Tag: Finder

Some very useful Contextual Menu add-ons

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

The other day I was using my Titanium PowerBook G4 and I needed to perform a series of checks on a couple of folders containing a bunch of old digital photos. I remembered that a few years back I had stumbled on a series of very cool third-party Contextual Menu add-ons but I couldn’t locate them right away or recall their precise names. I turned to the trusty iBook G3/466 and after a bit of digging I was able to find some information, and to find these Contextual Menu add-ons again on the Web. They were all developed by Pixture Studio and the company has made them available on this page.

They are all very useful, and also very light on the system, which is perfect if you still use a vintage iBook or PowerBook. My favourites (and those I needed for the task at hand) are PhotoToolCM and QuickImageCM. Installing these little extensions is quite easy: you download the compressed archive, it extracts into a DMG file, you mount the disk image and there’s a handy AppleScript application that will install the software in the right place for you. Just follow the prompts and you’re good to go in a few seconds. Once the add-ons are installed, and you relaunch the Finder, they’ll appear at the bottom of the contextual menu in the Finder when you right-click or Ctrl-click on an item.

PhotoToolCM adds two entries to the contextual menu, Photo Exif Info and Photo Tool:

#alttext#

 

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As you can see, Photo Exif Info is quite handy: you select the photo you want information about, Ctrl-click on its icon, choose Photo Exif Info and the EXIF data appears right there in a submenu. As far as I know, this is, to this day, still the quickest way to have that amount of EXIF data on the fly. It was incredibly useful for what I needed to do — quickly parse a folder full of photos I didn’t remember much about, either the camera I used to shoot them with, or the date/time. (The information you see in the screenshots is just to show you how the tool works, it’s not related to what I was doing.)

And the Photo Tool menu gives you a series of powerful features you can take advantage of without leaving the Finder. Same goes for QuickImage — take a look:

#alttext#

You can quickly convert an image in a bunch of different formats by selecting Convert to:

#alttext#

(The JPEG command has yet another submenu where you can choose the quality for the JPEG conversion).

 

In the QuickImage submenu, if you choose View… you’ll get a mini image editor directly in the Finder:

#alttext#

It’s not a full-blown editor, but for basic retouching is surely enough. And you’re still inside the Finder! And did I say the impact on CPU resources is minimal? This window in Activity Monitor on my PowerBook G4 17″ showed 0.2% CPU usage.

 

System Requirements

These Contextual Menu add-ons only work on PowerPC Macs. On the Pixture website you’ll notice Jaguar, Panther under System Compatibility, but they also work under Tiger and Leopard. (In Leopard, the additional contextual menus are added to the More command at the bottom of the standard Finder contextual menu — you can see that in the screenshots above). These tools do not work on Intel Macs. I hope you’ll find them as useful as I did, and if someone from Pixture Studio is reading this, thank you for creating these great add-ons.

OpenDoc: an introduction

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

The following article was written by Chris Cain for Personal Computer World and published in the March 1996 issue of the magazine. For a more general overview of the OpenDoc technology and what that meant, the Wikipedia has an interesting entry about it. I’ve chosen to reprint this article because I find it to be a good, simple introduction to OpenDoc, which was in my opinion one of the most promising features of the Mac OS system. Sadly it was terminated even before it could grow and improve.

Apple recently released the first version of its component software architecture, OpenDoc, which plays a major part in the company’s future plans. OpenDoc could completely reshape the way in which we work with Macs, PCs and other platforms. In fact, it’s my Utility of the Month.

OpenDoc is officially described as a multi-platform, component software architecture that enables developers to evolve applications into component software, or create new component software applications. In more simple terms, it’s about breaking down today’s monolithic software apps into smaller, more manageable components that can then be mixed and matched to suit every user’s needs.

At the moment, if you wanted to create, say, a newsletter containing text, graphics and spreadsheet data, you would probably edit each piece of data in a separate application and either export it as a file and import it into your main application, or cut and paste info using the clipboard. Either way, you end up loading three or four different packages and using only a subset of the tools on offer. It takes a long time and you can experience problems such as unsupported file formats and lack of memory.

