, however, work on our 2008 20-inch iMac. It’s also known to work on the MacBook Air, and probably any other recent Mac. If you’ve got a multi-disk-bootable Mac, give it a try and see if it works for you—if it does, it can be a nice little timesaver for those times you’d like to permanently change the startup disk.

Improve readability of notes in iCal

Here’s a very simple Friday tip for those of you using iCal. I like to use iCal’s notes field extensively—I’ll put in all the information about an upcoming flight or hotel reservation, for instance. However, I’ve found that iCal doesn’t do the best job of wrapping the text I add to the notes field.

So here’s the simple solution…just press Option-Return anywhere you want a line break in the notes field—or press Option-Return twice to insert a blank line. I find that some judiciously-applied line breaks make my notes much more readable. If we could use some simple text styles on our notes, that would help even more—sadly, I don’t have a hint to solve that one. For now, though, line breaks and blank lines help quite a bit.

Prevent iTunes 8 from adding track numbers to filenames

As we’ve discussed in prior hints, iTunes 8 removed a number of preferences that were available in iTunes 7. In the Set some missing iTunes 8 preferences hints blog, I explained how to set four of the removed preferences—show genre when browsing, show links to the iTunes Store, play songs while importing, and load complete preview before playing. Today, I’m going to look at one of the more contentious omissions in iTunes 8—the removal of the preference to not add track numbers (and disc numbers, for multi-disc sets) to song filenames in the Finder.

Now, I’ll admit that this particular preference change was meaningless to me—I really don’t care, nor do I even know, what iTunes names my songs when it imports them. I use iTunes to make listening to music easier, and not having to care about filenames is a key part of the “making it easier” bit. However, I know this is a very important topic for many people who take a more active role in managing their music collection. So in today’s blog, I’ll explain how to disable the addition of track and disc numbers to filenames—and more importantly, perhaps, how to reverse the effects if you’ve already imported a bunch of music and noticed the filename problem.

If you’d rather not have iTunes add disc and track numbers to your filenames, quit iTunes, open Terminal (in /Applications -> Utilities), and type these two commands, pressing Return after each line:

Keyboard shortcuts for iTunes’ Get Info window

If you’re a serious iTunes user, you’re probably well aware of the Get Info window (File -> Get Info, or press Command-I). The Get Info window in iTunes contains seven tabs—Summary, Info, Video, Sorting, Options, Lyrics, and Artwork—that give you fine-grain control over all of those options for a given track in your library. But again, if you’re a serious iTunes user, you doubtlessly know all this.

What you may not know about this window is that you don’t have to reach for the mouse to change tabs—instead, you can just press Command-1 for the Summary tab, Command-2 for the Info tab, Command-3 for the Video tab, and so on. For me, this is a much quicker way to get to the various tabs, instead of moving between keyboard and mouse. (Once a tab is active, you can use the Tab key to reach the various fields on that tab.) If you’re running iTunes 8, this same trick works in the new Multiple Item Info window—Command-1 is the Info tab, Command-2 the Video tab, and so forth.

As an added bonus, you can even change tracks with the Get Info window open, and without reaching for the mouse to click on the Previous or Next buttons. That’s because—even though they’re grayed out in the Controls menu—the keyboard shortcuts for previous (Command-Left Arrow) and next (Command-Right Arrow) song work with the Get Info window open.

Secret controls for the new iTunes 8 visualizer

As noted in our iTunes 8 first look and review, iTunes 8 features a new default visualizer that many people--myself included--find much more visually interesting than the version in prior releases. As I noted in the First Look, after enabling the visualizer (View -> Show Visualizer or Command-T), you can call up its help screen by pressing the "?" key. On the help screen, you'll see that you can press M to change modes, P to change palettes, N to toggle nebula mode on and off, and much more.

