Macworld Guides vol3 tiger

www.macworld. .com Power Guide: Mac 0S X Tiger The Mac Product Experts GET STARTED WITH TIGER Spotlight @ »f the Mac the outside ive metalli arer Indl potlight Spotlight’s significance goes deeper than the touting on Tiger’s packaging. It resides in the deepest levels of the oper- ating system, where Spotlight performs feats far beyond the reach of simple Finder searches. What sets Spotlight apart from previ- ous search schemes is its ability to catalog and search metadata—information about the data contained in a file, such as the brand of camera used to take a digital photo, the bit rate of an iTunes track, or the author of an e-mail message. The metadata index makes it possible to search for a term—tiger, say—and si not only documents that contain that word in their file names, but also pictures from your child’s last trip to the zoo, any e-mail exchanges that discuss Apple’s recently released operating system update, a new desktop pattern, and—if your musical taste runs to early eighties anthems—Survivor’s now-regrettable hit from Rocky III. Spotlight does its work by accessing two indexes per volume—one that con- tains metadata and another that indexes the contents of files. These indexes are 9 1 heweusen thedinak tion of hx iht eae important Tiger’s By Christopher Breen ou arch created on-the-fly and in the background, so the search results you see are always up-to-date. Unlike the search systems offered on other platforms, Spotlight doesn’t require you to update its indexes. And | 5 Spotlight is fast because it taps the smaller metadata index before accessing the much larger contents index. If you find that searching metadata and contents isn’t enough, you’re welcome to open a file’s Get Info win- dow and tag the file with a note in the Spotlight Com- ment field. Spotlight can search for these comments Mail M as well. Imag Finder Seeker The most obvious manife: tation of Spotlight’s pres ence is the magnifying-glass icon @ that appears in the upper right corner of the Mac’s menu bar. Click on this icon (or press 1-spacebar), and the blue Spot- light field appears ®. As you type your query in that field, results begin to show up in a window below; they narrow as you continue typing. If you see what you want in the 20 most relevant results that appear, select that result, and the doc- ument—an e-mail message or an iTunes music track, for example—will open in its asso- ciated application. To cancel a search, click on the stop button in the Spotlight field a If you’re not sure how to = spell a term, type as much as you know and then press com Spotlight Music m= 4) wed430em 2a Show All (14) This is a test ger ReadMe.rtf Snapz Pro X notes.txt 2 What's New in 5.6? Re: [News from You Softwar... Re: Request from Macworld * TidBITS#¥776/18-Apr-OS Macworld Newsletter 04-18... * TidBITS#775/11-Apr-05 es Mil Tiger.jpg BB Tigerjpg = Tiger In A Spotlight.mp3 #2 07 Tiger In A Spotlight.mp3 Spotlight preferences 1-period (,). Spotlight will drop down a menu listing all the words it knows that start with those letters. Narrow the Field If you have a hard drive packed with files, you can narrow what Spotlight searches for by calling up its preference pane (choose Spotlight Preferences @ at the bottom of the Spotlight results window, or open Sy Spotlight). In the Search Results tab ®, you can specify what kinds of files you want to look for—say, documents and images, but not applications and music files. You can also specify new keyboard shortcuts for ing the Spotlight menu and the Spotlight window @ (for a list of Spot- tem Preferences and select ace light’s default shortcuts, see “Spotlight Keyboard Commands”). In the Privacy tab @, you can instruct Spotlight to keep out of specific locations. And speaking of butting out, Spotlight pal respects OS X’s permissions and won't | @ jer sn search the files in another user account on your Mac. The Spotlight Window If you don’t find what you're looking for in the Spotlight menu, keep typing to nar- row the search or click on Show All @ at the top of the list to view all the results in a separate Spotlight window @. (This window will also appear if you press 1-option-spacebar.) On the right side of the Spotlight win- dow, you'll find the options for grouping, sorting, and filtering search results @. This is also the place to tell Spotlight where on your computer it should look (on the whole hard drive or just in your Home folder, for example). When you first run it, Spotlight groups files by Kind, sorts by Name, filters by Any Date, and searches all the files on your computer it’s able to search. If you change these default options—grouping by Date, sorting by Kind, and filtering by This Week, for instance—Spotlight will use those settings the next time it runs. However Spotlight groups your files, a reveal triangle @ appears next to each heading, indicating that results lie within. ‘To view the contents beneath that heading, click on the triangle next to it. To reveal or hide the contents under ai/ the headings at once, option-click on any reveal triangle. Within these groups you'll see the five most relevant results, followed by a blue link @ that tells you how many other results remain. Click on this link and all the found items appear. More Info Each search result comes with an infor- mation icon, labeled with an 7 @. Click on this icon to learn the file’s more intimate details. For example, clicking on the icon for a movie @ reveals its location, dimen- sions, encoder settings, channels, dura- tion, and size. Information for a digital photograph might reveal the camera maker and model, focal length, exposure time, and image size. Slide Shows and Thumbnails Spotlight also supports multimedia in a big way. For example, when grouped by Kind, Spotlight offers additional options Acid book 200 fH) Spomare add seo rans) Canae Be eos ae 2001. | eeapine (cee sat tt a ee) a i Comer d¥epdt (Pod FU/TOC ptt = Poca a Sapa seer co Py ae ia @ for viewing images and PDF documents. Clicking on the thumbnail icon @ in the Images or PDF Documents headers dis- plays the search results as thumbnail images rather than a list. (PDFs display the first page of the document.) Click on the play icon in the Images heading, and all the listed images will play in an iPhoto-like slide show. While you’re in slide-show mode, you can use the on-screen controls to pause and restart playback, view all the images on an index sheet, view pictures as full-screen images, and add an image to your iPhoto library. ‘To view just a portion of your pictures, select the images you want to view, control-click on one of them, and choose Slideshow from the contextual menu. If you select a movie file in the Spot- light window and click on the small info icon, you'll see a thumbnail image of the movie with playback controls. Click on the play button © to watch the movie, complete with sound. Drag that movie to the desktop to copy the entire file there. ‘The process works similarly for audio files. Additionally, the Spotlight window's contextual menus allow you to add a file to an Automator workflow or direct it to Mail as an attachment. > 1-spacebar exposes the Spotlight menu. > 1-option-spacebar opens the Spotlight window. > 1-click on an item in the Spotlight menu to reveal its loca- tion in the Finder. > Press 1 when the Spotlight menu is open to select the Top Hit item rather than Show All. > Press enter to open the item selected in the Spotlight menu. > Option-click on a heading in the results window to open or close all headings. > Select a search result and press 1-I to open its Get Info win- dow. Selecting multiple items and pressing 1-1 opens multiple Get Info windows. GET STARTED WITH TIGER Digging Deeper If you're just looking for files with certain words in their contents or certain creation dates, the Spotlight menu or window can help you track them down, But if you need to find files that match several different cri- teria—such as color label and shutter speed—or that fall in a range of dates or set- tings, you'll need something more power- ful. For these times, switch to the Spotlight tools built into Tiger’s Finder windows @. Anyone who has ever used iTunes Smart Playlist and iPhoto’s Smart Album features will see a similar influence at work in the Finder. Like these programs, the Finder lets you create live-filtering mechanisms, or smart items, which give you quick access to related files and fold- ers. But whereas iTunes and iPhoto can search only for songs and photos, respec- tively, the Finder’s Smart Folder feature can include almost any type of file. Press 1-F to open a new Find window, or simply start typing in the Spotlight field ® in any open Finder window and then click on the plus sign (+) next to the Save button. A set of pull-down menus @ will appear at the top of the window. By changing the options in these menus, you can perform complex searches based on more than 125 different file criteria. Click on the plus sign @ at the end of the list to produce additional search menus. You can save a search query as a smart folder by clicking on the Save button @. Smart folders appear not only in Finder windows’ sidebars ©, but also in the sidebar within Tiger’s Open and Save dialog boxes. (For more information on Spotlight’s secrets, see “Find Anything” on page 46.) More to Come Spotlight is also extensible, meaning that it works with the help of plug-ins. Develop- ers are welcome to create Spotlight plug- ins for their applications; over time, it should become possible to find any type of file on your Mac. Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents already appear in Spotlight searches. (Because of the way Entourage stores e-mail messages, it isn’t Spotlight-ready—yet.) For a list of the latest Spotlight plug- ins—including those for programs such as Delicious Library, RealBasic, Font Agent Pro, and much more—go to macworld .com/0630. Contributing Editor CHRISTOPHER BREEN is also the editor of Playlistmag.com, Spotlight Is Everywhere Spotlight is more than a convenient way to search for files from the menu bar. Its technology underlies new find and sort tricks in almost every corner of Tiger— including Mail, Address Book, and System Preferences. Like the Finder, Address Book 4.0 has a Smart Group feature for gathering contacts that meet certain condi- tions—people who live within a particular zip code or belong to a specific e-mail domain, for instance. Address Book even allows you to choose a contact and invoke a Spotlight command that will show you all files pertaining to that person. Mail 2.0 has also gained new powers. The most useful of these is smart mailboxes. Like the other smart tools, smart mailboxes are essentially saved searches. Once you define the criteria for a smart mailbox, all matching messages will appear in that mailbox. But Spotlight really lives up to its name in Tiger's Sys- tem Preferences. Enter a query in System Preferences’ Spotlight field @, and any preference pane related to the query will appear in, yes, a white spotlight. For example, entering the word access places a strong spotlight @ on Accounts and a dimmer spotlight €9 on QuickTime to convey that the preference most relevant to the query is Accounts. Along with this eye candy comes a list of top- ics related to your query that appears below the Spot- light field. Safari unveil uld bi en Apple fi chan C that the new Sai ition of A lates RSS In case you've been hiding out in the woods lately, RSS (an acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or some other alternative, depending on whom you ask) is a way for Web sites to provide summaries of articles and other new content via a simple summary page called a feed. With Safari 2.0, you no longer need a dedicated RSS client— such as Ranchero Software’s Net- NewsWire ($25; ranchero.com/netnews wire)—to read feeds. Instead, you can read them right in Safari. In Safari 2.0, a blue RS appears in the address bar whenever you browse a site with an RSS feed (Safari sup- ports both RSS and Atom formats). Click- ing on that icon displays the feed right in your Safari window @. A simple slider control @ lets you adjust the size of article summaries on-the-fly. To read an entire entry, click on the blue Read More link at the end of a summary con @ now In RSS