With OpenDoc you have “Part Editors” instead of applications and your work is based around documents called “Stationery”. Part Editors are small sets of tools for doing jobs like editing text, manipulating pictures and so on, and Stationery files are templates for doing certain types of work. Each different type of Stationery contains links to the Part Editors used for that type of job.

To prepare the same newsletter with OpenDoc you would use a piece of stationery that has been set up with links to text editing, drawing and numeric data Editors. You’d then create your data using these and if you wanted to import a file created with something else, you’d just drag it from the desktop onto your document. If you’ve set up a stationery file without a certain set of tools, you just drag the appropriate Editor onto your document and they appear.

The beauty of working like this is that you use only as much RAM as you need for the job, and all tools are available whenever you want them without loading lots of individual applications. Part Editors should also be much easier to develop and maintain than larger applications, and will give small developers more of a chance to compete with large companies like Microsoft.

There will still be room for big applications in an OpenDoc world, but they will need to support embedded OpenDoc parts.

Apple’s OpenDoc 1.0 contains a Control Panel for setting up associations between Editors and different types of data, a few sample Stationery files and some very simple Editors to accompany them. I’ve been putting these through their paces over the past few weeks and have successfully managed to build a document using this method. Although it’s difficult at the start, once you get into it everything begins to make sense.

If you want to see for yourself what OpenDoc is all about, you can download it from Apple’s World Wide Web support sites.

Remember PowerTalk?

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

I didn’t. Well, I did, of course, but sometimes memory can’t retain all the details. Especially when it comes to yet another potentially brilliant idea Apple tried to implement, but dropped in a relatively short time frame.

PowerTalk was the later name of the Apple Open Collaboration Environment (AOCE) that was released in 1993 within the System 7 Pro bundle. There is quite an informative entry on AOCE in the Wikipedia, which will help in putting things in context. AOCE was created to solve a series of issues related to the electronic mail and delivery systems of that time, and the solutions it proposed were indeed promising. From the aforementioned Wikipedia entry (my comments are italicised in brackets):

At “one end” of the system, AOCE focused on the underlying delivery and addressing systems, generalizing the e-mail concept so the system could be used to deliver anything from e-mail to word processor documents to print jobs. Addressing was another issue the market was struggling with, so AOCE would offer a single universal addressing mechanism and address book, one that could support not only people’s e-mail addresses, but the “addresses” of things like printers and fax machines as well. These could be looked up in an interface much easier to use than the existing solution, the Chooser.

AOCE would normally store a user’s e-mail on their computer, as opposed to a server. This not only allowed the user to read their mail offline, but also removed the need for a single machine with huge storage space. Small networks could be set up simply by installing the standard “client” software; the machines would discover each other on AppleTalk and communicate directly. AOCE understood that users were not always connected to the network, so outbound mail was cached on the sender’s machine until both the sender and recipient were online. Even on a LAN this would be valuable, as many people turn off their computers at night and the mail would have to wait until the next morning for delivery.

Since the mail was stored locally, users with laptop computers would be able to read and compose mail while on the road. Everything would automatically update the next time they returned to the office and connected back to the LAN. AppleTalk Remote Access, Apple’s “standard” solution for supporting the AppleTalk protocol over modems, was also supported for those users who wished to sync up remotely. [This model can be seen today with services like MobileMe and the so-called ‘Cloud computing’, but it was 1992 when Apple had the idea].

For security over the potentially “open” phone lines, all communications could be secured using RSA encryption and digital signing, even on the local network. Additionally, Apple provided the Keychain, which stored various login credentials in an encrypted file. This allowed the users to use a different username and password on the various systems they used, placing them in the keychain for secure storage. This way they only had to remember a single password for the keychain; AOCE would retrieve the credentials for a particular service on demand. [Keychain has survived and it’s part of Mac OS X].

I’ve found a nicely written breakdown of PowerTalk in the March 1995 issue of a vintage UK magazine called The Mac. In that issue, the main feature was a 16-page special on the then-new System 7.5. The excerpt on PowerTalk I’m about to ‘reprint’ is taken from that special (pages 74-75). It is written by Cliff Joseph. (For better readability I won’t be formatting it with the blockquote tab; the text will be in italics enclosed in two separating lines).

 

 

 

 

PowerTalk

PowerTalk isn’t just a single new feature, it’s an entire system designed to handle communications with other Mac users and with sources of information such as online services.