But you won't find the following keys listed in help--these keys are left over from the days of yore, when the now-in-iTunes visualizer was an independent iTunes plug-in known as Magnetosphere. These hidden keys offer even more control over the behavior of the visualizer:

• + and -: Increase or decrease the intensity (brightness) of the particles; multiple presses further increase or decrease the intensity.
• A and S: Add or Subtract particles to the visualizer. You can make the visualizer as complex (or sparse) as you wish.
• R: Reset the intensity and particle count to their default values.
• E: When in nebula mode (press N), this greatly accentuates the nebula clouds, making them very easy to see. (If you've used the M key to change modes, you may find that the nebula clouds aren't visible; it seems they're only used in certain modes.)

There may be other commands that aren't covered in the help screen, but these are the only ones I've run across so far.

Edit Mail’s data detector iCal events directly in iCal

If you’re running OS X 10.5, you’re probably aware of the new “data detctors” feature in Mail (and in iChat via a Terminal command). Data detectors see dates, times, and addresses in e-mails, and provide the ability to add those items to iCal or your Address Book, as appropriate.

When Mail’s data detectors find a date or time in the body of an e-mail, a dashed box and drop-down arrow will appear when the mouse hovers over that data; click the mouse, and a drop-down menu appears with two options: Create New iCal Event and Show This Date in iCal. If you choose to create a new iCal event, a dialog box that resembles the standard iCal “add an event” box appears as a pop-up within Mail. Enter the event’s location, calendar, alarm, and other data, then click Add to iCal to send the event off to iCal.

While this is very useful, there are some limitations. The pop-up box in Mail lacks some of the fields you’ll find in the same box in iCal—attachments, attendees, and URL are all missing, for instance. Also, you can’t add multiple alarms to events created with this dialog box in Mail. To do these things, you’d typically add the event to iCal, switch to iCal, find the newly-added event, and then edit it as needed.

Sync devices in iTunes via keyboard shortcut

Here’s a little timesaver that—even though it’s specific to the iPhone/iPods and iTunes—may help you in other programs as well. As regular readers know, I’m a huge fan of using the keyboard whenever possible, so I usually assign shortcuts to often-used menu items via the Keyboard Shortcuts tab of the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel.

After reaching for the mouse one time too many to press the Sync button to re-sync my iPhone (after installing application updates, for instance), I decided to add a keyboard shortcut for the Sync button—you may not have noticed it, but Sync “User’s iPhone” is a menu option in the File menu. (Today’s hint can be just as easily used for iPods as well as iPhones, of course.)

There was just one challenge to overcome to get this done: the menu item uses smart quotes (both the single and double quotes) instead of the straight quotes one gets by pressing the quotes key on the keyboard. So how do you create a keyboard shortcut for a menu item that uses smart quotes?

Restore Screen Sharing buttons to 10.5.5

As I discussed in my deeper look at 10.5.5, our very-popular hint on adding more power to 10.5’s screen sharing mostly no longer works (only the Bonjour browser portion of the hint still works). Today, however, I’m going to explain how to bring back the missing functionality, in two different ways—one easy but potentially dangerous, the other more complicated (it requires you have Xcode installed) but completely safe.

The simple solution

First, the simple but potentially dangerous solution: just use the Screen Sharing application from OS X 10.5.4. The reason this is potentially dangerous is that if there were any security fixes for screen sharing, you’ll be giving up those fixes by reverting to the previous version. For that reason alone, I do not recommend this method, especially if you’ll be using screen sharing across the internet. For those working with a few Macs at home, behind a firewall, however, the risks are probably acceptable. But just to be certain you understand…if you implement the solution in this way and your machine is then compromised, the fault is entirely yours!

First, you’ll need to find a copy of Screen Sharing from 10.5.4; I can think of a few ways to legally obtain this file. First, if you’ve got a Mac you haven’t yet updated to 10.5.5, you can copy it from there. Second, if you use Time Machine and haven’t customized it to exclude system files, you’ll find a copy in your backups from before the 10.5.5 update. Finally, you can use a tool like Pacifist, which can extract system files from your OS X 10.5 installation DVD.