mode, the right side of the Safari window offers tools for searching feed and organizing your RSS If you're interested in a particular topic, you can type a search term into the Search field Safari will narrow the current list to only those entries that include your search request. You can sort the news items by date, title, source (who published it), or time (how recent it is) @. You can also view older items by clicking on one of the options under the Recent Articles list. ‘ource list shows who published the current article listing. If you have com- piled stories from multiple feeds, you can toggle between the sources he You can bookmark a feed @ just as you would any other Web site; Safari moni- tors these bookmarks for new content and displays the number of new articles next to each one’s title. If you click on a folder of RSS feeds in the bookmark bar, you can choose the View All RSS Feeds Tiger in 2004, it ummed up in three letter 2.0 eemed that the bi =D-S But ari is here, it’s clear there’s much more to the ser. By Dan Frakes command to produce a single window containing all the stories from the mult- iple sources, saving you the trouble of vis- iting all the feeds separately. Although in many ways it makes sense to put RSS in a browser—after all, the content you're reading comes from the Web—some dedicated RSS users may find Safari’ single-pane window frustrat- ingly limited when it comes to sorting, organizing, and processing RSS content. If you’re an RSS junkie like I am, it may make more sense to use a dedicated reader (such as NetNewsWire) or an e-mail client (the Mozilla e-mail program Thun- derbird can handle RSS now) that lets you see your list of feeds in one pane and each feed's articles in another. If you'd rather read feeds in your cur- rent RSS client, Safari lets you set your default RSS reader as another application. When you do, clicking on an RSS icon in Safari will display the feed in the applic tion of your choosing. a. por aC Wee [eae A eesrit WEL CO oh ik F wrt LS Pees twee viee> Cricket; Emgtand on assault wits’ chins crosity trie guilty Man charged with McCmrtmey murder Turkish ‘pro-istamist’ taw vecoed ee eed More Than RSS There’s more to the new Safari than RSS, though. For one thing, it’s faster than earlier vers “he updated ren- dering engine is excellent (though not perfect), displaying more pages correctly than the previous version did and com- plying with emerging Web standards. A handful of sites stopped working in Safari after Tiger’s release, but on the whole Safari’s compatibility is as good as its competitors’. ions. momrines Reeting Linerk Lancet inehemet Actes GET STARTED WITH TIGER [Fite | Edit View History Bookrm!| New Window 36N New Tab x“T Open File... 0 Open Location... eb Close Window aeW 0 Save As... 5 oo Contents of This sn at Import Bookmarks... (D Export Bookmarks _ Page Setup tr Print. *P E-mail Links and Pages Most browsers let you send a page’s URL via e-mail; Safari 2.0 goes the competition one better. With one menu command, you can e-mail a friend either a link to the cur- rent page or the contents of the entire page @ (including layout and graphics) using the Tiger version of Mail @. Cur- rently this feature works only with Mail. Improved Searching Searching has improved in Safari. While browsing your bookmarks, you can now conduct instant Spotlight searches @ of your bookmarks, RSS feeds, and history. The Parent field ®@ will even show you where the item is located. Save Web Pages Earlier versions of Safari could save the HTML source of the current page; Safari 2.0 can also save a Web archive that includes all graphics and other embedded files, so you can view the page later even Sebject: SEC SPORT | Fostball =] AUR ares Date abpettieez i] FOOTBALL Hace pith erator muaha probe if you’re not connected to the Internet. By the way, you can now share your book- marks with others, too. Just choose Export Bookmarks from the File menu @ to produce an HTML page of hyperlinks that anyone can use on any platform. Private Browsing Mode A new Private Browsing mode (accessed from the Safari menu) disables your brows- ing history, cookies, and cache files—great when you're browsing on a public com- puter or you’re just feeling paranoid. With Private Browsing enabled, Safari forgets which pages you've visited, what you've downloaded, and what Google searches you've performed since you activated the feature (it won’t work retroactively). ‘Nook marta Actor Kia) Coikng Se meh taem ieee setae = Breton re (O Cnremetter Clee tee Pete 1 emcrecee ay te ad ~n ey Lat ant Toy cee = pie rw Row, Last Wa Tay eniecee Cd sae Harms Tasan 2 My SST aot Paes DX. tt Pate Tag 2 May JF on bet © The ew tort Tones Howts GD mantener Tanto eee on — ee ee ee OY Man Utd fans demand match boycott Man Ut supgoreere’ grange att Yor fara to beryostt ‘Seowday’s Mame game mc) | ERE Wat etm in protest ae maken clazer + Garrard pape trite ta Bese ge + Waar felt 6 tears Pe *Wastata coatbe OPV AE Plan pry Ta | arpa goal Security If Safari detects that a file you’re down- loading may contain an application, it warns you. Apple intends this measure as a safety feature so you don’t inadvertently install viruses or other malware. Safari doesn’t provide any way to turn the warn- ings off, however. Parental Controls Ifyou have a nonadministrative OS X user account on your system, you can enable Parental Controls for that account. The user can then access only the pages in the Safari bookmarks bar. Bookmarking a new page requires an administrator password (for more on setting up limited user accounts, see “Kid-Proof Your Mac” on page 70). Better File Control If you click on a Web-page link that takes you to a PDF document, Safari can now display it directly, rather than having to send it to Preview or Adobe Reader. But the built-in PDF viewer doesn’t support thumbnails or bookmarks; for that, you'll need the PDF plug-in included with the free Adobe Reader. You can also now send Web images directly to iPhoto by control-clicking on it and choosing Add Image ‘To iPhoto Library. Senior Writer DAN FRAKES is reviews editor for Playlistmag.com and author of Mac OS X Power Tools, second edition (Sybex, 2004). According to our latest survey, 45 percent of Macworld.com readers use Safari. The rest are u: 9 Microsoft Internet Explorer, one of the Mozilla products (Mozilla, Firefox, or Camino), or one of the myriad other alterna- tives—Netscape, Opera Software’s eponymous browser, the Omni Group’s Omni feb, and so forth (see “Feature Matchup”). Safari 2.0 is without question a solid competitor, but do its new features make it the best browser out there? | don’t think so. The Browser War Safari 2.0 is faster than earlier ver- sions and now easily keeps up with most other browsers. Its form auto- completion feature is better than average. The updated rendering engine is excellent (though not per- fect), displaying the vast majority of pages correctly and keeping up fairly well with emerging standards. But flexibility continues to be one of Safari's biggest shortcomings. For example, you have to turn Safari's Block Pop-Up Windows setting either on or off; you can't selectively block pop-ups from some sites but not oth- ers (as you can in Camino or Firefox) or easily unblock a particular sup- pressed pop-up (as you can in Camino, Opera, or OmniWeb). Despite the advent of Private Brows- ing, Safari has comparatively limited cookie management. And its built-in search tool works only with Google; Firefox and OmniWeb both let you choose the search engines you want to use. Although Safari offers a terrific tabbed interface, you can't save a set of tabs without bookmarking each page individually; Firefox, OmniWeb, and Opera all save tab sets easily. So while its new features make Safari 2.0 clearly better than version 1.0, they don’t make it clearly superior to the other browsers out there. Safari versus RSS Readers Compared with stand-alone news- readers, Safari 2.0’s RSS support might be useful for people who are new to the feature. But it’s a pale shadow of what's available in dedi- cated RSS applications. On the plus side, Safari alerts you when a site you're browsing has an RSS feed—something that’s all too easy to miss. By letting you display that feed with just one click, Safari demystifies RSS, making it as friendly and intuitive as any Web page. (Note that Firefox and Opera offer roughly comparable features.) This increased awareness of RSS will undoubtedly get many new users hooked on the concept, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, Safari's implementa- tion of RSS is weak as newsreaders go. For example, although you can sort posts by age and mark new arti- cles with a special color, you can’t mark just one article in a feed as read without marking them all, making it hard to figure out which posts you've already seen. You have very little flex- ibility in the display of feeds—you can't easily adjust the font or style; you can’t show the information in a table view; and you can’t turn off full- text postings, images, or ads. (You can control a post’s length using the Article Length slider.) For now, Safari is good enough to get you started in the world of RSS. But you'll soon want something more.—JOE KISSELL Joe Kissell is the author of Take Control of Upgrading to Tiger (TdBits Electronic Publishing, wwwwstakecontrol books.com, 2005) and Curator of Interesting Things for InterestingThingOfTheDay.com. Feature Matchup Safari 2.0 adds a whole bunch of features, along with its now-famous RSS skills. But is it breaking new ground or playing catch-up? Here’s how it compares with the other leading OS X browsers on the market today.—JeFFERY BATTERSBY illa__ Netscape The Omni Group Opera FEATURE fox 1.0 7. OmniWeb5 8 E-mail Web Page or Link e e e e Send links to Web pages from within browser. Export and Share Bookmarks e e >) fey e Export and share bookmarks from within browser. Fit Images to Screen ) e e e e Resize images to fit browser window, Inline Dictionary Search e e >) fo) e Dictionaty lookup of words embedded in Web pages. Inline PDF Viewing e fey >) O ) View PDF files from within browser. Inline Text Search >) e e e 3) Find specific text on Web page without having to open separate Find dialog box. Inline Web Search e e e e e Run Google search for words on Web page from within that page. Parental Controls e fey e) 2 2) Control access to Web content. Pop-up Blocking e e e e e Control and suppress Web pop-up ads. Rich-Text Web Editing e > 3) > > Edit text on Web pages from within browser. RSS Services and Aggregation e e >) fo} e View RSS newsfeeds from within browser. Save Images to iPhoto e fey > 3 5) Save images from Web directly to iPhoto, Tabbed Interface e e e e e Open new Web pages in tabs instead of new browser windows. = yes, O = no. GET STARTED WITH TIGER Dashboard @ board has b the return of H t shboard is 1 at that it su: en yperC SS an eds. By Little Apps The concept behind Dashboard may not be entirely new, but it is straightforward: it’s like an alternative Finder desktop containing mini-applications called wid- sts. These apps range from calculators, ames, and weather reports to search tools and front ends for more-complex applications. Tiger ships with 14 different widgets, including the aforementioned weather report (complete with cool animated graph world clock, a stock ticker, and an iTunes controller. The Widget Bar If you're used to the way Exposé makes application windows appear and disap- pear, switching to and from the Dash- board layer should quickly become second nature to you. By default, you Dashboard by pressing F12. However, you can change this shortcut from within the Dashboard & Exposé preference pane. Once you've s Dashboard layer, click on the circle icon in the lower left corner @ to call up the Widget Bar ©. Here you'll see an alpha- betical, graphical list of all the widgets installed on your Mac. Click on the Wid- access ched over to the to make b d 3 c SAGES Dori Smith get Bar's left and right arrows @ to scroll through the available widgets. Placing Widgets To use a widget, click on its icon in the Widget Bar and drag it anywhere you like on the Dashboard. (Placing them pro- duces a cool ripple effect). Widgets can appear in front of or behind other wid- gets—or both. ashboard Tips > Instead