It’s easy to connect your Mac to a network or subscribe to services such as Cix and CompuServe, but in the past all these different connections had to be handled separately. You might get e-mail delivered to you from several different sources — from colleagues on your office network, from CompuServe and so on — but each set of e-mail would be stored in different parts of your hard disk. The network and each online service will have all their own passwords, and for business users there’s always the issue of security for sensitive information.

PowerTalk provides a central communications system that handles all these different sources of information, stores e-mail and network addresses for all the people you work with and controls passwords and security features.

Other software developers can design their applications to work in conjunction with PowerTalk so that you can share the information and documents you create within those applications. WordPerfect 3.1 supports PowerTalk, for instance, so when you set that program to type a memo you can instantly send that memo to a colleague without having to leave WordPerfect at all. Just select the e-mail option within WordPerfect and off it goes. [RM note: It’s the same thing you would do today using Mac OS X Services feature.]

The following is a quick guide to the main features of PowerTalk.

Catalogues

Rather like a contact management program, a PowerTalk catalogue is simply a collection of ‘information cards’. Each card holds details about a colleague on your office network, or about anyone else to whom you send mail or other types of information. The card stores personal details such as the person’s name and telephone number, plus their e-mail or network address.

DigiSign

DigiSign is a program that allows you to attach an electronic ‘signature’ to a file such as a spreadsheet or memo that you can send to someone via e-mail. Any PowerTalk user who receives that document can then ‘verify’ the signature to ensure that it is genuine. This allows you to authorise documents such as expenses claims electronically, without having to print them out and send them to other departments using traditional, slow mail systems. The verification process will vary, depending on your work set-up. Some organisations may decide to restrict the use of DigiSign so that ‘signatures’ can only be allocated to specific users by a central authority such as the accounts or finance department.

Key Chain

A PowerTalk key chain stores all your different network and online service passwords and access codes.

For example, I have accounts with three different online services, and each one has a separate log-on procedure and its own password. With PowerTalk, I can type all these passwords into a key chain, and give the key chain a single password. By using the key chain I can instantly send e-mail via any of these online services, as all their passwords are stored in the chain and I no longer have to type them in myself. You may need ‘gateways’ to use a key chain with services such as CompuServe or eWorld (see MailBox).

MailBox

Once you install PowerTalk you will see a new icon appear on your desktop. This icon looks like a traditional In/Out tray, and double-clicking on it will take you into the mailbox, where you can sort through all the e-mail that has been sent to you.

PowerTalk also enables online services such as CompuServe to provide ‘gateways’ that connect with PowerTalk. These gateways connect the service to your mailbox so that any e-mail coming from the service is automatically routed into it. This way, mail from several different sources can be stored centrally, rather than being stored in all sorts of different places on your hard disk.

If you want to send a reply to an item of e-mail, the gateway will automatically direct your reply to the required service without the need for you to go and locate the separate communications program that you would normally use to log onto that service.

AppleMail

This is an e-mail application that allows you to send mail to any user who is included in your PowerTalk catalogue, whether it’s a colleague on your office network or just a friend that you send mail to over Cix or CompuServe. [RM note: So the name ‘Apple Mail’ has quite a long history…]

 

 

So, with all these fascinating ideas and concepts, why did PowerTalk fail? For a number of reasons. First, its system requirements, that were a wee too demanding for the Macs of that era. It required at least 2.5 MB RAM, but was really usable with 4 MB. Problem is, 4 MB was the maximum available RAM for Macs in the 1993-1995 years, and RAM was awfully expensive. Plus, it was impossible to use together with QuickDraw GX, another Apple innovative and promising technology of the time, again due to lack of memory. Other reasons included a not-really-thought-of user interface (which is strange, considering that we’re talking about Apple; but perhaps not that strange, since we’re talking of 1990s Apple, heh). The Wikipedia article I already mentioned says it all:

For instance, the addressing system was so deeply embedded into the core of the system that simply typing in a new address was an ordeal. First the user had to click on a button, select the address type, type it in, and then finally click OK to have it appear in the message. Disk usage was also a problem; each message was stored as a separate file, requiring 1k or more of space in an era where 40MB and 80MB disks were still common. Thus a few hundred letters would be enough to fill the free space on the drive. Backing up e-mail was likewise almost impossible as a side-effect of the design; the mail was spread out over the network, some of it remote and inaccessible.

