If I see an update of an application, I want to have the latest and hottest stuff, of course. But first of all I read the changelog to know what is new or changed, and then I do run the update.

Unwanted changes

Sometimes, the developers change the behavior of a certain feature or in worst case it is even removed. If I really need this functionality exactly as it was before, it would make sense to downgrade the fresh installed update back to the old version.

New software is not always an improvement. A good bad example is Aptana Studio having removed the FTP-Sync functionality from version 1.5 to 2.0. It was so heavenly useful and now it is gone. The developers stated to eventually bringing it back in a future version.

Back to the past

If that worst case scenario became true, it is often impossible to get the old version back, because the vendor often just serves the latest version for downloading. But, what if there is no archive existing? Where do you get it?

For the Mac user

On a Mac you can use Time Machine and grab your old copy back from the Applications backup folder. But what, if no Time Machine backup was created?

Then go to http://mac.oldversion.com/ and download what you need. They have a large archive and host really many old versions of favourite applications.

For the Windows user

Go to http://www.oldversion.com/ and download your older piece of software.

Sometimes my fingers are too fast and something is trashed, especially podcast episodes. If you are wacking the same as me, then I am sure this or the other time you want it being undone.

Of course there is a simple and quick way:

Just select any episode or the podcast itself, then hit on the bottom left the unsubscribe button. Then it turns to subscribe, and press it again. Then iTunes will reload the feed and you can download the lost childen, again.

Take the following settings, to enable it:

Incoming mail server: imap.gmail.com
Outgoing mail server: smtp.gmail.com

Username: yourmail@gmail.com
Password: yourpassword

You also may take these settings, even if you own a googlemail.com address.

On OS X’s mail.app you will find an extra area on the left hand pane for your Google mail account.

With OS X comes a handy tiny helper called DigitalColor Meter. You will find that in /Applications/Utilities/. You simply can set the wanted text output format and use Command+Shift+C to get the value into the Clipboard. The settings are autosaved, so on the next start you can continue as you are used to.

jmeds845b7

With that version Apple focuses to the average user with functions like trimming and uploading videos to Youtube. This may look simple, but beware that cutting and converting has to be done before the upload can begin and now it runs totally by itself without your interactivity.

Trimming was possible in the former versions, too, but not as easy as it is right now. Apple kindly kept the older Quicktime 7 Player and moved it into the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. If it is not there for you, you may reinstall it from your Snow Leopard DVD.

I am lucky about that, because there are some mighty features I absolutely do not want to miss like exporting with tons of options and different playback speeds.

What do you think about the new Quicktime player and do you still use the “old” one?

Image sources: Integrated Application icons by Apple.

Espacially, when you want to install something large which normally requires an expensive dual layer DVD or even when no DVD drive is available at all, it makes sense to use a USB device. On a Mac, this can be a standard USB stick or an iPod having the appropriate capacity.

Also using a USB device is really fast und produces less noise.

Ok, here is my short step-by-step guide for you how to make it work:

Note: Doing that will erase ALL data on your media!

Step 1: Open the Disk Utility from the Application / Utilities folder and select your destination USB device. Then go to the “Partition” tab and change the scheme from “Current” to “1 Partition”.

Step 2: Click the options to select the partition mode. To make it bootable on a Mac “GUID Partition Table” is required. Check this radio button and confirm with “ok”.

Step 3: “Apply” the settings and confirm to “Partition”.

Step 4: Finally, we need to select that image file to be placed on the USB device. This can be a DMG or ISO file. You can use the Disk Utility tool, to create such images from your DVDs. You can start the process by clicking on “Restore”.

Note: Do NOT copy discs or any other media you are not allowed to!

Drop me a comment, if that guide helped you out.

In some situations, it would be helpful to start it again – especially system applications like the network scanner.

With the help of Path Finder it is no big deal to start a running application as much times as you need it, by just right-clicking on the app in process sidebar and selecting “new instance“.

With that way it is easy to manage some unique tasks as a mass task.