of clicking on a widget in the Widget Bar, try dragging it. You'll be able to launch and posi- tion the widget at the same time rather than doing so in two sepa- rate steps. > To put a widget in the Finder layer, launch Terminal and type defaults write cm.apple.dashboard dev mode YES, Log out and then log back in again, and you'll be able to pull as many widgets into the Finder as you like. As you drag the widget, press F12 to leave the Dash- board layer. When you release the mouse button, the widget remains on the Finder layer. > Ever put a new widget in your Widgets folder, but then look for it in vain on the Widget Bar? Scroll past where it should be on the Bar (widgets appear in alphabetical order), and then back again. You should now see it where it belongs. Configuring Widgets Most widgets need some sort of input from you to do their jobs. For example, the Weather widget needs to know what city you want to track. To input this infor- mation, hover the cursor over the widget. On most widgets this will produce a small info button, labeled with an 7 ®. Click on that icon and the widget will fip over. On its backside you'll find preference tools for configuring the widget—defining locations for clocks and weather, for example—as well as more information about the application. For example, when you flip over the Stickies widget, you'll find controls for changing the note’s color and setting the font Clicking on some wi additional information or options. For example, if you click on the Weather wid- get’s graphic icon @, a small window will drop down, revealing a forecast for the next few days @. (By the way, you can sneak a peek at all the weather icons by 1-option-clicking on the current weather icon.) Likewise, clicking on the Calendar widget will bring up a monthly view. ts will reveal Closing Widgets When you want to remove a widget from Dashboard, just hold down the option key with the cursor hovering over a widget. A Close icon ® will appear. Click on the X and you'll close the widget. Adding Your Own Apple has also made it easy to add to Tiger’s original 14 widgets: clicking on More Widgets @ takes you to wwwapple .com/macosx/dashboard. There you'll be able to check out and download the latest widgets (some free and some demos). Because widgets are, at their most basic level, composed of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, plenty of third-party developers have been cranking them out as well. Secure Downloads Wherever you get your widgets, Apple has done some behind-the-scenes work to make them self-installing. If the site from which you’re down- loading has done its work correctly, you should be able to simply click on a link in Safari and download the widget. When you see an alert warning you that your download is an application, click on Download and the widget will move itself into /your user folder/Library/ Widgets. The item will automatically appear in the Widget Bar the next time you open Dashboard. When Tiger first came out, some Mac users brought to light security concerns about Safari’s auto-install feature. Apple appears to have largely addressed these in OS X 10.4.1, its first Tiger update. (For more information, see “Dashboard Secu- rity” on page 56.) If you use a browser other than Safari, or if you have turned off Safari’s Open “Safe” Files After Downloading option, your widgets won’t automatically install; instead, they will simply download to whichever folder you specify. In either case, you'll need to move the downloaded widget manually into the /your user folder/Library/Widgets folder before it will appear in the Wid- get Bar. Pick Your Widgets It’s easy to get carried away downloading cool widgets to the bar; I currently have to scroll through as many as five bars to find the one I want. Because relaunching wid- gets is a multistep process, the easiest thing to do is to leave widgets open once you've launched them. In times past you might have thought twice about launching an extra app or heading out on the Web to look up a bit of information. But my guess is that you'll soon be pressing the F12 key to call up Dashboard dozens of times a day. DORI SMITH is the author of the upcoming Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide (Peachpit Press, 2005). just an F12 key away. You'll never use Stickies again after you've started keeping cross-linked notes with a Wiki. inkspotting.com/wikity/ This is the Type Cast widget showing the Widget Manager 1.1 This is not a widget at all, but a preference pane in which you can manage widgets. Until Apple creates something similar, it’s the only straightforward way to turn widgets off and on again (unless you enjoy digging into Library directories). It also lets you see what version of each widget you're running. downtownsoftwarehouse.com/ WidgetManager/ WikityWidget 1.1 WikityWidget won Apple’s first widget contest, and rightfully so. It’s a great little note-taker and database for those bits of information you want to have P22Eaglefeather font Type Cast 1.0 From the makers of Art Direc- tor’s Toolkit comes Type Cast, a handy little utility for viewing your active fonts. You can change the font, style, point size, and/or text, and then see how it looks, all using this one widget. code-line.com/typecast/ Air Traffic Control 1.0.1 Want to know what AirPort net- works are around and which one of them has the strongest sig- nal? Plenty of applications can do this, but none is as small and handy as Air Traffic Control. At a glance, you can see which net- works are encrypted, which channel they're using, and their signal strength. spintriplet.com/widgets/ emt epetutt @: 23pm Yahoo Local Traffic 1.1 It’s time to leave work, but which route should you take home? If you've got a big-city commute, put in your zip code, and this widget by Yahoo will warn you of the major, moderate, and minor incidents that are in progress on your route. apple.com/downloads/macosx/ dashboard/yahoolocaltraffic -html GET STARTED WITH TIGER 1 automate re, id. Jads that handle small, discrete ta’ ide. Instead, you as: ks suc By Adam Goldstein Automator lets you put a complicated— or not so complicated—task on autopilot by breaking it down into individual steps (called actions) and then assembling those actions into an entire process, called a workflow. Workflows take care of tasks such as batch-renaming files in the Finder, build- ing a slide show from iPhoto images, or sending customized e-mail messages to a whole group of people simultaneously. Building Blocks Automator’s Library @ lists every pro- gram on your Mac that supports Automa- tor control, along with a few ategories (such as System and PDF) containing actions that aren’t specific to any single program. When you select a category in the Library, all of the available actions for that category appear in the Action list ‘To assemble a multistep workflow, you simply drag and drop items from the Action list into the Workflow pane Once you've pieced together your wor flow, you click on Run ® (or press 1-R) to make your workflow run from beginning to end. If you encounter trouble, click on Stop (or press 1-period [.]) to make your workflow stop midway through. When you run a workflow, each action its result to the next action @, passes which is then free to process the result as it sees fit (in this sample workflow, it applies a sepia tone to some image files). ‘To move an action to a different position in your workflow, simply drag it by its title bar @; to get rid of an action alto- gether, just click on the close box @ in its upper right corner Perhaps coolest of all, you can save your favorite workflows as plug-ins for the Find- er’s shortcut menus by choosing File: Save As Plug-in from Automator’s menu bar. Search Actions If you’re not sure what an action does, click on it to see additional information — — ™ E 5 sae wi y a) Timon rots ine ee 7 “4 st ns en Ro” j > @ = zs what it does, what it expects to receive from the previ- ous action, and what it passes on to the next action—in the Description pane If you know what you'd like to do but aren’t sure what action to use, then turn to Automator’s Spotlight field @. Simply type a keyword for what you'd like to do or a portion of an action’s name, and Automator searches the currently sel- ected category in the Library list for matching actions. (The results of your search show up in the Action list.) about the action—including Learn by Example To get you started, Apple has included three demonstration workflows in the Library’s Example Workflows folder. To check out one of these workflows, click on the reveal triangle next to Example Work flows @, and then double-click on the name of any workflow in the list. You can learn a lot by exploring these workflows, such as how information from the next passes to through a workflow. one action Unfortunately, Automator still has a few rough edges. Most notably, not every Mac program supports it, and your selec- tion of actions is limited to what other programmers have already written. (You can download more prewritten Automa- tor actions from Web sites such as www automatorworld.com.) quite the automate-anything- miracle that some advocates make it out to be—at least not yet. Also, Automator lacks many of the workflow-control features—such as loop- ing commands—that Unix geeks and Mac programmers expect. If you’re a nonpro- grammer, though, you probably won't notice the difference. For supercomplicated jobs such as automating a newspaper layout, stick with AppleScript. But if writing scripts gives ‘ou hives, Automator could be the tool Automator isn’t ou-want ‘ou need. ADAM GOLDSTEIN is the author of AppleScript: The Missing Manual (Q'Reilly, 2005) and contributed to the Tiger edition of Mac OSX: The Missing Manual (O'Reilly, 2005). Five Easy Workflows Think Automator sounds cool but don’t know where to start? Here are five useful workflows you can try right now. (For a step-by-step guide to creating your own, see “Automate Your Routines” on page 66.) To create these workflows, click on the library item specified at the beginning of each step (in bold) and then drag the action that follows from the Action list into the Workflow pane below any previous actions. E-mail a Song from iTunes This workflow lets you e-mail songs from your iTunes Library (assuming, of course, the songs are yours to send and aren't protected by any DRM). The workflow will prompt you for the recipient and subject of the e-mail, as well as for the song (or songs) you want to attach. 1. Mail: New Mail Message. In Options, select Show Action When Run; that way, the workflow will prompt you for the subject and recipient. 2. iTunes: Ask For Songs. This action lets you pick the song (or songs) you want to send. If you think you might want to send more than one, select Allow Multiple Selection. 3. Mail: Add Attachments To Front Message. This action assembles the finished Mail message for you. Get a List of Every Font Enabled on Your Mac This workflow takes a while to run, but when it’s done you'll have a text document listing all the fonts cur- rently enabled on your Mac. 1. Font Book: Find Font Book Items. Make sure Typefaces is sel- ected in the Find pop-up menu; the lower menus should read Whose Enabled Is True. 2. Font Book: Get Font Info. Leave only PostScript Name turned on; the other items will clog up your list with unnecessary information. You can also turn off the Add Labels check box. 3. TextEdit: New TextEdit Docu- ment. This action launches TextEdit (if it isn’t already running), creates a new text file, and dumps your list of fonts into it. Burn a Backup of Recent Photos > I time to back up your latest photos onto a CD. 1 This workflow burns any we pictures you've taken in the past two months onto a blank CD or DVD. ane | 1. Automator: Ask For Confirmation. In the top Find: (Photos box, type a short descrip- tion of what the workflow does; add a more elaborate whose: options a) ee description in the Explana- tion field. These descrip- tions will appear when you run your workflow. bur Die In ose Name: [stoop diene PRONEER DvD-RW OVR-1060 Brace fst ‘her turniog 2. iPhoto: Find iPhoto Items. In the Find pop-up menu, choose Photos. In O BecrDise options verty burned data @ Mourt on Desktop the Whose section, choose Date from the first pop-up menu and Within Last 2 Months from the sec- ‘ond one. 3. System: Burn A Disc. In the Disc Name field, give your disc a descrip- tive name such as iPhoto Backup. Create a Photo Album from Images on a Web Site This workflow copies images from a Web page in Safari to a new iPhoto album. 