Another annoyance was that the system could not know who a user was, because Mac OS did not require users to log in. Thus documents had to be delivered to a user’s machine. This did not work well when the user had two or more machines, making the concept of a universal mailbox difficult to achieve in practice.

Even the remote access functionality was doomed by feature interaction. To ensure that all messages were delivered in a reasonable time on a network where machines might appear and disappear at random (when they are turned on and off), AOCE had a 15-minute timeout in which it repeatedly tried to deliver pending messages. If the user in question was using a dialup connection on a modem, AOCE would keep the line open for a full 15 minutes before giving up on disconnected user, driving up huge long distance bills to deliver a potentially tiny message.

Many of these problems were intended to be solved with the PowerShare server, which acted as an always-on, always responsive “super-peer”. The basic AOCE protocol would notice these machines when attempting delivery, and send to them first, thereby eliminating the delays and centralizing storage and maintenance. Sadly the server was not ready in time for the release, and did not ship for another year. When it did it was likewise slow and resource hungry, largely a side effect of various features of the Mac OS that made it unsuitable for server applications (not that it was designed for this role).

What’s interesting to me about PowerTalk, anyway, is the fact that it shows how Apple was trying to veer toward a document-oriented approach for its system. PowerTalk was bringing that approach to email services, while the immediately following OpenDoc and CyberDog addressed, respectively, document creation/management and Internet browsing. I plan to discuss these in more detail in the future.

A curious form of Mac evangelism

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

The “featured letter” of MacFormat’s Issue 63 [May 1998] is rather funny. It’s titled What in the (PC) world…?, and the reader indeed shows an ingenious, albeit complicated, form of promoting Macs:

I am always dismayed when I go to our local PC World computer superstore by the lack of things Apple, and the fact that the only two Macs on display are always tucked away in a corner and ignored. So this is what I’ve taken to doing…

First, I take time to go through all the Control Panels to set things up correctly on each Mac, including turning the speaker volume up to full. Then I find the SimpleText application and open it. I type something like: Apple Macs are the world's best computers; ask for them by name. Apple Macs -- designed by geniuses, marketed by morons! I then select all, copy it, paste it five times; and select all again, copy, paste five times; and go back and repeat it again and again. In just a matter of seconds I have over 250 copies of the phrases. Next I make the window quite small and invoke the “WindowShade” feature to roll the window up into a tiny title bar. I can then position it right down by the Trash can, sticking off the edge of the Desktop. This is repeated on the other Mac, too.

All that’s left to do is select all the text and, after a quick tour of the store, come back and press Command-J (“Speak Selection”) and walk away. Just a glance over the shoulder before leaving the store and you’ll see salespeople wondering what’s going on!

Another way you can annoy them is…

Peter Bell
United Kingdom

The letter is interrupted, probably edited by the MacFormat editorial staff. Their answer, in fact, is: We’d just like to say that all the opinions expressed on this page are those of the writers, not necessarily those of MacFormat or Future Publishing Ltd, and we cannot possibly condone hooliganism or endorse the commission of pranks. Just thought we’d make that clear.

But where is their sense of humour?! Heh, probably in choosing this letter as the “featured letter”, thus granting the guy a prize. For this issue it’s a Pace 56K Voice modem and a year’s Internet access account with leading service provider Direct Connection. (Apparently a worthy prize, by the way: This great prize is worth over £300 and comes courtesy of Direct Connection.)

Probably the letter was picked at random — I can’t help but pointing out the irony of not “condoning hooliganism or endorsing the commission of pranks” yet granting the reader a £300 prize…

A tour of Mac OS X 10.0.3

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

Yes I know, Mac OS X in this blog should be out of place and off topic. But after growing so accustomed to the last incarnation of OS X, when I installed 10.0.3 on an external disk connected to my clamshell iBook SE 466 MHz (FireWire), I couldn’t help feeling ‘the vintage vibe’. Six years and four versions separate Mac OS X 10.5 from Mac OS X 10.0, and when the installation of Mac OS X 10.0.3 was over and I was looking at the desktop, I admit I didn’t remember all that aqua blue, those drop shadows behind the system font, those striped bars and gummy, pulsating buttons. I do think Mac OS X looks much more elegant now, but I can’t deny there was something playful and provocative in the look and feel of the first versions, from the Developer Previews to Mac OS X 10.1 (Puma).

