Sunday, May 1, 2005

Random Tiger Notes

Miscellaneous

Printing

Mail

Tools

Safari

Spotlight

Finder

Dock

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Regarding PDFs and Safari. I prefer using Preview. Was it not possible to option-click the link to the PDF? That would have just downloaded it. Unless the site that was serving the PDF doesn't allow you to option-click a link through some sort of web tomfoolery.

This hint will let you disable inline PDFs.

"There doesn't even seem to be a way to save the currently viewed PDF to disk."

Command-S?

Chris: Yes, the problem was that this site uses JavaScript and a temporary URL to open the PDF.

Jonathan: Thanks for the hint!

Erik: Command-S was the first thing I tried. I didn't work.

Thanks for the list, there are a bunch of things in there I hadn't noticed.

Where are the new database and plist scripting additions? I don't see them in Standard Additions, or in /System/Library/ScriptingAdditions/. I hadn't noticed the new dictionary browser in script editor until I went looking, though.

(I'm used to scanning through scripting dictionaries by selecting all and then using cmd-f to do a substring search across all entries. The new dictionary browser only updates to display all entries if you select suites with the mouse, while failing to update in response to command-A. Radar #4104459.)

Seems that random Tiger notes are popping up all over the place. Here are mine, if anyone cares: http://assortedgeekery.com/archives/2005/04/20/tiger.

Good to see that I'm not the only one annoyed by the change in the Trash's Dock menu.

"After the initial indexing, there's no visual indication of the indexing process."

I don't think this is correct. I noticed a white dot appear in the centre of the magnifying glass icon when it built the initial index, and I've seen it again after I mounted up a new filesystem on a removable disk.

Yes, it's hard to see but unless I need my eyes tested again, it is there.

Nat: They're actually background applications. The database stuff is in:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Database Events.app

and the plist stuff is in System Events. I read dictionaries the same way.

Mark: mdimport has been running at full speed all day, and I definitely don't see a dot. Perhaps it only appears when it builds the initial index (when it also shows a progress bar in the Spotlight menu).

Command-option-drag onto Script Debugger works for me even if it's not the frontmost app.

And I guess I didn't notice the Trash contextual menu because I have the dock vertical, anchored at the bottom right corner of my screen. Empty Trash is still just directly to the left.

No script menu in Mail sucks; my primary method of filing mail (which I don't use on the machine I have Tiger on) relies on my binding command-D to it.

I've seen the Dock dragging behavior both work and not work. I was going nuts on Friday trying to figure out why I couldn't drag scripts Command-Option drag a script from it's Dock icon to the Dock icon for Script Editor. Today, though, it works fine, even if Script Editor isn't running.

Don't have Script Debugger, so I can't check that.

Nicholas: I have the Dock vertical, too. I think what was disorienting me was that it's not in the same place relative to the top of the menu. Funny how the "muscle memory" works.

Eric: I experimented with the dragging some more this morning, and determined that the two criteria I mentioned (Command-Option and frontmost) are not always necessary *or* sufficient to make it work. But they do seem to help. Also, once I've dropped onto a particular application, it seems to be more receptive to subsequent drags, until I quit it.

Sounds like they shipped too early!
How much longer would you have let it baked? Or, what functionality would you have cut?

Another easy way to save a pdf to disk (and for that matter just about any page in any app) is to Print and then use the "save to pdf" option hidden in the weird pdf button/pulldown menu in every print dialog box.

Raul: That's often not acceptable because it creates a new PDF with different compression, unclickable links, and missing metadata.

One thing about Spotlight--it seems to do two-phase indexing. During my initial index run, it took it most of an hour to add all of the files to the Spotlight db, but it took overnight before it had actually searched the *contents* of the files. This was verified via 'mdls'--files would show up in there quite quickly, but there was no file-specific data for most files until I'd let the huge indexing process run. Running 'mdimport' manually short-circuited the process and made extra metadata show up almost immediately.

You can control click on the PDF content and select "Open with Preview".

Hope this helps

Deestar: That was the second thing I tried. :-) Control-clicking caused Safari to crash.

Printer jobs do stop randomly, but they did that in Panther with an HP, but this is the first time it has happened with a new HP OfficeJet, connected wirelessly via Bonjour & Airport Extreme. It seems to happen most often with MS Office apps, if I quit before it finishes printing (annoying when I pull up a file to print it quick and want to move onto other stuff).

Also: even though I use NetNewsWire, I wanted a password-protected feed for my screensaver feed, but even if Safari (and SyndicationAgent) have the password saved, it doesn't load. I also noticed that RSS feeds do not show up in the list for the screensaver until you access them once via Safari (and it adds them to the All RSS Feeds list), but that may be that I need to append feed:// manually, as that's what Safari does the first time I access it.