1. Safari: Get Current Webpage From Safari. This fetches the URL of the foremost browser window. 2. Safari: Get Image URLs From Webpage. From the Get URLs Of Images pop-up menu, choose Linked From These Webpages, so the work- flow will download the images them- selves, not dinky thumbnails. Just keep in mind that it'll download any and all graphics on the page. 3. Safari: Download URLs. Choose whatever folder you like from the Where pop-up menu; your Pictures folder is as good a place as any. 4. iPhoto: Import Photos Into iPhoto. In the Options section, select Show Action When Run so you get a chance to give your new iPhoto album a name while your workflow is running. Convert and Rename Big Image Files This one will shrink any images you select (space-hogging TIFFs, for example) by 50 percent, save them as space-conserving JPEGs, append the word (small) to the end of their file names, and open the newly shrunken images in Preview for inspection. 1. Finder: Ask For Finder Items. Make sure Files is selected in the Type pop-up menu. Specify the loca- tion where you want to start select- ing, and select the Allow Multiple Selection check box, which presents an Open dialog box where you can select the images you want to con- vert and rename. 2. Finder: Copy Finder Items. From the To pop-up menu, pick a folder (your Pictures folder will work just fine), to which the workflow will copy the original images before it modifies them. 3. Finder: Rename Finder Items. From the top pop-up menu, choose Add Text. Type (small) in the text field, and select After Name so your workflow will add the descriptive suffix to the end of each image's file name. 4. Preview: Scale Images. Choose By Percentage from the pop-up menu and type 50. 5. Preview: Change Type Of Images. You can select any image format you want, but JPEG is a good option if you're planning to post the images on a Web site or send them via e-mail. 6. Preview: Open Images In Preview. This shows the result of your workflow in Preview. GET STARTED WITH TIGER rt, Mail 2.0 b p -mail client. By Chuck Toporek and Alistair Dabbs The New Look Farlier versions of Mail displayed your mailboxes in a drawer that popped out on the right or left side of the main window; you could open and close that drawer with a simple keyboard shortcut—particularly handy if you were using an iBook or a 12 inch PowerBook. Mail 2.0, however, now rated sidebar, anchored at . This setup resembles that of other e-mail clients on the market (such as Microsoft Entourage, Qualcomm’s Eudora, and Mozilla’s Thun- derbird), but dedicated Mail users may not like it. features an inte the left side of the interface Smarter E-mail Not only can Spotlight find Mail mes- sages when you aren't in the e-mail app, it also adds some powerful search tools to Mail. The most useful of these is smart mailboxes ®. Like similar tools built into iTunes or iPhoto, smart mailboxes are saved searches. Once you define the crite- ria for a smart mailbox, all matching mes- sages will appear in that mailbox. Mail isn’t actually moving messages from one mailbox or folder to another; they still reside wherever you've put them. So you can have the same messages appear in multiple smart mailboxes. For example, you can quickly and easil define smart mailboxes that keep trac! Mail 2.0 Tip Wondering if one of your e-mail accounts is close to overflowing? Select its Inbox, click on the gear icon (beneath the sidebar to the left) to open the Action menu, and select Get Info. The Account Info window appears, with tabs that let you view Quota Limits, Mailbox Behaviors, and a Summary of settings e0e Inbox — dotmackahuna (4 messages) = =» 4A & @ Delete Junk Reply Reply All Forward New Get Mal Sear Ye, * © From Subject Date Received ¥ ‘Accounts Thank you for subscribin... Yesterday 7.01 AM E ‘Chuck Toporek Pictures from our garden Yesterday 6:24 AM Bae % info@hotspotfreetrial... YourT-Moblle Hotspot 3... Yesterday 623 AM USPREPAID Your Apple invoice # 970... 5/5/05 852 PM sent > @ trsn Chuck Toporek Pictures from our garden 0 ae cial May 18, 2005 6:20:51 AM POT dotmackehuna@mec.com 8 certo na 6 Attachments, 1.0 MB Sava‘) (“Siawatow Hey mere, Junk v Here are some pictures from our garden. doesn’ look so bae when you look att rom the Trash macro level, but rom far away, not so good, Enjoy!) + ot i all recent messages. To set up a smart mailbox that looks for messages received today, select Mailbox: New Smart Mail- box (or click on the gear icon @). After naming your new mailbox, define it with the criteria Date Received Is Today and then click on OK. When combined with rules, a set of criteria for applying specific actions to your mail, smart mailboxes give you a much greater ability to sift and sort your messages than you had in previous ver- sions of Mail. e050. Coty cme, Gy hens (Cea tor eas Sonar New Attachment Options If you receive a message with an attach- ment, you'll see a little Save button ®; for image attachments, you'll also now see a Slideshow button @, which you can click on to view the attachments in a full-screen slide show. While watching the slide show, press any key to bring up the slide show toolbar, which lets you quickly pause playback, switch to thumbnail view, or import the images into iPhoto. Mail Troubleshooting If you're experiencing problems collecting e-mail, the Connection Doctor (accessed from the Window menu) quickly deter- mines where the problem lies. It checks incoming and outgoing mail servers and network connections, and reports back with a green or red status light for each item. If it tells you that your Internet con- nection is at fault, click on the Assist Me Now button for additional help. CHUCK TOPOREK is a senior editor for O'Reilly Media and the author of Mac OS X Tiger Pocket Guide and Inside .Mac (O'Reilly, 2005). ALISTAIR DABBS is a freelance journalist and the author of Digital Designer's Bible Ilex, 2005). Address Book ® pr By Jeffery Battersby and Ali Heads-up Display If you need to look up a contact quickly, you no longer have to open the Address Book app. You can now find contacts with Spotlight searches. Tiger also comes with a Dashboard widget @ that digs through Address Book without your having to open the application. ‘Type what you're looking for in the widget’s search field ©, and you have your contact information literally at your fingertips. Of course, you can still find contacts the old-fashioned way, in Address Book itself. The application has a new menu option that lets you search all the information on your computer for a selected contact. All you need to do is select a contact; then, from the Action menu Spotlight: “Contact Name” item. Spotlight will find everything on your computer related to that contact. , choose the Smarter Contacts Another Groups feature (accessed via the Action menu). Smart groups ® work like smart playlists in /Tunes and smart mailboxes in Mail. For example, you can set up a smart group that looks for a specific e-mail domain—macworld.com, say—and every useful addition is the Smart n0e e0e __| Address Book fajol{#-y a Group Nome =f Gai | Uli Action Sports Media * Action Sports Media a Directories | Marcus Austin Action Sports Media ‘Bast Import =| Matthew Bath Family = INeil Bennett Friends ‘4 Bite Communications Meeting list red baron Collette Boardman Steve Caplin +44 20 7886 0680 131-151 Great Titchfield Street Xmas cards ht Centaur Business Inte London Chattable John Charnock wwess David Dabbs imminent birthdays | |= /Gill Daly ' se Edi 43 cards Vj, time you add a new contact who has an e-mail address in that domain, Address Book will add him or her to that smart group. You can create smart groups based on a variety of criteria, including birth- days, zip codes, area codes, company names, and instant-messaging service Automate Me Address Book also has close-knit ties with Automator, Tiger’s new scripting tool. Using Automator, you can create work- flows that, for example, gather e-mail addresses for a specific set of contacts and then send out messages to that group. Address Book i ‘Smart Group Name: New Smart Group @ Contains cards which match ( any [i of the following conditions: Address 1a (contains BD tondon O@ MService [ay (is set iF] O@ { (Birthday [ig {is within Bio weeks Boe q i URL contains Borg Oe q - = ' G Anniversary [i@i) (is in the next BB days BOe Z @) Brighlight group when updated (Cancel Macworld Magazine 501 2nd Street, 5th Floor San Francisco CA 94105 Importing and Printing Address Book employs the vCard format internally and for import and export. How- ever, it can now import contact data from a wider range of formats, including tab- and comma-delimited text files. The Text File Import window allows you to match each data element with Address Book’s headers. ow you have four printing templates for those times when you want a hard copy of your contact details: Envelopes, Lists, Pocket Address Book, and a redesigned set of Mailing Labels. The Pocket Address Book style produces a tab-style booklet that you can carry around with you. JEFFERY BATTERSBY is a regular Macworld contributor. ALISTAIR DABBS is the author of Digital Designer's Bible (lex, 2005). GET STARTED WITH TIGER gan and to-« Find It Fast At first glance, iCal’s interface appears unchanged from the previous version. But take a second look. You can now group calendars into folderlike subsets by going to File: New Calendar Sub- group. You can show or hide subsets with one click. A Spotlight search field © along the bottom edge of the window allows fast searching across iCal. Results display in a pane immediately above Meeting Manager You can set up a meeting—and determine who should attend it—simply by dragging and dropping names from Address Book onto iCal ©. These names appear as Atten- dees in iCal’s drawer for the event Clicking on an attendee name @ produces a pop-up menu; from here you can edit or remove that person’s name, send that attendee an e-mail, or locate him or her in Address Book. When you have at least one name in the Attendee list for a selected meeting, click on the Send button @ in the drawer to e-mail the person directly from iCal with- out having to go through Mail or any other intermediate e-mail package. ‘The recipient receives an e-mail with an iCal attachment. Clicking on the attachment produces an invitation window containing acceptance instructions. iCal Tip Have trouble remembering birth- days? Open iCal's preferences and enable the Show Birthdays Calendar option. iCal will pull birthday infor- mation automatically from Address Book. When you click on a birthday item in iCal, the drawer shows a clickable link back to the relevant card in Address Book. phisticated funct its, trackir Taille) ur appointme rching your ¢ ng c o items. By Jeffery Battersby and Alistair Dabbs ‘Meeting with Sue Donim Celalee (= lett eo) After sending out invitations to your Serta = meeting, you will begin — 3 to receive e-mailed eae responses from the attendees. You can track these at any time by clicking on the Notifi- cations button @ at the bottom left corner of the iCal window. Scheduling Workflows iCal works as Automa- | sums (ontate iB) [sr0072005)2) tds: (ater [PQ aan es fveccm a & al-oay evens 1 Timed Events Z roo: Fen moners 1 catensar eye Sack ana wie tor’s scheduling engine, making it possible to zon: O—— aa create workflows that run themselves. For example, you could create an iCal event that runs daily, searching Address Book to see if any of your contacts has a birthday that day. If Automator finds any, it could gather that person’s information and create a new, personalized birthday greeting. Printing At last iCal prints calendars whose con- tent you can fully control and preview within the Print window You can choose between Day, Week, Month, and List templates 'y a precise time period or pick one, such as Today or Next Week, from the Time Range pop-up menu. The Print window includes a big preview pane that lets you zoom in and out @ to check legibility and detail before printing your calendar. JEFFERY BATTERSBY is a regular Macworld contributor. ALISTAIR DABBS is a U.K.