My first contact with Mac OS X was with this latter version, but I had seen screenshots of what was before, and I really wanted to put my hands on some previous version. So when I saw that someone on the LEM Swap list was selling the original installation disk of Mac OS X 10.0.3, I had to have it.

So here’s a tour of Mac OS X 10.0.3, with my observations regarding what was there and what has changed over time.

First of all, reading the “READ BEFORE YOU INSTALL” PDF document, I was a bit worried I couldn’t even install Mac OS X on the partition of the external FireWire drive I had prepared for the occasion, since it was written that installation on external USB or FireWire volumes was not supported. I decided to try anyway and there was no problem — the Installer recognised both partitions of my external drive.

The installation was quick, took less than 20 minutes; quicker than more recent versions of Mac OS X, which is obvious, since there was actually less software to install. And here’s what I saw when I restarted in Mac OS X 10.0.3:

Mac OS X 10.0.3 Desktop

Ah, that deep blue Apple menu icon. Wasn’t it lovely? Other notable details: the keyboard layout menu was attached to the application menus, and it was not a menu extra on the right corner of the menu bar. The “Computer” icon in the Finder window toolbar was an iMac G3 (it would become an iMac G4 and then a more faithful representation of the actual Mac model in use). Then it’s interesting to see some elements in the Dock that would disappear as soon as version 10.1. They were called docklings and you can see three of them: the Displays dockling (between System Preferences and QuickTime Player), the Battery Monitor and the AirPort Signal Strength.

Apple quickly abandoned the use of docklings, but at this time it seems pretty evident that the Dock was designed to be a versatile center of operations, acting as a Launcher, a navigational tool (by putting folder aliases on the right side of it), an application switcher (taking the function of the Application menu in the Mac OS ‘classic’ Finder) but also as an evolution of the Control Strip.

By the way, the ‘dockling’ concept wasn’t that bad. With hindsight, using the Dock for status icons could have been a better idea, since the Dock is more expandable and eventually has more room for icons rather than the menu bar. The menu bar in my PowerBook G4 is quite crowded, and when an application has a lot of menus, they end up covering some of the menu extras in the upper right corner. Conversely, no matter how many icons you add to the Dock, it stretches to accommodate all of them and they’re all always visible.

I sure love that Battery monitor, by the way. Much nicer than the black & white & gray little menu extra that came afterwards…

But I digress, so on with the tour! Here’s the mandatory About this Mac screenshot:

About this Mac

No processor speed, just the processor type, and no direct links to System Profiler or Software Update, like now with Leopard.

Let’s see… That’s Internet Explorer. Can’t wait to get rid of it, but first let’s have a look at its interface:

Internet Explorer 5.1 Preview Release

Wow, Version 5.1 Preview Release! And yes, I opened the Clock application and there it is in the Dock. I miss the analogue clock a bit.

And now, System Preferences:

System Preferences and Signal Strength dockling

Sorry, I left the System Preferences application behind and grabbed a screenshot with the Signal Strength dockling in the foreground. (And did I mention I love that Battery monitor thing?). Things to note: the app name was shortened — “System Prefs” — and the various panes weren’t grouped in different categories. I haven’t dug much, but apparently there isn’t a direct way to change the desktop picture. There is a Screen Saver pane, but it’s only for the Screen Saver, and I found nothing under Displays either. Let’s click on the Internet pane…

internet-prefpane-itools

…and here you are, iTools! For those who have been living under a rock these past seven years, iTools is the father of the .Mac (dotmac) service (so it’s MobileMe’s grandfather, then, heh). And it was free, also. I wonder what’s going to happen if I click on “Free Sign Up”. Oh wait, I can’t connect to the Internet. If you go back at the previous screenshot, you’ll notice that the AirPort dockling sees a lot of wireless networks of the neighbourhood. Mine is “AirBook Express”, but it’s a WPA Personal-encrypted wireless network and Mac OS X 10.0.3 still didn’t have the capability of connecting to such kind of networks (when I enter the network password, it says “Password incorrect”).