The dock contain a large amount of icons and thanks to the scalability of OS X you can resize the dock bar to have them larger or smaller.

I personally do prefer only having that applications in the dock which I am using every single day. Those who I do not need shall disappear.

The printer icon is one of them. When a print job is done, the icon will still remain there, and because I am printing quite rare this is annoying me to quit it manually.

There is a simple way out, by just activating the “Auto-Quit” option. Just rightclick the printer icon and enable it as shown in the screenshot above.

Many disc accesses are usually done with a Virtual Machine, so I put a blank Parallels Windows XP virtual machine image to the stick, hoping the speed would be fantastic.

But, the hope still remains a hope. The speed is just OK, and absolutely not faster than directly starting from a harddisk. The USB probing sais 480Mb/sec which is a maximum of 6 MB per second, but the average speed I could measure in fact is 5.2 MB per second.

That is absolutely too slow and the conclusion for me is, that flash memory is only really fast if it will provided over the S-ATA port.

Merge windows

To feel as fit as a fiddle on my Mac’s screen I need to have it clean with only that windows in front I am currently working in.

For how to hide unwanted applications without termination I blogged the article The secrets of hide and seek.

The Eventbox is my best friend when getting updated on RSS feeds, Twitter, Flickr and Facebook. When clicking the arrow to see the original or full details it opens the source in Safari as a new window.

If you click many details, you will get many Safari windows open. You can configure Safari to put them in tabs. I have not enabled this, because I prefer that when applications open a browser it should be a fresh window.

When having lots of Safari windows, but you want to have them just in only one and seperated by tabs, you can go to the menu Window and select merge all windows.

Currently, many sites are integrating multiple Sign-In technologies with accounts from other sites like OpenId, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Yahoo and more. That can be a cool thing, but require to re-authentificate by logging in to your primary account.

One problem is coming with that! The site you need to put in your username and password is not the same as you would visit to login, where the formdata of your browser is stored. And how do you get your password back?

Normally, you could request a password reset, but that takes time, because you need to wait for the email, confirm the link and sometimes to change the password. That is too nasty and it is much easier. Use the Mac’s Keychain Access utility.

Keychain access

1. Go to Application/Utilities/Keychain Access.
2. Put in the domain of the website your forgot the password.
3. Doubleclick the appropriate name.
4. Put in the checkbox next to “show password”.
5. If you are asked for your Mac password, put it in.
6. See the password and use copy & paste.

Leave me a comment if it helped you.

The most nerving thing is the way how to edit the crontabs. There is unfortunately no simple interface delivered by default or I did not find it, yet. Normally, it is required to open a text editor and know the format to do changes.

The developers from abstracture did not sleep and created a wonderful application named CronniX which is a fantastic easy and simple interface to match exactly the task to edit the crontab.

CronniX

Step 1: Open your favourite flashvideo – let’s say on Youtube. Then open the Activity Window using the menubar.

Activity Window

Step 2: Now you see the activity window which shows every data file transfer from the current open tab. When the video is playing, then you will notice that the download is still in progress and the transfered size is increasing. But, if the video is already stopped, then it will be line with the largest file size. Just do a doubleclick and watch the flashvideo downloading.

File List

Step 3: That’s it! Once downloaded you can play the flv-file with Quicktime.

Downloading flv

Hint:

When you are not able to watch and listen to flv files, then you need the codecs! You may download Perian to have your Mac enabled playing those and AVI videos.

Column selections

I am sure you are using the copy and paste technique every day you are using your Mac. Of course this a very impotant feature who nobody would ever like to miss again.

Normally you select the text either by keyboard or using the mouse to drag from the start to the end of the text you want to place into the clipboard. This way marks the text floating including it’s contents line breaks.

On a Mac you even can mark a text by drawing a rectangle! That makes sense if you need a exact text block to be marked. If you are working with text editors quite often, I am sure there was the one or other situation you needed that.

Just hold down the <OPTION> key before starting. The mouse pointer changes to a cross fade and then you know, that column selecting is activated. Now hightlight your wanted area, and that’s it.

