Recent versions of iChat automatically pause your voice [and video] chat sessions if you start a file transfer, for the duration of the entire transfer. This is OK if it’s just a small file, but if it’s anything larger than a few MB, you probably don’t want to be stuck on mute while waiting for the transfer to finish.

There’s a dirty workaround, though: stop the voice chat, start the file transfer, and restart the voice chat. The voice chat ignores already existing file transfers!

Technorati Tags:
tiger, ichat

In high school, I didn’t want to learn French, and in the part of Canada I come from, your choices for non-English languages are: French. So I took some other class, which probably had an educational value about as dubious as French. Now, I look at totally cool-looking french RPGs like Vermine and go “Man, not learning French was really dumb of you.”

So, really, I’m not that proud, but it does mean I can take great advantage of Monolingual for OSX, a rocking piece of freeware that will root through the language files in the system and various applications and delete the non-English ones that you choose. This little app immediately saved me over 1GB of space on both my laptop and desktop — nothing to sneeze at, especially if you like having a small boot partition.

If you try it out, be sure to read the FAQ! There’s a “gotcha” with regards to Adobe applications, but it’s one of those great gotchas that is easily worked around … if you read the FAQ.

BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com is some wacky promotion where, if enough people blog about SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys. MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software to bloggers.

I’ve not used SubEthaEdit, but from what I know about it, it has some really great collaboration features, but is also a fine text editor if you don’t need those features.

This is an interesting promotion that seems pretty simple on the surface: A percentage of people that get the application for free — if the goals are met — will go on to be future customers and evangelists, while a certain percentage will use it but not ever bother to upgrade to a new version. Another group will dislike it, but only a very small portion will dislike it and complain about the quality: it was free, after all.

And, of course, the nature of the promotion means it will be frequently talked about in the Mac “blogosphere” until the next shiny thing comes along.

Mail.app’s data takes up too much space on my hard drive. I know why — I’m an email packrat. I have mail dating back to 1997 on my other computer, and a lot of that mail includes attachments, because I’m constantly sending them: drafts for articles, layout drafts, art sketches, random pictures of last night’s snowfall … all sorts of attachments. And Mail.app saves those for you right within its own data files, so you don’t lose the attachment if, in the future, you delete the original file.

That means if you send a 1MB PDF to a co-worker, that 1MB PDF is now taking up 2MB+ on your hard drive; once in the original place, and once somewhere in the bowels of ~/Library/Mail/.

Side Tip: As soon as you hit the Choose File button, Mail saves the file you’re attacahing. So if you’re working on a graphic, attach it to your email, and then notice you made a typo, you must delete it from your email before you edit and re-save the document. Even if you edit and re-save overtop of the original file you attached, the first one will be sent!

Aside from taking up hard drive space, this is a potential security/privacy issue, as you may think you’ve deleted confidential files from your hard drive, but still have a copy saved with Mail’s data.

Thankfully, it’s relatively simple to get rid of all of those attachments, or at least re-save them all into a form where they’re more usable. That’s a potential reason to want to save attachments with your mail data — if you accidentally lose the original file somewhere down the road, you have them saved in your mail data and you can retrieve them. But really, that’s a last ditch resort that should be unnecessary given a smart and sane backup plan, and we all have one of those, right?

Alright, let’s go through the steps to archive and delete these files.

1. Create a temporary directory on your hard drive, and inside that directory create directories for each mail account you have. You can get away with just one directory even if you have multiple accounts, but since my accounts often send files related to a single company, I can save sorting time by making these directories in advance and saving the files there.

2. Open your Sent folder, and select the first folder inside it. Turn off Threading so you can see every single email in it, and Select All, then File -> Save Attachments. Select the relevant directory to save your attachments in, and they’ll be saved in there. This step may take a little while and jack up CPU load.

3. With all your messages still selected, select Message -> Remove Attachments.

4. Select Mailbox -> Rebuild.

5. Repeat steps 2-4 with the next mailbox until you have none left.

6. If you just want to get that junk off your hard drive, burn all those attachments to CD and date it, then toss it in the pile of backup CDs full of random junk that aren’t useful and you’ll never use again. Or you can sort out the attachments, delete the ones you’ll no longer need, and safely archive the stuff that might be useful in the future.

You can, of course, do this on any other folder that you have mail in, including a Smart Mailbox — so yes, you can make a Smart Mailbox that only includes emails that have attachments, both incoming and outgoing, and simply save and delete the attachments from there. I tried this for all my incoming attachments, and it took roughly forever, but then again, I did have over three years of attachments built up, and I do find recent attachments to be useful when they’re in-line with the message, so you may want to set it up a smart folder that shows all messages with attachments that are older than, say, 90 days, and then archive and delete those, keeping attachments newer than 90 days in with your messages.