-based writer and the author of Digital Designer's Bible (ilex, 2005). i, a or PDA. T sync yinc only to By Chuck Toporek The Syne pane @ acts as a conduit for moving data between your Mac and your -Mac account. Once you register other Macs with the .Mac Sync Server (for this, use the Advanced tab @), you can syn- chronize data among them all. In Panther, you could synchronize Address Book, iCal, and Safari book- marks. In Tiger, you can do far more. Now you can synchronize your Key- chains; Mail n Mail rules, signatures, and smart mailboxes ccounts; and e} You can also set the preferences (in the Syne pane) on e: syne with your .Mac account at regular intervals ch of your Macs so they , making it simple to keep mul- tiple Macs synchronized even when you're on the road. Of course, you'll need a Mac member- ship. You'll also need Tiger; Apple doesn’t appear to plan on retrofitting Panther to work with Mac C Still, Tiger misses the Holy syne services g application preferences between multiple Macs. You can’t, for example, drag your Preferences folder—or anything else, for that matter—to the Syne pane. That means there’s no easy way to make sure the Dock, Dashboard, Exposé, and Desk- Grail of synchronizii ystem and < Show All Account ‘Sync 8) Calendars unt. The such Automatically Adve iDisk & synchronize with MaciXEN ETS Every Day Every Week @ Bookmarks Manually [oo Contacts Keychains SS ® wait Accounts @ show status in menu bar Mail Rules, Signatures, and Smart Mailboxes Sync Now) top & Screen Saver behave the same way onall your Macs. So altho 5 chronization is better in Tiger than it in Panther, I’ll keep using Ken Boyd’s free RsyncX (archive.macosxlabs.org/rsyncx) to syne preferences and files between my machines—at least for now. CHUCK TOPOREK is a senior editor for O'Reilly Media and the author of inside .Mac (O'Reilly, 2005). Stay Ahead of Trouble with Mac O Updates Less than three weeks after unleash- ing Tiger, Apple fixed many of the new OS's problems with the release of OS X 10.41. The update addresses several Mac syncing issues, including the “cannot login to the .Mac sync server” alert, which can unexpect- edly appear and prevent your Mac from syncing when you click on the Sync Now button Another major improvement is that users are now warned when down- loading images or archives that con- tain an application—you must click ‘on the Continue button that pops up in Safari in order to complete the download. The fix—which prevents automated widget installation—is a response to some of the security con- cerns surrounding Dashboard. The 10.4.1 update also addressed several issues with Apple's Mail, including one in which the appli- cation could unexpectedly quit, stop responding, or fail to import your previous e-mails if you had third-party software installed in the /your user folder/Library/Mail/ Bundles or root level /Library/Mail/ Bundles directories. OS X 10.4.1 fixes the problem by preventing previously installed plug-ins from loading. For complete coverage of the 10.4.1 update and beyond, go to macworld .com/tiger. You can install updates through your Software Update prefer- ence pane.—JIM DALRYMPLE GET STARTED WITH TIGER Pre ned 30h for Coe = Preview sports two new tools for adding annotations to images and PDF docu- ments. When you click on the Annotation menu (the pencil icon) @, a pop-up menu lets you switch between Text Annotation @ and Oval Annotation @. You can re-edit, reshape, and move these annotations at any time until you save. After saving, you can no longer change the annotations, either in Preview or in Adobe Acrobat. You can also now open simple PDF elec- tronic forms and fill out all sections, including text fields, check boxes, and radio buttons. You can print completed forms or save them back to PDF format. However, saved PDF forms become flat documents and lose their form-filling capability, so be sure to use the File: Save As command. Preview also includes tools for working with long documents. You can view multi- page PDFs as facing pages, just as you can in Adobe Reader. The new Bookmarks menu makes it possible to add page bookmarks to any multipage PDF. Preview doesn’t embed these bookmarks into the PDF, but it does remember them from one session to the next. This means the bookmarks remain available to you, but are not accessible to anyone else who opens the file, or to Adobe Reader. e008 = i Ena) re ey 1 Drawer Next tackjronvard EL puaru ur pircuwTs LATEST twice-anrval ing of the Region & ittee teok place in on 15-17 April. 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The anginal agreement tion that JAL-LOGO cooperation iment between the I~ ional Electatechnicel ission (IEC) and the has begun to bear Ta dete, seven IEEE ymmittee at April co salt Pari successful runing of Region Ball the mere impressive Zoje’s opening remarks ara followed up by Clean Anderson, |EEE 2006 Pras: owe are jeined in a commen yoca- ranseends our fas and builds *E rénews.jun05.pdf (16 pages) a8 (ag (ela lo i) ‘eademician Vladimir A Kotelnikov passed amay fon 12 February 2005 in Moscow, Russia, atthe age 197. Potessr Ketln kov ‘was the founder of radio astronomy. His name is piven to acteraie number 1725 to commemorate riz Aistanaing coctrbutiens word selene Keteniou yes theDeen assing Comication and Engineers, der and Hence ofthe Institute Tecan af the Russian ‘Acadory of Sciorees, An IEEE Lite Faloy, Koten ev reeaved meny Russian ‘and international awards, Including the pres IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Gold Medal ‘Hersich S. Lantsberg EEF Russia Section IEEE vision of promating the engineering community worlwide. The ganization, he sald, should angage in advancing global prosperity ‘by fostering technological Inpetion and nabing out ‘memes’ carers,” 4 beni trom the vale vr uncertain by the IE IEC endorsement also ged selected IEEE standards ener market acceptaree In this way, IEEE and Preview 3.0 now supports JP2 (PEG 2000) files and three formats currently used by professional digital photogra- phers: RAW (Camera RAW), DNG (Dig- ital Negative), and OpenEXR. = Choosing the Image Correction | option from the Tools oxo | menu opens a new floating palette of are. slider controls@® for adjusting an eas image’s exposure, gamma, and col- ors. You can also set the white point or black point, sharpen the image, or create a sepia effect. Preview also offers an eaay.siy add searchable data to your files. The Document Info window @ includes a Keywords tab that lets you add keywords to any image or PDF that you have opened in Preview. These keywords are fully searchable from Spotlight. ALISTAIR DABBS is a U.K.-based writer and the author of Digital Designer's Bible Ilex, 2005). GET STARTED WITH TIGER Fe y ‘To set up a four-person chat @ with crystal-clear video, such as those Apple has been demonstrating for the past year, you'll need not only good cameras and lighting, but also four extremely fast Inter- net connections. A whole lot of data is fly- ing across the Internet and between those four systems; even some high-speed con- nections just can’t keep up. To keep chats going under less than ideal circumstances, iChat assigns highest prior- ity to audio and the video signal's frame rate (to keep a video chat from becoming awkward at best and unfeasible at worst)— to the detriment of picture quality. As a result, images of participants sometimes go horribly out of focus. That's just iChat’s way of blurring out the ugly pixelation of the compressed video image. In my experience, three people can chat with relatively little blurring, but throw in a fourth and suddenly a couple of people go off to fuzzy-camera land ©. One way to avoid that situation is to let whoever has the fastest Internet connec- tion initiate the chat. We saw a noticeable difference in quality in our test chats when someone ata gigantic Silicon Valley corporation initiated them, rather than the person with home-office DSL. Four-person videoconferencing in iChat AV 3 has some pretty strict system require- ments. According to Apple, you must be on Buddy List at least a dual-1GHz G4 or G5 Mac with a minimum 384-Kbps Internet connection to host a multiperson video chat; just to participate, you need a 1GHz G4, a dual- 800MHz G4, or a G5, as well as a 100- Kbps connection. Even when you're video-chatting with just one friend, image quality in iChat AV siderably better than in previ- mpression scheme used throughout Tiger (see “QuickTime 7.0 and H.264,” page 36). iChat AV 3 is also more secure than its predecessors. Previously, the application supported both America Online’s Instant Messenger service and local chatting via Rendezvous. Those two features remain intact (though Apple has renamed Ren- dezvous “Bonjour”). But there’s now a third server option for iChat: Jabber, an open-source chat-service protocol. Apple added Jabber to iChat largely because many businesses—yes, including Macworld—rely on iChat to get real work done. And many of the IT types at those businesses were quite concerned over the fact that confidential corporate informa- tion was traveling across the Internet via a server at AOL. IT types like Jabber, because it lets them set up a chat server of their own and dole out official corporate chat accounts; messages sent to and from those accounts can then utilize SSL encryption. With iChat AV 3, Apple’s finally done AOL-style buddy groups right. Now when you turn on groups (View: Use Groups), a collapsible gray header pre- cedes each group of buddies @. Clicking on the header toggles between showing and hiding the members of that group. Creating and editing groups is easy, too: click on the plus sign (+) in the Buddy List window @ to add a buddy or a group; and use the Edit Groups option to add, rename, or delete groups. Finally, iChat includes a small but cool new tool. Many people I chat with like to customize their status message to show the music they’re listening to. Prior to Tiger, that required third-party utilities. Now Apple has built this function right into iChat. Just select Current iTunes Track from the list of status-line options, and iChat will update to reflect the playing track’s title and artist. Other iChat AV 3 users can click on the arrow icon at the end of a Current iTunes Track status line to open that song in the iTunes Music Store. JASON SNELL is Macworld’s editorial director. GET STARTED WITH TIGER HD-Ready The latest update to the player (version 4.6) adds support for playback of HD- DVDs created with Apple’s DVD Studio Pro 4 and the new H.264 codec. Since set- top HD-DVD players are still in the developmental stage, that makes DVD Player currently the only viable way to watch such discs. Play It Again DVD Player lets you add your own book- marks independent of the existing DVD chapters. You can add and edit these within the Bookmarks window @ or while watch- ing the movie in full-screen mode. You can view bookmarks in thumbnail mode (seen here) or in list mode. ‘To jump to a bookmark, just double-click on its in the Bookmarks window or name select it from the Navigator bar. And now you can also create custom video clips which let you define the start and end points for playback. You can even set video clips to loop, if you'd like. Live Resizing DVD Player now features live window resizing, with smooth movement and con- tinuous playing. If your Mac supports Quartz Extreme, you can even minimize a continues Cyrene (Gerster _viceo Cire) GET STARTED WITH TIGER DVD window to the Dock and have it keep playing. Better Video Control New floating palettes (similar to the ones in other Apple apps such as Motion and iPhoto) give you greater control over your movie-watching experience. The additions include a ten-band Audio Equalizer © with presets; a Video Color controller with sliders for adjusting brightness, contrast, color, and tint; and a Video Zoom controller that’s useful for reduc- ing letterbox bars while retaining much of the video quality. od You can access the different controllers Audio Equalizer E from the Window menu, or click on the Vocal Bo title bar @ of an on-screen controller to produce a list of options. Video Zoom Video Color DVD Navigator The Navigator palette @—a more elabo- rate version of the old Info window in the previous DVD