Monday, May 09, 2005

Essential Tiger utility: manage dashboard widgets

MacInTouch Home Page: "Widget Manager 1.0 is a Tiger Preference Pane that makes it possible to inspect, disable, and even remove Dashboard Widgets. It also shows individual widget version numbers. Widget Manager is free (donations requested) for Mac OS X 10.4."

Add 'Find Target' to XP Right Click (Context) Menu

MSFN Forums > Add 'Find Target' to Right Click...

Once upon a time, in the first golden age of the PC, PC Magazine ran a regular "utility" column that featured ingenious solutions to the limitations of what was then DOS. This continued into the first generation of Windows 3.1 and even into Windows 95, then it died out as many of the advertising supported hobbyist magazines went under (of which the greatest loss, by far, was BYTE).

I thought of this when I went looking for a fix to an age-old annoyance -- a quick to go from a windows 'shortcut' (file/folder alias) to the original. (The usual route is RMB, then properties, then 'Find Target ...').

It turns out this is not hard to do. I found sample code in several places, and a registry hack on this page.

However, it's not "packaged" the way things were in the old days. The "hobbyist" energy that used to provide a myriad of such solutions has faded away. I'm sure this has been done a hundred times, but each solution has been lost in a mass of noise.

In the OS X world, the enthusiast energy, and the general coherence of the OS, means these problems get solved and the solution is maintained and available.

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Hacking Quicktime: tips and tricks

Hacker's Guide to QuickTime

Import an imapbox into Mail

macosxhints - How to import an .imapmbox into Mail.app

I wonder if this would work with Eudora PC's IMAP file?

Keeping Classic on a disk image

macosxhints - Remove Classic cleanly

A "clean" way to keep classic around a 10.4 system
Just create a .dmg, copy all the classic stuff onto it, bless the system folder, and choose that folder in the classic system prefs.

The neat think about classic on an image is the image will automatically mount when classic is needed.

No more classic cruft hanging around, but it's there if you need it.