BTW, Mail helpfully adds a notice like “[The attachment file.pdf has been manually removed]” to each message you remove an attachment from, so if you need it to hunt it down at a later date, you at least know what you’re looking for.

Technorati Tags: tiger, mail.app, apple mail, email

[Alternate Title: Fixing iChat when Video Breaks]

The Setup: My Dual 2GHZ G5, Master, running OSX 10.4.2. Upon installing the latest point revisions of Quicktime and iTunes, iChat 3.1 is no longer able to use my iSight for video, even though the microphone on it works just fine. I can’t initiate video chats and nobody can initiate a video chat with me. This applies to both 1 or 2 way chats. An upgrade to 10.4.3 didn’t fix this problem, and it didn’t bring me a pony, either.

The Fix: Insert my Tiger CD and reinstall iChat 3.0 overtop iChat 3.1. Instructions Here. Delete all my iChat preference files. Install or re-install the 10.4.3 Combo Update. The Combo Update is a fat-bottomed gal — over 100MB — so you should probably have coffee ready. Reboot. Re-configure iChat with your preferences. Find that hot userpic you use that looks nothing like you really do and put it back into your profile.

The End Result: You should be fixed. Err, you should have working video in iChat again. Maybe you should be fixed, too, but that’s not my call to make.

A side note: I have no conclusive proof that it was the installs of Quicktime or iTunes that broke iChat video for me, but it’s the only logical conclusion I could come to.

Technorati Tags: tiger, ichat, isight, 10.4.3

Dear Apple,

I don’t have time to install 10.4.2 today, but I would like to thank you in advance:

If iChat is logged in to your AIM account in Mac OS X 10.4 or 10.4.1, logging in to the same account on a different computer disconnects the Tiger computer without warning—this update adds a preference choice to iChat to avoid this, if desired.

Woo!

Full 10.4.2 Update Details

love,
Adam

Dear Reader[s],

What can I say? Busier than hell!

cheers,
Adam

As a brief followup to my initial impressions on Tiger:

• They’ve added a dimensions field to the preview pane, which is something I wanted under 10.3. Unfortunately it doesn’t show the resolution of the image.
• I’ve messed around with how I invoke Dashboard — now I use the bottom-left corner as the “Active Corner”, combined with the shift key. It works much more nicely and “flows” more easily than a keyboard shortcut.
• I’ve used Spotlight a little bit more, and it’s certainly faster and more configurable than the old Find method in the Finder. Why, for the love of all that is holy, is the 10.3 Find window not resizable? If you have more than a half-dozen entries in the “Search in Specific Places” menu, you get a scroll bar, with no way to make the window bigger. Ridiculous!

So, I finally got around to snagging Tiger last night. I made myself promise that I wouldn’t install it until after I cleaned my living room, and sure enough, two hours later I had a clean living room.

I did an “Archive and Install”, and an hour after putting the vacuum cleaner away, I was booting into Tiger for the first time.

First Impressions

• Dashboard is a bit cooler than I thought. I’ve already installed DashLicious and within seconds had made a del.icio.us bookmark. Pretty neat. I haven’t spent much more time hunting around for cool widgets — from what I’ve seen a lot of them are “suck the headlines from WebSite X” widgets, which to me seems silly when I already have NetNewsWire. The World Clock widgit is also relatively useful, as you can have multiple instances of it, cued to different important time-zones. I also like SysStat, although I wish it also showed the total amount of used/available/total space on all our drives put together.
• The new iChat has this ridiculous feature that disconnects other clients on different computers logged in with the same AIM user name. Since I often have clients connected on both my laptop and desktop — I typically chat on my laptop but want to direct file sends to my desktop — I find this feature exceptionally annoying, and I’ve already kvetched to Apple about it. I haven’t had chance to use my iSight or do any voice chatting with Tiger.
• I haven’t used Spotlight much yet. My desktop is really focused towards production, and to a lesser extent media playing — I don’t browse the web on it much, I don’t keep email on it, I don’t have Address Book contents on it … so the value of searching it even more efficiently isn’t that valuable, when I don’t search it that often anyway. I expect Spotlight will be more interesting on my laptop, when I get around to installing Tiger on it.
• My faux postscript printer got eaten in the install process; not sure if that was my fault or not. That probably means I’ll need to spend some time dorking around with InDesign and Quark to get them to point all my printing preferences to the “new” virtual printer, when I get around to making it. Not a big deal.
• Not being able to turn off the “.app” extension is annoying — I pretty much need to have extensions visible, since I often have the same file with different types in the same directory ["System Failure Cover.psd" and "System Failure Cover.tif", for example], but I sure as hell don’t need to see “Dashboard.app” and “Dictionary.app” …
• I was very happy about the install time — within an hour of starting the install, I was back in a working OS getting work done, not tinkering with stuff to make the OS look and feel right and snappy. Not shabby!