Player—presents details (chapter, elapsed time, audio track, and so on) about the current movie, and includes Title:(1 + (English 1 + Bookmark: ( Select + the ability to change settings and pick Chapter:(4 Subtitle: (Of Video Clip: {Select ¢ bookmarks and video clips. itis Base COTS OT @IMAnoE cae j JONATHAN SEFF is Macworld’s senior news editor. ‘ime is the ‘The biggest advance in Quick presence of the H.264 video codec (com- pressor/decompressor). Just as music files based on the AAC audio codec in iTunes sound better than MP3 files of the same size, video files based on the H.264 video codec look better than those based on other codecs. More specifically, H.264 gives you the same quality as MPEG-2 video at one-third or one-half the data rate. You'll particularly notice that advantage in the new iChat, which produces much- improved video and supports multiperson chats (see “iChat AV 3.0” on page 30). The Quic some nice features. Full- > adds ‘ime Player itself als en controls & let you play, pause, stop, fast-forward, or rewind, as well as adjust volume and scrub through a movie—all while remaining in full-screen mode. Previ- ously, you had to switch out of full- screen mode to make such adjustments. Keep in mind, though, that you'll need to purchase the Pro version to access full- screen viewing QuickTime’s new A/V Controls win- dow @ lets you determine how fast you jump back or forth through a movie's ano frames. A new Playback Speed slider slows down playback to half-speed or makes it move up to three times as fast. You can now quickly capture and share movies from an iSight or other FireWire- based camera; and while the DVD Player in Panther added multichannel audio out puts, QuickTime 7.0 is the first version to offer surround sound through the Quick- ‘Time Player itself. QuickTime 7.0 also features live window resizing, which keeps playback smooth fa) © Alv Controls Audio Playback Volume Jog Shuttle Reverse Forward Bass Treble Playback Speed Vixlx 2x 3x Balance ar, and continuous when you adjust the player’s window @—it actually stretches or compresses in front of your eyes rather than jumping from one size to the other. This addition, along with many other QuickTime improvements, comes courtesy of Apple’s new Core Video technology, which allows for hardware- accelerated video processing. Still, it’s the video in iChat and the high-quality playback that many users will appreciate most. JONATHAN SEFF is Macworld's senior news editor. GET STARTED WITH TIGER Font Book 2 Tiger’s new Font Book gives you increased flexibility and control over the fonts on your Mac. While it can’t compete with high-end commercial font managers, it does take advantage of features such as Spotlight and Auto- One of the key improve- ments in Font Book 2 is the way it handles validation (checking your fonts for problems). In Panther, the font utility automatically verified your fonts, but you couldn’t control the opera- tion manually. You can validate your fonts individually by selecting a font and choosing Validate from the Action menu (the gear icon) @. The Font Vali- dation window @ gives you a detailed report about each font you choose, telling you whether it’s safe to use, has minor prob- lems but is still usable, or is too corrupt to use @. You can delete problematic fonts by clicking on Remove Checked ©. Font Book has no repair function, however. ‘Tiger’s Font Book lets you export col- lections of fonts to any folder or volume | bewteur Font Valdtion tment Sars re Het opto eear are eee eygmeiace ra nue re ba cane a Pa enaaers wt Bb 2 Gover ou sve eect a 1 0 roses ris tor sreuis ve sale use, 1 es pels irs etn precent tect: © seveus prelems were found. Da ratute th font that’s connected to your Mac— — @ convenient for projects that require shared font libraries. You can also create multiple libraries from fonts on your hard drive or server and organize collections within them Font Book works seamlessly with Spot- light and Automator. In Spotlight, just type Under the Hood By now you probably know that underneath OS X’s pretty inter- face lies a Unix-based operating system. And Tiger has other behind-the-scenes technologies that will vastly improve your computing experience, even if you never touch them directly. Unix Just as Spotlight turns up in system software, it also appears in Terminal, OS X's front end to its Unix underpin- nings. More specifically, you can access Spotlight using the mafind command. Simply open Terminal, type mafind fol- lowed by whatever text string you're looking for, and press enter. Your screen will fill with the file names that match. (For more on tapping into Spotlight from the command line, see “Find Any- thing” on page 46.) You now have new ways to connect to the rest of OS X from Terminal. For example, you can use pbcopy to send a Unix command's output to the Clip- board. Similarly, typing pbpaste pastes the contents of the Clipboard into a Terminal command or file. As in previous versions of OS X, any- time you need more information about a Unix command, type man, followed by the name of the command (for example, man méfind), and press enter. That will call up the manual for that command. © Canseco’) the first few letters in the name of the font you're looking for, and the search engine will display all the matches it finds. And Tiger ships with 16 Automator actions for Font Book that let you customize and automate functions such as validat- ing fonts, adding fonts to a library, and more. Finally, Tiger opens Font Book to Apple- Script, letting you auto- mate certain ta: i scripts. You can script any number of actions in AppleScript, or you can save an Automator workflow as an AppleScript and apply it to various fonts or to Font Book functions. ecoccocces JACKIE DOVE is a senior associate editor at Macworld. Press the spacebar to move to the next page; press Q when you're done reading and want to quit. You may run across another new Unix technology: launch daemons. Though you may never even know you're deal- ing with them, developers are likely to use them, and their apps are likely to show it. Launch daemons are akin to startup and login items: they're pro- grams that can start up when you turn on the computer or when a user logs in. But launch daemons can do a whole lot more. They can start at a specific time, watch for (and react to) changes in files on your Mac, and shut down gracefully when you power down your Mac. This means Mac developers can now write apps that react appropriately to the various changes people make on their computers—everything from switching users to shutting the system down. Universal Access Via its Universal Access features, Apple has long offered help to Mac users with limitations on their vision, hearing, and motor skills. These capabilities, built into the Mac OS, make it easier to manipulate the keyboard and mouse and to see what's displayed on the monitor. With Tiger, Apple seriously steps up the scope of Universal Access’s powers. By ( reen Universal Ac marquee feature is VoiceOver @, a scheme that will read any on-screen text, in any application, using OS X’s built-in Speech voices. ‘That includes Web pages, e-mail mes: sages, and other documents. In addition to reading text, VoiceOver can display the current selection in a large-text win- dow, thus providing both aural and enhanced visual feedback. You can control VoiceOver entirely from the keyboard. Not only can you switch it on and off and control how VoiceOver reads text—by character, word, or paragraph, for example—but you can interact with on-screen ele- ments such as menus, scroll bars, and check boxes with the keyboard, no mouse required. In addition, VoiceOver allows you to alter the pitch, speed, and volume of each voice. Even with the ability to change the sound of Apple’s included voices, some Core Technologies Panther marked the arrival of Core Audio and Core MIDI. Those technolo- gies introduced low-level architectural changes that audio applications, such as Logic, could exploit. Apple has pulled off the same trick in Tiger, only this time with graphics. OS X 10.4 adds Core Image and Core Data technologies. Core Image gives developers easier access to pixel-level effects than they had in previous versions of OS X, while offering a new way to create such effects. Specifically, it lets apps take advantage of the speedy, pro- grammable graphics processing units (GPUs) in today's ATI and Nvidia video cards. If your video card doesn’t have a programmable GPU, Core Image uses your CPU more efficiently by making adjustments for Velocity Engine and dual processors. people may find listening to their mechan- ical pronunciation tiresome. Thankfully, Cepstral (\ stral.com) produces higher-quality voices, which work with any application that uses OS X’s speech technology—VoiceOver included. Because Apple built VoiceOver into ‘Tiger, the company believes its spoken- word application has an advantage over third-party screen readers: it should work seamlessly with OS X 10.4 the moment users press 1-F5 to activate VoiceOver. Indeed, Mail, Safari, Pre- view, and ‘Terminal already support VoiceOver. And it works with familiar keyboard commands such as 1-S for save and 1-C for copy. Easier to See VoiceOver may be the most notable addi- tion to OS X’s accessibility features, but it’s not the only one. Previously, the Mouse & ‘Trackpad tab of Universal Core Image relies on Image Units, a plug-in architecture for accessing fil- ters, transitions, and effects. Tiger includes about 100 Image Units, includ- ing blurs, color blends, sharpeners, gra- dients, transitions, halftones, and distortions. Developers can tap into these filters without having to write their own; they can also create new ones that will work across applications. While all of the Core technologies (Core Audio, Core Image, and Core Video) clearly target developers, end users ultimately benefit as well. Core Image creates a new standard for graph- ics plug-ins that your apps can exploit, and makes better use of the fast new graphics cards included in today's Macs. As Tiger ships, the following cards support Core Image: the ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 and Radeon 9600 XT, 9800 XT, and X800 XT; and the Nvidia Access could magnify the Mac’s screen to make it easier to read; now it offers a slider to make the cursor larger—a feature people with impaired vision have been waiting for. Contributing Editor CHRISTOPHER BREEN is also the editor of Playlistmag.com. Voiceover: Turn VolceOver on oF ~ @0n Con | @0n Com | Display: switch to white-on-black: #8 | @Black on White SUse grayscale ‘OWhite on Black Enhance contrast: a | ieincuenes Increase contrast: enable access for assistive devices GeForce FX Go 5200, GeForce FX 5200 Ultra, and GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL and 6800 GT DDL. Look for Core Image support to appear in other cards with programmable GPUs in the future. The other new Core technology in Tiger is Core Data. Mac OS X uses this database technology to keep track of all the information that's swimming around on your system—kind of like a down-to- the-metal FileMaker that the operating system and applications rely on to orga- nize their data. Before Core Data, the Mac had as many different ways of stor- ing data as it had different applications. Now that Core Data has arrived, your Mac has one way of storing everything, which makes it easier for different pro- grams to peek at one another's data. The bottom line for you is better- behaved applications.