Mac Trick, Tip or Quip of the Week (Week 1)

Using Aliases: One of the most useful and probably most underused feature of the Mac OS is aliases. Aliases are basically just a pointer to another file. You've probably put a few aliases in your apple menu folder of some of the programs you use most often. But that is just the beginning of what you can do with aliases. For example, I put an alias for my hard disc in my menu folder. Because of the hierarchical menu sytem, I can navigate through my hard disc without wading through all those windows. If you're a webauthor and often update your pages, why not put an alias of your web page folder in your Netscape folder and/or Internet Explorer folder. Then when you want to check your pages, you can easily get to them from the open file command in the browser's file menu. I think you get the idea. If you are often accessing a file or document from another program, place an alias for it in that program's folder.

Maybe you have the opposite problem--You've gone alias crazy and your apple menu folder is so full of aliases, it's getting hard to scroll through so many. Once again the hierarchical nature of the menu folder can help you. Instead of having 30 different items placed seperately in your menu folder, group them together in folders. (System 7.5 already has 3 folders in your menu folder: Automated Tasks, Recent Applications and Recent Documents.) For example, instead of having seperate aliases for your web browser, e-mail,ftp, and newswatcher programs, place an alias of a folder that has aliases of all these programs inside it (or if you have your hard disc organized so all your internet applications are already in one folder, just place an alias of that folder in the apple menu folder.) How you name the aliases can also help you navigate. You can change the aliases' names and they will still point to the same item. The apple menu folder arranges everything alphabetically, so an alias of something like Z-Term or WriteNow is going to near the bottom. If you want it to appear higher up, you can always get it to appear higher up in the menu by simply adding a space at the beginning of the name. A space will appear before the letter "A" so those items will appear first in your menu folder. Perhaps there's little new information here in this tip, but I hope I've stirred your imagination as to how you can make better uses of aliases to help you work a little easier.

Mac Trick, Tip or Quip of the Week (Week2)

I have two short tips I'd like to share with you this week that were sent to me.

The first comes from Kurt Tappe

To start up your Mac with extensions but without startup items, hold down the shift key AFTER extensions have loaded but before the menu bar draws or any volumes mount.

NOTE: This trick worked with Systems 7.0.x thru 7.5.1, but does not work with 7.5.2, 7.5.3, or 7.5.5. It DOES work again in 7.6.x. Weird!!

The second one comes from Sari Kadison-Shapiro

Did you ever have an errant folder or file that was a LONG scroll away from the others? This can happen when switching from View by name to View by icon. The company I was freelancing for would print the window of icons indicating which files were on the Zip disk they were delivering...This is where the tip comes in...hold down the option key and select (under the 'Special' menu) Clean Up By Name (if you don't hold down the option key it says 'Clean up Window') This arranges the icons in any window size that you drag the size box to. Then select "Print Window" You now have a graphic view of what is on that removable disk.

Thanks for the tips, Kurt and Sari.

Mac Trick, Tip or Quip of the Week (Week3)

This week's tip deals with managing Netscape Navigator's bookmark. After you've been surfing the web for a while, you've probably got quite a large bookmark file. One of the things that really annoys me is that there is some strange offshoot to Murphy's Law which states: "The bookmark you which to reach is at the end of your bookmark list." Inevitably, before you reach the book mark, you accidentally release the mouse and have to start again from the top. You could use the bookmark window to scroll through your bookmarks. Since it's not a drop down menu, it doesn't lock everything up and doesn't go back to the beginning if you stop scrolling. There is a better way without buying some kind of commercial software program. One solution is to not allow your bookmark file to get that big. Does that mean you have to delete some of your bookmarks to keep the size manageable? No. If you go into the netscape folder which is in the preference folder of your systems folder, you will see a bookmark file for netscape. Remove this file and place it somewhere else. I keep mine in the main netscape folder (the one the browser itself resides in, NOT the one in the system folder.) Now if you start up netscape, you will find that you have no bookmarks. You can start fresh again. But what about all your old bookmarks? You can access them by using the open file command and selecting the bookmark file. Now your old bookmark file comes up as a page instead of as bookmarks. Because it is a page, you can now bookmark it. Whenever you select that bookmark, your page of old bookmarks will come up. If you want to be really fancy, you can use this method to organize bookmarks by category. You could have one called News, another called Mac stuff. However you do it, it's sure easier than scrolling through all those hundreds of bookmarks you've collected! If you have a tip you'd like to pass along, don't hesitate to send it.

Mac Trick, Tip or Quip of the Week (Week4)

Cleaning out your garage: Isn't amazing the things that you find whenever you move into a new house or apartment? As you empty out the garage, you find stuff you haven't seen/used in years. Maybe if we threw some of that stuff out, we wouldn't need a bigger house to begin with! Our hard drives are the same way. We accumulate a whole bunch of junk we don't need or use. For example, why are you keeping that expired demo or beta on your drive? (Oh yeah, that reminds me, I've got to throw away my trial version of Internet Phone that has expired.) Do you really need to keep every letter you've ever written? What about faxes? Do you have old faxes sitting on your drive that you really don't need? One pitfall to avoid is this: "I have a huge drive with plenty of space, so I'll worry about cleaning up the old hard drive later." The reason this isn't such a good idea is that when your hard drive does get cramped, it's going to be a much harder time-consuming task to try and make more space. Also, your Mac functions much better when it has a little breathing room instead of having every nook and cranny packed with stuff. For example, you may have trouble trying to transfer files in Eudora if your hard disk is full, or trouble copying a file.

