Latest Posts in Mac Gems

Baseline 1.4.2

One of the most common issues I hear about from readers—via email or in the Macworld forums—is that their hard drives are getting full and they can’t figure out what’s taking up all that space. The simple solution is to run a program that examines your hard drive and shows you the biggest space-hogging offenders. In the past, I’ve recommended GrandPerspective and WhatSize, two excellent programs that do just that, although using different presentations of the data: GrandPerspective creates a visual representation of the space each file on your drive occupies, letting you see, graphically, what’s taking up the most space; WhatSize instead provides a size-sorted, hierarchical display that looks much like the Finder’s column view.

But another good option is Baseline, which offers both graphical and columnar views, along with a unique twist. Like GrandPerspective and WhatSize, you can scan a volume at any time and view the results. In List View, you can sort by name, kind, modification date, size, or size difference (more on the last option in a bit). Column view gives you a hierarchical view of your drive’s contents. As with WhatSize, in both of these views, file and folder sizes are colored based on size; for example, the sizes for items over 1GB in size are displayed in red, and the sizes of items over 1MB but under 1GB are purple. Baseline can even scan Time Machine volumes. (As with any of these space-surveying programs, you’ll need to run Baseline with root privileges to scan private directories; for example, the home folders of other users.)

One drawback of Baseline's Column view compared to WhatSize is that in my testing, the contents of each folder aren’t always sorted by size. On the other hand, Baseline includes Quick Look support—you can select a file or folder in any view and then press the space bar to see OS X’s Quick Look preview for that item—and you can delete or compress items right from within Baseline. (A nice safety feature: If the name of an item in List or Column view is purple, that means—in the developer’s words—the item is “referenced in Apple or non-Apple software packages that have been installed on your system.” This means you shouldn’t mess with that item.)

Like GrandPerspective, Baseline also has a TreeMap (graphical) view that shows every file on your drive represented by a proportionately-sized block or group of blocks. Click on an item to see information about it, including yellow outlines that show you the “boundaries” of the selected item’s parent folders. You also see, at the bottom of the window, the path to the item; unfortunately, longer paths can be difficult to read, as the names of each folder are cut off to allow the full path to fit the width of the window. If you double-click on an item in TreeMap view, the display changes to show a more-detailed view of the contents of the next folder down the file hierarchy.

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Promising Prospect: Choosy

Earlier this week, I reviewed Highbrow, a handy utility that lets you quickly change your default browser and, even better, choose a different browser on the fly to open a particular URL. Such functionality can be quite useful if you develop Web sites and need to test your work in different browsers; if you’re opening a site that you know works better in a browser other than your preferred one; or if you’re just testing several browsers to determine which to use full-time.

But Highbrow isn’t the only game in town; George Brocklehurst’s Choosy 0.9.1, a System Preferences pane currently in beta, offers similar functionality via a slightly different interface and with a few unique options.

As with Highbrow, whenever you click on a Web link outside of a Web browser, Choosy lets you choose the browser used to open that link. Specifically, Choosy’s browser picker pops up, displaying all the programs that you might use to open the link; you use your mouse cursor or the arrow keys to pick the desired program.

Choosy's horizontal (top) and circular (bottom) browser pickers

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Highbrow 1.0.1

As Mac users, we’re fortunate to have a wide variety of Web browsers to choose from. Heck, many people even use multiple browsers regularly. For example, some sites work better in different browsers; if you develop Web sites, you want to test your work in different browsers; or perhaps you like to keep your personal and work-related browsing separate.

One of the hassles of using multiple browsers is OS X's default-browser setting, set in Safari’s preferences or using a third-party utility such as RCDefaultApp or More Internet. Once you’ve chosen your default browser, every Web URL you click on outside of a Web browser—for example, in an email message, in a word-processing document, or in an HTML file you're editing—will open in your chosen browser. If you want to open a particular link in a different browser than the default, you have to copy the URL and paste it into that other browser.

Recently, however, a couple utilities have emerged to make it easier to choose a browser for each link you click on. Today I look at Highbrow; later this week, I’ll cover Choosy.

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RipIt 1.1.5

As any respectable road warrior knows, transferring movies from DVDs to your hard drive—"ripping" the discs—is great for portable movie watching. If you’ve got the hard-drive space, it means you don’t have to deal with lugging around—or worry about damaging—a bunch of discs, and watching movies from your hard drive sucks up less battery power than using your laptop’s optical drive. (Assuming your laptop actually has an optical drive, that is. If not, ripped movies are even more useful.) Ripping DVDs is also convenient for those with a Mac as part of their home entertainment system: all of your movies are ready for watching at a moment’s notice.

The problem is that commercial DVDs are copy-protected to prevent you from ripping them as you would a music CD. So you need software that removes this copy protection as it copies the DVD’s contents to your hard drive. We’ve long been fans of HandBrake and MacTheRipper for this task, but neither approaches the ease of use of, say, ripping a CD in iTunes. HandBrake is designed to rip particular parts of DVDs (usually the main movie or individual TV episodes) to video formats that will play on iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs, and other devices. So before ripping a DVD, you’ve got to choose which part(s) of a DVD to rip, where you’ll use the resulting movie file, and which of many possible conversion settings to use. MacTheRipper rips the entire DVD—menus, special features, and all—but still requires you to know something about disc formats, regions, and other options. As a result, as good as both of these utilities are, I regularly receive comments from readers, and read posts in the Macworld forums, asking exactly how to use them.

RipIt's window when you insert a disc

The latest DVD-ripping tool to hit the Mac platform is RipIt, and it's obvious the program was designed with ease of use as the primary goal. While limited in functionality, it’s the simplest—and, in many cases, the most effective—DVD ripper I’ve seen.