—BRIAN JEPSON AND JONATHAN SEFF GET STARTED WITH TIGER According to Apple, Mac OS X 10.4 offers over 200 new features. True, not all of them are what you'd call revolutionary. The tally includes some fairly mundane overhauls—conforming AppleScript’s Display Alert command to the Aqua interface, for instance, or adding the ability to play DVDs live using the Dock icon. But in between those geeky tweaks and the big-ticket handful (like Spot- light and Dashboard) lies an intriguing middle ground, where some of the cleverest enhancements await. Here’s a quick tour. By David Pogue E-mail as PDF 4 Mac OS X fans have always enjoyed the ability to save any printable document as a PDF file by choosing File: Print and clicking on Save As PDF. But in Tiger, that option in the Print dialog box has become a strange-looking pop-up but- ton. It includes not only the familiar Save As PDF command, but also Encrypt PDF (a handy way to add a password to any document), Save PDF To Web Receipts Folder (to archive receipts for stuff you buy online), and, perhaps most useful, Mail PDF. That last command turns the document into a PDF document, opens up the Mail program, and creates an out- going e-mail message with the PDF attached. Just address it and send it to anyone—regardless of platform—confi- dent that your recipient will see the same layout and fonts you did. Deep into the Dictionary Tiger's new dictionary, which is based on The New Oxford American Diction- ary, puts those of other operating sys- tems to shame. Apple's advantage, as always, is that it can integrate this dictionary into the operating system. The dictionary is available not only as a stand-alone program in your Applications folder, but also from the Services menu and the shortcut menu that appears when you control-click on a highlighted word in a Cocoa program such as Mail or Safari. But that’s only the beginning; the dictionary also has a keystroke that works in almost any program. Highlight a word in a Cocoa program and press 1-control-D. A handy definition panel appears—and if you continue to press 1-control, you can drag across the text, marveling as the panel follows along, defining every word you touch. Your Personal Clipping Service Just about every Mac user knows that Safari now doubles as an RSS reader (for more information, see “Safari 2.0” on page 17). The beauty of RSS, of course, is that it saves you the trouble of visiting a bunch of favorite Web sites just to see what, if anything, is new. But you need an RSS reader to get these summaries, and building one into Safari was a natural solution. Safari goes most RSS readers one better, however. Its first big stunt: for Beyond the Big Five your convenience, it can collect many Web sites’ headlines onto one scrolling page. Its second stunt: it can filter the blurbs on that consolidated page so you see only the articles pertaining to something that interests you—Tiger tips, Desperate Housewives, or the space shuttle, say. This lets you create a personal clipping service for the entire Internet. Here's how to set up a consoli- dated RSS page. Stunt 1: Whenever you see an RSS logo in the address bar, click on it to open Safari's RSS-reading view. Book- mark this page. From now on, your Bookmarks menu (or Bookmarks bar) lets you know, in parentheses, how many new articles that Web site has published. If you drag several of these book- marks (on a related topic, for example) into one Safari bookmark folder, you gain a new option: a View All RSS Articles command that sprouts from that folder. Now all your RSS subscrip- tions appear on one neatly consoli- dated page. Stunt 2: You can search this consoli- dated page for a topic that interests you, using the Search box on the right side. Safari hides all entries except those that match. Bookmark the filtered page, and you've built yourself a self- updating personal clipping service. With one click, you make Safari draw all the topical articles from the relevant Web sites. Deeg CSE) News Ticker by . . . Your Name Here 4 Safari isn’t the only piece of Tiger soft- ware that can display your favorite RSS news feeds. Its screen saver can, too. Leave the Mac unattended for a while and the screen fills not with starry nights or shifting photos, but with a truly spectacular, 3-D, spiraling-text dis- play showing each RSS headline in turn. It even offers to show you the complete article in Safari (you'll see the message “Press the 1 key to read more”) To set this up, open System Prefer- ences. Click on Desktop & Screen Saver, and then on the Screen Saver tab; in the list of screen-saver modules, click on RSS Visualizer. (If you don't see this item in the list, your Mac doesn’t have the necessary graphics horsepower.) Next, click on Options to choose which RSS feed you want to feature, and then click on Done. To see the result, either wait until your screen goes dark or, for instant gratification, click on Test. Who said screen savers were brainless pixel-wasters? Instant Address Books Smart folders are creeping into every area of the Mac experience; they're in iTunes, iPhoto, and now the Finder. But they have an especially interest- ing use in Address Book. With just a couple of clicks, you can create a folder—a smart group—that lists every- one who has a birthday coming up, or everyone on your kids’ Little League team, or everyone ina city you're about to visit (so that you can print out a handy pocket phone book, thanks to Address Book's new printing formats) To create a smart group, choose File: New Smart Group (1-shift-N), or option-click on the plus sign (+) in the lower left corner of the Address Book window. In the resulting sheet, name the smart group. Use the pop-up menus to set up the continuous-search criteria In the Little League example, you'd set up the pop-up menus to say Card Con- tains Little League. For a city directory, you'd use City Is Chicago (or whatever urban location you want). The High- light Group When Updated check box ensures that you'll see whenever one of your groups has changed. When you click on OK, the smart group will appear in the list at left Select it and you'll see that it has mag- ically rounded up all the people in your Address Book who match your query. (To edit the settings, highlight the group name and choose Edit: Edit Smart Group.) Sharing Address Books Here are two chronic challenges for husband-wife or small-business teams: first, how do you maintain your own independent address books without wasting effort on all the people you know in common? Second, how do you make a basic phone list available to both of you or to the whole company? Easy: publish your address book via a .Mac account, if you have one. Other people can then subscribe to your address book, which will show up in their own Address Book programs as a separate entity. To publish your list, choose Address Book: Preferences. Click on Sharing, and turn on Share Your Address Book. Now specify who's allowed to see your list by clicking on the plus sign (+) Your address list opens, allowing you to 1-click on the chosen few; click on OK. Turn on Allow Editing next to some- one's name if you have that much trust in him or her. Now suppose you're the spouse or coworker who wants access to the published list. In your copy of Address Book, choose File: Subscribe To Address Book, and type in the .Mac address of whoever did the publishing Once you have the idea, it’s easy to set up a matrix of people publishing to people, which can be a good way to harness everyone's contacts in these times of social-network mobilizing DAVID POGUE ( ) is the weekly tech ‘columnist for the New York Times and the author of Mac 05 X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition (O'Reilly, 2005). Maintain a Mac OS X tends to be more stable than some other operating systems I could name, but it’s not inde- structible. Properly maintaining your Mac can ward off disasters that'll leave your comfortable digital environment in ruins. ‘Mac maintenance is easy—there’s even software that does most of the work for you. Performed regu- larly, these four simple tasks will avert most problems and keep your technological house in order. Verify Preferences If your e-mail program quits while loading, your Web browser forgets your settings, or Address Book loses its categories, you may have an application with a cor- rupted preferences file. You could simply delete the corrupted file, but then you'll also lose all your custom preferences, which you must restore by hand. (For more on how to recover from application crashes, see “When Disaster Strikes” on page 64.) OS X uses -plist files to store application- and system-related preference information. These are bina ty files saved in the XML format, which follows a set layout. So it’s easy to determine whether you have a problematic file: if it doesn’t adhere to the XML layout, it’ corrupted. Verifying your preferences should be your first course of action anytime you notice unex- pected behavior, such as crashes or menu corruption. ‘There are two ways to check XML preference files in Tiger. With Terminal One way is with the Unix utility known as plutil. Open ‘Terminal (/Applications/ Utilities) and type sudo plutil -s ~/Library/ Preferences/* plist. ‘Then press enter and provide your password when asked. In the preceding code, = tells plutil to suppress output of a successful test, so if you see output, you'll know it’s from an error. You need to use sudo for file access because the system owns some preference files, such as those from Micromat’s TechTool, even though they reside in the Preferences folder in your user folder. You can check the top-level system preferences by repeating this command, substituting /Library /Preferences as the file location. ‘To simplify using the plutil utility in the future, select File: Save As, give the file a name (such as Check My Permissions), and pick a location. In the When Opening This File section, select Execute Command In A Shell, click on the Execute This mgicalthy SIMPLE WAYS TO AVOID THE MOST COMMON MAC PROBLEMS BY ROB GRIFFITHS T i Prior versions of OS X kept -plist files as p text, making them easy to view. For speed reasons, Apple has converted them to binary format in OS X 10.4. But it’s relatively easy to move them back into the old text format. In Terminal, just type the following: sudo plutil -convert xml1 /path/to/prefer - ence/file You can then use pico or vi or even TextEdit to look at or modify the file. When you're done, convert the file back to binary by typing the following: sudo plutil -convert binary1 /path/to/pref - erence/file Command (Specify Complete Path) button, and enter either of the commands. Click on Save, and you’ve gota clickable file. In the future, simply double-click on the file, enter your password when prompted, and press return. With Preferential Treatment If you’re not fond of ‘Terminal, try Jonathan Nathan’s free Preferential ‘Treatment application (find.macworld.com/0644). It lets you check user- and system-level preferences by click- ing on a couple of buttons. The program is a bit slower serie Who's in Charge Here? Permissions are complicated. On the left is the user's Home folder—the user can read from and write to this directory without restriction. In the center is the Applications folder, which the user and admin-level user can read from and write toa— but notice that the user doesn't own this folder. On the right is the OS X System folder, to which not even the admin user has write privileges. OS X DISASTER RELIEF than Terminal, but it’s much easier to use and its results are easier to read. Preferential Treatment lets you opt to open, move, or trash any corrupted files it finds. An application may create a file that fails Apple’s test but is not corrupt. If you see a file or two listed for applications that seem to work just fine, you can safely ignore the warnings. If you find a truly corrupted preference file (and you don’t have a corruption-free backup), quit the application, trash the file, and start over with the application settings. Repair Permissions Say your word processor can’t save the file you've been working on for an hour, your e-mail program won't let you change its preferences, or you can’t even launch an application. These are all symptoms of per- missions gone bad. OS X uses file permissions to determine which users are allowed to access files. Different programs in different locations on your hard drive have differ- ent permissions (see “Who's in Charge Here?”). Although this system works well most of the time, default permissions can become corrupt. If permis- sions are mistakenly modified, you may not be able to access folders or programs. This happens most often after you install software that includes system-level components, or when you update the OS. ‘To repair broken permissions, launch Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities), click on your startup disk, and then click on the Repair Disk Permissions button. (Don’t bother running Verify Disk Permissions—it takes just as long as Repair Disk Permissions, and if it tells