Let’s have a look at Mail now:

Mail 1.0

Mail 1.0 in all its glossy, striped glory.

It’s Sherlock’s turn now:

sherlock

You know what? I miss Sherlock. Call me crazy, but the search method in the pre-Spotlight era was not that bad. If you consider how messed up the “Show All” Spotlight window has become under Leopard, Sherlock’s search window and search results pane was a breeze. Spotlight may be faster, but often the time you save with a Spotlight search is wasted afterwards when you try to decipher the search results. I have the feeling that Sherlock (and Finder) searches were slower but more efficient, results-wise, if you know what I mean.

Last but not least, QuickTime Player. Its Dock icon in Mac OS X 10.0.3 was ugly for sure. Let’s launch it.

QuickTime Player 5.0

QuickTime Player 5.0, ladies and gentlemen, with its peculiar mix of Aqua elements (stripes, glossy buttons) and brushed-metal inserts. Its look has definitely got better over the years.

As you can see, there was no iTunes at that time (iTunes 1.0 came a little later, with Mac OS X 10.1), and no iChat (iChat 1.0 would appear with Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar). The Applications folder wasn’t very populated. I haven’t got a screenshot for that, but the list of applications with Mac OS X 10.0.3 was as follows: Address Book, Calculator, Chess, Clock, Image Capture, Internet Connect, Internet Explorer, Mail, Preview, QuickTime Player, Sherlock, Stickies, System Preferences and TextEdit, plus the Apple Script, Dock Extras and Utilities folders. In the Dock Extras folder were the aforementioned Battery Monitor, Displays and Signal Strength docklings:

Dock Extras

If you notice, docklings have a “.dock” extension. It’s clear that the intent was to follow the Control Strip Modules model of Mac OS 9 and earlier versions. But then Dock Extras became Menu Extras, and the menu bar started getting crowded.

If you want to have an idea of how other applications looked in all this Aqua blueness, here’s a screenshot of Acrobat Reader 5.0:

acrobat-reader-50

But when I tried to open something newer (MacStumbler), this is what I got:

Unexpected quit

Wow, look at that exclamation mark! Dialog boxes are worse than I remember.

Two interesting things I noticed while finding my way around this old version of Mac OS X: firstly, performance. Mac OS X 10.0.3 was not yet a mature system, but felt quite fast and snappy with my 466 MHz G3 iBook. Snappier than Tiger (10.4.11), which is what I use daily. Another strange thing was the speaker volume, much louder than it is under Tiger. Don’t know why, but I’ll investigate soon.

That’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed this brief tour. Now back to System 7!

Tip from the past: Removing Finder quirks

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

Another ResEdit-related tip!

Taken from MacUser, June 10, 1994 issue. At that time, MacUser magazine used to keep a Help section titled Quick Tips, where Peter Jackson published tips and tricks from the readers. This tip is from Donald McLintock from Oxford.

When I switched from System 7.0.1 to System 7.1, I found that the Finder had reverted to some bad habits. The Window zoom animation and the delay before an icon name can be changed after clicking on it, which I had removed from my old System using the SevenFor7 utility, were back. And the same utility did not work on System 7.1, presumably because the new Finder stores data in different places.

However, you can use ResEdit to get rid of these quirks. To remove the zoom rectangles, open a copy of the Finder in ResEdit and open the CODE resource with ID 4. At offset 78 you will find the sequence 48E7 1F38 — you can search for this sequence to find the right one. Change this to 6000 00E6, and the rectangles will be gone.

Similarly, the icon-naming delay can be removed by opening CODE resource 11 and changing the 5DC0 sequence at offset A34 to 50C0.

Tip from the past: Quick reprint

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

This is taken from MacUser, Vol. 9 No. 16, August 6, 1993 issue. At that time, MacUser magazine used to keep a Help section titled Hints and Tips, where Peter Jackson compiled readers’ tricks and shortcuts. This tip is from Graham Tyers, of Oakham, and is intended for those who reprint documents regularly.