So where to begin looking for space? As I said get rid of any expired betas or installers you have sitting around. If you have some usuable installers like Netscape, archive it if you can using a zip or mo or a less often used hard drive. Also if you keep back ups of installers and other downloaded items search for duplicates. You don't need the binhexed (.hqx) and stuffed (.sit) version of the same program. Throw the binhexed copy away since it uses more space. Another good place to go hunting for zappable items is in the system folder. There maybe old items there from programs you have previously deleted. Check for old preference files of deleted programs. There may even be old extensions or control panels from programs you have deleted. Speaking of extensions, how many printers do you have installed? The system installer will install drivers for all of apple's printers. Keep the printers that you use or need and throw the rest away. You can always re-install the needed driver if you should change your printer in the future. While you are hunting around your system file, let me recommend a great piece of shareware The InformInit. The InformInit is a guide to Apple's System Software. It is very complete and even has on-line references to the items to which it is referring. Have you ever wondered what all those extensions and control panels in your system folder really are and what their function is? The InformInit will tell you and if you decide you don't need that feature, you can delete it.

This has just been an introduction to a subject that could really be a small book. I encourage you to become acquainted with all the different parts of your system software and clean out that system garage once in a while!

Mac Trick, Tip or Quip of the Week (Number 5)

The next couple of weeks, I'd like to share some tips on basic trouble-shooting. I can remember as a new user the panic I had when I first experienced a system freeze or a crash. Oh no! The computer's broken. Once Netscape crashed on me and when I tried to restart I got the chimes of doom! In case you don't know, the chimes of doom are a strange series of chords that you hear at startup instead of the usual pleasant start up sound. I thought, "It's really dead this time!" Fortunately, the problem was simply solved. When the system crashed, the bootblocks on my hard disk were damaged. I ran Norton Utilities and fixed the problem and once again my Mac was smiling. So the first piece of advice I would give a new user is this: DON'T PANIC! The majority of problems that you will have are software related, not hardware related. They are usually fairly easy to fix and the more difficult software problems can still be solved with no trips to the repair shop. To begin this series of troubleshooting tips, I'm going to give you the most important piece of advice. BE PREPARED! It is inevitable that you are going to have crashes and freezes and other problems. Even the Mac is not perfect. The problem is unlike football, there is no 2 minute warning. Your Mac is not going to say:"I am going to crash in 2 minutes, so please save all open files." Develop the habit to save often. If you work 4 hours on your great American novel and your system crashes without you having saved it, IT IS GONE FOREVER! So SAVE SAVE SAVE! Just as important as saving files is backing up your hard disk. How important are the files on your disk? If your hard disk crashes, those files are gone. There are some companies that specialize in data recovery, but they are very expensive. The best thing to do is to back up your hard drive regularly. These days we have fairly inexpensive zip drives, MO drives and other removeable media that are quite suitable for this purpose. What would happen if your disk crashed RIGHT NOW? Would you lose everything? Your only protection is to back up before the problem happens. You may back up for years with no problem and then one day it happens and those years of backing up will be worth it!

Another area of preparation is to have some emergency tools available to you. When I had the chimes of doom, I was able to get back up and running right away because I had some tools to work with. The most important emergency tool is another means of booting the computer. If for some reason your hard drive won't boot, you need to have another way to boot the computer and check out what is going on. You should have a disk tools disk which comes with all of apple's system software. This disk has a minimal system folder and disk first aid. You should make a back up of this disk. As they say, when it rains, it pours! If you should have the bad luck of not being able to boot off your hard disk and then finding out something is wrong with your disk tools disk, you're out of luck! (As you can see the general rule of thumb to follow is it's better to be overly cautious then be sorry.) Disk First Aid is a great utility and can fix many of the problems that you might run into. I recommend that you run it regularly as a check up even when you don't see any problems. Some problems don't show up very easily, like a corrupted file. As great as Disk First Aid is you should also get a copy of Norton Utilities, another troubleshooting program. Why? Because Norton sometimes finds things that Disk First Aid doesn't and vice versa. If you run both Norton and Disk First Aid, and they both show there are no problems, you can be pretty confident that your disk is in good shape. You should also have some virus protection installed. The most popular for the Macintosh is Disinfectant. One reason it is so popular is that it is freeware. It is also updated whenever a new virus is discovered, so make sure you have the latest version installed.

Disinfectant can be downloaded from Info-Mac or Shareware.com (See the software links section of this page for the URLs) Nortons Utilities is a commercial program of the Symantec corporation and can be purchased from any of the usual software vendors. The subject of troubleshooting is large enough for a book. Indeed books have been written about it! We'll continue looking more into troubleshooting next week, but for now remember: BE PREPARED!

If you have a tip you'd like to pass along, don't hesitate to send it. 

Home  Theo  Mac  Home Page Help  Webrings  Mail