you that it found errors, you’ll then want to run. the latter anyway.) This process can take as long as 15 minutes; while it’s working, you'll see messages about items it has corrected (see “Permissions Granted”). When it’s done, it will have resolved any permissions issues that affect system-level files and folders on your machine. Repair Disk Permissions uses internal data as well as data in the top-level /Library/Receipts folder, which keeps track of software you've installed. Never delete anything from this folder. DAILY Check SMART indicators You can use third-party software to automate the task. MONTHLY Delete cache files Once or twice a month is sufficient for most people. If you always keep your Mac running, increase it to once a week. AS NEEDED Verily preferences Do this when you notice unexpected application behavior or crashes. Repair permissions Do this when you update the 0S or after you install new applications and shareware. Permissions Granted When you tun Disk Litlitys Repair Permissions feature, you'll see messages explaining which files and folders had incorrectly set values. Your permissions-repair schedule should depend on how often you run installers. The more often you run installers, the more often you should run Repair Permissions. I recommend that you run it weekly if you download and install a few programs a week. Delete Cache Files A cache is a place to store something temporarily so the OS or a program can retrieve it in a hurry. G4 and G5 processors have caches that help them handle instructions more quickly. OS X uses disk-based caches that hold copies of graphics, frequently per- formed calculations, and the contents of dynamic menus. Caches reduce application launch times, speed the display of screen data, and make Web sites load faster. If cache files become corrupted or simply too large to function well, you may experience odd issues with an application—such as preferences that won’t load or menus that contain strange characters—or the system may become sluggish. You'll find OS X’s cache files in the /System /Library/Caches folder, in multiple cache folders in the System folder, in the /your user folder/Library folder, and in folders within individual application folders. The easiest way to remove most of them is to use a utility such as Kristofer Szymanski’s Cocktail ($15; www.macosxcocktail.com). However, these tools generally don't affect application-specific caches (with the exception of Safari); you'll have to wrangle such files yourself. Regularly deleting your cache files is a good idea. Removing cache files once or twice a month works well for most people, but if your Mac is always on and working, you may want to remove cache files once a week to prevent corruption. And if you’re seeing slowdowns or other unexplained behaviors, there’s no harm in trying to rout the bad behavior by deleting the cache files. Monitor Hard Drives The hard drive or drives inside your Mac are critic- ally important—if they fail, the Mac won't boot, and you could lose all your files. While there’s nothing Ti p Although software warns you of impend- ing hardware failures, it won't help you with the primary cause of poor hard-drive perfor- mance: full disks. Keep at least 10 percent of your boot drive free. To see how much space you have available, highlight the boot drive in the Finder and press 1-1 (Get Info). you can do to maintain your drives physically, you can sniff out disk weaknesses before they have a cata- strophic effect. The SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) hard drives in newer Macs attempt to diagnose their own health on a regular basis, and they note any problems they find—so you have time to update backups and look for replace- ment drives. There are two ways to check the status of your Mac’s SMART indicators. If you’re using the machine locally, launch Disk Utility and click on the top-level indicator for your drive in the left column. In the bottom of the window, you'll see the words SMART status; next to that, the word verified (see “How SMART Am I?”). If you don’t see the SMART indicator, your Mac doesn’t have the tech- nology. If you see it but it’s not verified, you should update your backup and replace that drive—it will likely experience a failure soon. If you prefer to use Terminal, or if you connect remotely to Macs—for instance, you have a Mac in your home that you’re using as a server—you can also check the status of the drives from Terminal. For a Mac with only one hard drive, open Terminal and type diskutil info diskO | grep Rr. For a Mac with more than one hard drive, type disaitil list to see the number assigned to each drive, and then repeat the first command with the proper number. You should check SMART indicators daily. How- ever, doing this manually gets old fast. If youre oo 1. eer" JES — How SMART Am I? Disk Utility checks a Mac's SMART indica- tors. The text at the bottom right (@) indicates that this drive is in good health, with no signs of impending failure. Construct a ntenance Toolbox with OS X SMARTReporter c status DiskWarrior Get SMART Using SMARTReporter, you in receive word via -mail, an application, or pop-up alert if a drive’s SMART status indicator shov comfortable with the command line, you can add a new cron task that executes this command on a reg- ular basis and writes the output to a text file; you can also create an AppleScript that displays a dialog box, and then set the AppleScript to run at login each day. Or you could use a third-party application, such as Alsoft’s DiskWarrior ($80; www.alsoft.com), Micromat’s TechTool Pro 4 ($98; www.micromat com), or Julian Mayer’s SMARTReporter (free; http://homepage.mac.com/julianmayer/), to inspect the drives and alert you if there’s an error (see “Con- struct a Maintenance Toolbox”). An Ounce of Prevention You've always known that Macs are superior, and this superiority extends to ease of maintenance. With some very simple housework—regularly checking a few things such as permissions, cache files, and your drive’s SMART status—you can prevent your Mac from falling into disrepair. Senior Editor ROB GRIFFITHS is the author of Mac OS X Power Hound, Pan- ther Edition (O'Reilly, 2004) and runs the Mac OS X Hints Web site (www.macosxhints.com). potential problem OS X DISASTER RELIEF | GET BACK ON YOUR FEET WITH TIGER’S NEW TROUBLESHOOTING TOOLS Even with regular maintenance, good Macs can have bad days. With OS X 10.4, Apple has delivered some great new tools for tracking down and eliminating problems such as crashes and broken connections, so you can get up and running again quickly. Crashing Applications Like Panther, Tiger presents you with the Quit Unex- pectedly dialog box when an application crashes. But now that dialog box offers you more options for deal- ing with the problem. Click on the Reopen button and Tiger instantly restarts the crashed application. If the application crashes a second time, a Try Again button replaces the Reopen button (see “Tiy, ‘Try Again”). When you click on this button, Tiger reopens the application, but with a twist: it performs a Safe Launch. ‘This special mode prevents the application from accessing its preferences file, which stores any set- tings you specify via the application’s Preferences menu, as well as hidden settings specified by the pro- gram itself. Preferences files usually live in the /Library/Preferences folder of your home directory, and end in .plist. Corrupted preferences files are a common cause of application crashes. By bypassing the program’s preferences file, Tiger prevents any crashes it might cause. If the Safe Launch is successful, you'll have one more decision to make. When you quit the applica- tion, Tiger will ask whether you want to preserve the new settings. Click on No and the program will revert back to the original preferences file the next time it launches. However, if that preferences file was the source of your crash, the crash will return as well. ‘The application iCrash quit unexpectedly after it was reopened. Mac OS X ang other applications ore not affected, Click Try Again te temporarily restore the appication's default settings and open it again, Click Report to see more Getals or send a report to Apple. ( Ghose) (Try Again) (Reportw > Try, Try Again Click on the Try Again button to restart a crashed application using Safe Launch. This lets you bypass the application's preferences file. BY TED LANDAU Ti Having an extra user account that you access only in times of trouble is a great way to narrow down the source of crashes and other irregularities. If the problem goes away when you switch users, the culprit is probably a file in your user's. Library folder (such as a preferences or cache file). When setting up the fresh account (in your Accounts Preferences), be sure to click on Login Options and enable the Fast User Switching option. This will let you switch to the troubleshooting account without logging out of your own. In most cases, you'll want to click on Yes. When you do, ‘Tiger renames the original (presumably cor- rupt) preferences file by adding a .saved extension to its name. For example, ‘TextEdit’s old preferences file would now be called com.apple.TextEdit -plist.saved. The application ignores the old file on future launches. This also means you'll have to re-create any customized changes from the old pref- erences file. Later, if you decide to revert to the original .plist file—should you decide it was not the source of your trouble—simply remove the newly created preferences file and delete the .saved suffix from the old one. ‘Tiger's Unexpectedly Quit dialog box also gives you the option of reporting the crash’s details directly to Apple. Unfortunately, if you decide to send a report to Apple, you cannot initiate a Safe Launch at the same time. If OS X itself crashes, you get a kernel panic and you'll see a message asking you to restart your com- puter. After doing so, you'll get a new option—a but- ton you can click on to report the kernel panic to Apple. However, at least as of OS X 10.4.1, the but- ton does not appear to work. Crashing at Startup If your Mac is crashing at startup, restart your com- puter and hold down the shift key immediately after you hear the startup chime. This initiates a Safe Boot, a special startup protocol that disables many of the files that can cause crashes. With a Safe Boot, the login window will appear even if you have pre- viously selected to log in automatically, and the words “Safe Boot” will appear at the top of the win- dow, below the Mac logo. During a Safe Boot, Tiger attempts to perform disk repairs, in a process similar to Disk Utility’s First Aid. This alone may solve your problem. A Safe Boot also temporarily disables a number of files that load at startup. These include most kernel extensions (stored in the /System/Library/Extensions folder), third-party startup items (in the /Library/ Startupltems folder), all fonts except those in the /System/Library/Fonts folder, and all login items for your account (enabled in the Login Items pane of the Accounts preference pane). A Safe Boot also moves a variety of font cache files (located in /Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS) to the ‘Trash. OS X will create new default versions of these cache files as needed. If any of these files is the cause of the crash, the computer will now start successfully, giving you the chance to locate and remove the troublemaker. Unfortunately, tracking it down will require some trial and error. You will need to remove files system- atically, and then test to see if you can now restart successfully. Ifso, you know that the file (or files) you removed was the cause. I recommend starting with files that appear to have been added around the time the problem started and files that come from third parties, as these are the more likely culprits. Missing Internet Connection ‘Tiger also introduces a new feature to assist in trouble- shooting network problems. If the system detects a connection failure (for example, if you try to open a Web page in Safari when you're not connected to the Internet), it pops up a message that includes a Network Diagnostics button. Clicking on this launches the Net- work Diagnostics utility (stored in /System/Library/ CoreServices). This utility wal