Note: This is only working on Cocoa Text objects, like as in text/word processing fields.

Super Remove Dead Tracks

On a Mac almost everything is scriptable, and so is iTunes. One of those free cleaners is Super Remove Dead Tracks. Install it as described, then restart iTunes. From the scripts menu bar select the Super Remove Dead Tracks and just wait for completion. At the end, a logfile is placed on the desktop, so that you can see what was removed. If something went wrong, you can restore the files from the trashcan.

Of course I could use spaces with its multiple desktops, but actually I find it quite exhausting having multiple desktops and to remember where is which application and move all the time. Anyhow it causes me some additional and unwanted stress.

The way I am working is the great functionality using the secrets of hide and seek applications.

First of all, you need to differ between hiding and minimizing.

Locum equals toilet?

On my article how to secure delete files, I described a method to kill files in a way, that they are not recoverable anymore. This is useful for private data, nobody should ever gain access to.

Today, I was trashing some files. The CPU usage went quite high during another Windows 7 test installation using Parallels Desktop. I became snoopy and had a look at which tasks are eating my Mac power. With the easy to use iStatMenus I saw the largest cormorant is a task called Locum.

What a funny name!

I think it could be derived from the latin which does mean just about flushing the files into the toilet. Maybe I should consider creating a jolly easter egg category.

Clipboard viewer

There are several ways to copy and paste data from source to another target, mostly applications or different windows.

You can use the classic Command+C and Command+V method or the mousy drag and drop.

When you are working with the computer, I am sure you are using this clipboard functionality quite often, because is saves so much typing.

If you want to know what you have just copied and pasted, then take a look at the Clipboard viewer out of the Apple’s developer tools box.

It does not replace a clipboard manager, but may help if you lost some pasting.

Xcode installation

Directly with the OS X of your Mac you have a quite big bunch of nice and powerful tools delivered on your installation DVD.

They are not put on your Mac automatically, because they are designed to be developer tools.

To get them running, just insert your Tiger, Leopard (or in future Snow Leopard) installation DVD. Then go to “optional installs” and afterwards to “Xcode Tools”. Install the package or anything else you would need.

Here is a list of the most useful delivered utilities:

• Accessibility Inspector
• Accessibility Verifier
• Applet Launcher
• AU Lab
• AULabHelp
• BigTop
• Bluetooth Explorer
• Buildlet
• Clipboard Viewer
• Core Image Fun House
• CrashReporterPrefs
• Dashcode
• FileMerge
• HALLab
• Help Indexer
• Icon Composer
• Instruments
• Interface Builder
• IORegistryExplorer
• iSync Plug-in Maker
• Jar Bundler
• MallocDebug
• OpenGL Driver Monitor
• OpenGL Profiler
• OpenGL Shader Builder
• PackageMaker
• PacketLogger
• Pixie
• Property List Editor
• Quartz Composer
• Quartz Composer Visualizer
• Quartz Debug
• Quartz Debug
• Repeat After Me
• Shark
• SleepX
• Spin Control
• SRLanguageModeler
• Syncrospector
• Thread Viewer
• USB Prober
• Xcode
• ZoneMonitor

The tools are really tiny and do what their names say. It is really worth to have a glance at. So take a little time and install them. The complete thing including documentation and developer IDE will eat about 2,5 GB of disk space.

I will write some blog articles of my favourite tools from that list, soon.

Drop a comment of what application you like at most or what you are generally thinking about the Xcode tools.

Quick access Desktop in Finder

In any file dialog box of the OS X you have all your favourites in left pane. They are really useful to quick access favourite places on your computer.

The current things I am working on, are organized on my desktop. So inside a file dialog box, I just click the sidebar and click on desktop to go to there.

But, mostly I am using the keyboard, especially when I am working on the MacBook and using the trackpad. Also, keyboard strokes are still quicker for a fast typer than pushing the mouse around.

Just hit Command+D when a file dialog box is open and the desktop folder will become the active directory.