I am disappointed that Retrospect was not Tiger compatible. Why did they wait?

My Epson printer does not have all needed options in Tiger and Epson has no solution.

I really like Spotlight. I found stuff I didn't know I had.

Installation of Tiger was easy.

I think a lot of companies don't have their Tiger update ready because Apple didn't really announce ahead when they were going to ship. A lot of developer schedules got tossed once the shipping date was publicly announced!

It's a pity that the HIG isn't followed by the company that wrote it and that the muscle memory is disregarded in lot of current Apple implementations...

"AppleWorks files are indexed; Safari Web Archives are not"

I disagree. I have a web archive on my harddisk that is indexed...

Btw: has anyone except me a Tibook 800 Mhz and the display problem described in http://scrap.dasgenie.com/articles/2005/05/01/mac-os-x-10-4-tiger-no-more-brightness-control-on-tibook-800-mhz ?

Matt Green

If I understand Spotlight's indexing process correctly (which I probably don't), excluding folders from the index via the privacy pane _should_ remove them from the index right away, but apparently not always. The surefire way is to set up your exclusions, then delete the index folder in the root directory of the volume in question. The index folder is called .Spotlight-V100 Unfortunately, this will force Spotlight to reindex everything again, so don't start this when it might bother you. The mdutil command can also delete Spotlight indices, and turn it off completely for specific volumes.

Also, Spotlight normally does indexing on new or modified files as part of the disk i/o operations. This is why you don't ordinarily notice it once the initial indexing completes, but mounting an external drive or pulling a large amount of data from the web or SVN suddenly makes it go bonkers. Excluding the locations where you put such large chunks of data _should_ eliminate the indexing.

Annard: Agreed; I wasn't very happy with the Tiger seeding process. For a long time, we didn't know for sure when they would ship, and the last DVD seed was quite different from the GM.

Dominik: It's definitely not indexing the contents of my Web archives. I guess it's possible that something's messed up on my machine--just now when I tried to use Spotlight it hung SystemUIServer for the past half hour--but I've also heard other people say that Web archives aren't searchable.

Erik: Command-S was the first thing I tried. I didn't work.

Deestar: That was the second thing I tried. :-) Control-clicking caused Safari to crash.

Both work fine here.

Oliver: They work for me for regular PDF URLs, just not the ones that use JavaScript tomfoolery.

"Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End don't work in the message list."

This was the case in Panther, as well -- these keys applied to the message body instead. The solution was to hold the Control key down when pressing the key to appy it to the message list. Does this work in Tiger? (I don't have enough messages in my Tiger inbox right now to try it ;-) )

"It used to be that if you held down Command-Option, you could drop a Dock icon onto another Dock icon (e.g. dropping an application onto Script Debugger to view its dictionary). Now, this works if you first bring the receiving application to the front."

It was actually Command-drag, not Command-Option-drag -- evidently the "Option" just didn't break it ;-) And Command-dragging still works fine for me in Tiger.

DF: Page Up and Page Down work when you hold down Control. Home and End do not.

So which files in ~/Library/Mail/ are obsolete then? I have about 800 MB of mbox files - are they ready for trash?

you can assign custom keyboard shortcuts to scripts in the Script menu. how to do it is explained in Mail Help under:

Discover > Automating Mail > Using the Script Menu

xbhoff: I know that's what the help says, but I couldn't get it to work. I filed a bug on this in December, which Apple hasn't closed yet.

The way Spotlight works, if you copy files to a drive, it should be copying existing metadata. But if you create them for the first time, or copy them from a disk Spotlight hadn't seen before, it should index those files right away...

That's the same for content being decompressed.

With Mail, I've seen a tendency not to be able to actually see messages--but not only by Spotlight-- unless you Rebuild the mailbox..

Bill Scott

Re. Mail in Tiger:

Page up and page down move through the paragraphs of a long email, as they should. Home and end don't work. Up and Down arrows move from item to item in the email. Control-page up and control-page down jump from mail item to mail item of the same thread, i.e., from the same sender.

Regarding the Dictionary I dare to disagree: I found the panel just awesome – what do you think is wrong with it: that you cannot resize the pop-up window-thingie? that it is not tolerant towards mispellings?
But: that is there and that quick and handy - that is, in my perspective, too cool.

Btw: is there a way to re-install dictionaries for other languages than the ones you have OS X installed for?
(I installed, for reasons of harddrive-capacity-issues, only the default English – can I now install some, say, german dictionary additonally?)

taktmann: I don't like the small size, the special mode, the way it disappears when I do *anything*, or the lack of keyboard navigation.

Michael: I see your points (but did you realize that mouse-scroll-wheel is supported?); but is there any other pop-up-dictionary available on os x?
But dont you have to admit: the panel does look good?!

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