When you print a document using background printing, make a copy of the spool file that appears in the Print Monitor Documents folder in the System Folder. To print this document again, option-drag it into the Print Monitor Documents folder and it will print instantly, although you may have to click OK in a dialog box, depending on your printer. This method will print documents from hefty applications in a fraction of the time taken to launch the application and then spool the file. The down-side is that the spool files take up a lot of space, especially if pictures or other graphics are included.

LiteSwitch

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

Since I use both modern Mac OS X equipped Macs, and classic 68k machines, one of the crucial things to be productive in both environments is to try to maintain consistency when using the keyboard. I already have to fight with different keyboard layouts and different key placements (in this regard, I practically type on at least four different keyboards), so, whenever possible, I’d like to find the same keyboard shortcuts. The Macintosh UI has been fairly reliable and coherent through the years. The shortcuts for common operations like Cut Copy and Paste remain unchanged, even the key combination for taking a screenshot (Command-Shift-3) has been the same from System 6 to the latest version of Mac OS X.

What I was missing is the very handy Command-Tab shortcut, to cycle through the current active applications and pass from one to the other. Using Mac OS X for many hours a day, it’s practically hard-coded in my fingers. On a classic Mac, you have to use the mouse and click on the application menu on the far right of the menubar. Thankfully, there’s a nifty control panel called LiteSwitch which brings this handy feature to vintage Macs. It works in exactly the same way as in Mac OS X, and it’s also customisable (you can select the preferred modifier-keys combination: Alt-Tab, Command-Tab or Ctrl-Tab. You can quit an application pressing Q or X while it’s highlighted, and you can even hide it by pressing W or H. And it works really well — it’s very responsive on my PowerBook 5300 with Mac OS 8.1. Definitely recommended.

Tip from the past: System error codes explained

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

At least the most frequent.

Taken from Personal Computer World, May 1996 issue. Written by Chris Cain.

One of the most annoying things about the MacOS is its lack of proper error messages. How many times has your Mac crashed with “an error of type X”, without telling you exactly what “X” means? To help you out of some of these situations here’s a list of the most common error numbers and their official meanings, as listed by Apple in its Technical Info Library. If you have access to the World Wide Web you can get a more complete list from Apple’s web site (www.apple.com). There are some errors that even the Apple technical documents don’t explain, specifically Type 11. If I find out what these mean I’ll let you know.

  • ID 01 = Bus Error
    A type 01 error usually occurs when the computer tries to access memory that doesn’t exist: you can get this error on almost any Macintosh. In my experience, assigning extra RAM to an application, using its Get Info dialogue, can help prevent it.
  • ID 02 = Address Error
    The Motorola 68000 microprocessor can access memory in increments of one byte (8 bits), or one word (16 bits), or one long word (32 bits). This microprocessor can access a byte of information at either an odd or an even memory address. But it mustaccess one word or one long word at an evenmemory address. So, when the microprocessor attempts to read or write a word (or long word) at an oddaddress, you see this error. Since that’s a 50/50 proposition when running random code, this one shows up quite often.
  • ID 03 = Illegal Instruction
    The computer has a specific vocabulary of machine language instructions it can understand. If it tries to execute an instruction that isn’t in its vocabulary, you see this error code. It’s less likely than error 02 but is nevertheless common.
  • ID 04 = Zero Divide Error
    This error results if the microprocessor divides two numbers, and the divisor is zero. Sometimes a programmer puts these in as debugging aids and forgets to take them out.

Spotlight is overrated

Posted on by Riccardo Mori

Spotlight is undoubtedly a powerful search technology, but I don’t know how much faster it is compared to the erstwhile Find command. In my home network I have temporarily added my old PowerBook 5300 with Mac OS 8.1, and since I needed to transfer some files from the PowerBook G4 Titanium, I mounted the entire volume on the 5300’s desktop, connecting the two Macs via Ethernet (not directly, but through a switch). I was looking for a file on the TiBook volume, but instead of searching it on the TiBook with Spotlight, I wanted to try one little thing: searching it via the Find command on the PowerBook 5300. The TiBook volume is 40 GB, and of course the Find command in Mac OS 8.1 doesn’t know about indexing — it’s search-as-you-go, so to speak. Well, search took 5 seconds. I say I’m quite impressed.