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Newer Technology Portable Toolkit

If, like me, you're someone who tends to take apart your computers, having the right tools is important. Unfortunately, many of the tools needed for disassembling a laptop or portable device—Torx screwdrivers, spudgers, and the like—aren’t included in your typical tool collection, leaving you to search them out at Sears, Radio Shack, or various online retailers.

Back when I first started amassing my own collection of computer tools, I remember spending $10 or more for each size of Torx screwdriver. Which is why Newer Technology’s 11-Piece Portable Toolkit is so appealing. For just $18, you get:

• Three Torx screwdrivers (T6, T8, and T10)
• Two flathead screwdrivers (1.8mm and 3.0mm)
• Two Phillips screwdrivers (#00 and #2)
• Two nylon spudgers—otherwise known as pry tools, useful for opening iPods or Mac minis or removing the top case from an older MacBook Pro.
• A set of large tweezers, perfect for fishing out the screw you accidentally dropped into the innards of your laptop
• A scissor clamp for holding cables and other thin objects in place

The screwdrivers have magnetized tips to help keep tiny screws from falling into tiny spaces, and all the tools fit in the included zip-up case; all but the spudgers fit tightly, so they don’t fall out of their slots during travel.

At this price, you shouldn’t expect Snap-on quality. But I’ve used the Portable Toolkit several times over the past couple months, and the tools have worked well. Most importantly for inexpensive tools, the screwdriver tips haven’t stripped, despite being used with a number of very tight screws—a good sign. (Newer includes a one-year warranty, nevertheless.)

One complaint is that while the screwdrivers have rotating, dimpled caps—a design that lets you put pressure on the screw while turning it—the caps on a few of the screwdrivers in the set I’ve been testing don’t rotate freely enough to make this feature useful. It’s also worth noting that the nylon pry tools are intentionally made to “give” to avoid scratching whatever object you’re working on; this means they’ll eventually wear out.

If you’re celebrating the holidays this time of year, the Portable Toolkit is a great inexpensive gift for techies. It’s also a relatively cheap way to reward yourself—these are handy tools to have around.

Promising Prospect: Hyperspaces

Before Leopard was officially released, one of its most anticipated features was Spaces, Apple’s take on virtual desktops. Using Spaces, you can set up different workspaces, each with its own programs, windows, and documents, and then switch between those workspaces.

Unfortunately, Spaces has also been one of Leopard’s biggest disappointments—for some people, at least. It’s not that Spaces doesn’t work well; it does. But it’s got enough quirks that it’s turned off a good number of power users, and it’s missing many little features and touches that would make it appealing to more people.

Addressing some of the latter ommissions is the goal of Tony Arnold’s Hyperspaces, currently in public preview (meaning it’s not quite finished, but you can download it and take it for a spin; the final version will be $13). I’ve been using Hyperspaces a bit, and while it’s still a work in progress, I’m impressed with the progress so far.

Hyperspaces adds several minor tweaks to Spaces that, taken together, make Spaces much more useful. Here are some of the things Hyperspaces lets you do:

• Choose a different Desktop image or color background for each workspace; this makes it easier to tell, at a glance, which workspace you’re currently using (or which one you want to switch to).
• Name each space, and have that name displayed on the Desktop—yet another useful visual cue. You can even choose the font, color, and size, as well as the onscreen location, for the text label.
• Choose to display the current workspace’s name in the menu bar in addition to, or instead of, Spaces' standard menu-bar icon.
• Use Hyperspaces' own workspace switcher. Instead of taking over the entire screen, Exposé-style, Hyperspaces' switcher drops down from the menu bar and shows the Desktop background and name of each workspace—again, making it easier to choose the desired workspace.
• Assign custom keyboard shortcuts for viewing the Spaces switcher; for directly switching to each space; for adding and removing rows and columns of workspaces on the fly; and for cycling between workspaces.

Unfortunately, Hyperspaces doesn’t do anything to fix some of the more annoying Spaces behaviors (such as how frustrating it can be to work with the same application in multiple spaces). But for making quick switches and adjustments to your Spaces configuration, and for making it easier to identify different workspaces, Hyperspaces looks like a promising prospect.

Calaboration 1.0.1

Google’s Calendar feature has become a popular part of the company’s suite of online tools. Yesterday, it became even more popular among Mac users thanks to support for the CalDAV protocol—a way to store, access, and edit calendars online, and a protocol supported by Apple’s iCal. Yes, this means that you can now use iCal to work with your Google-hosted calendars, editing and syncing events from one to the other, and even responding to invitations.

But this isn’t a review of Google Calendar. Rather, I’m highlighting another useful (and free) tool Google recently released, Calaboration . Back when Google first enabled iCal compatibility in beta form, adding a Google-hosted calendar to iCal required several steps that included copying complex URLs from the Google site and pasting them into iCal. But now that iCal support is official, Calaboration makes the task a snap.

After launching Calaboration and entering the email address and password for your Google Calendar account, the program shows all your Google Calendars. Just check those you want to work with in iCal and click on the Add To iCal button; the next time you launch iCal, those calendars will appear in the calendar list and will automatically check for updates. (Because of the way iCal and Google Calendar interact, each Google calendar will appear in its own section in iCal's list.) You can create and edit events in either place—iCal or the Google Calendar site—and those changes are synced instantly; they appear in the other location once you refresh.

Note that read-only calendars are grayed out in Calaboration unless you enable them in Calaboration’s preferences. The reason for this is that iCal doesn’t properly handle read-only CalDAV calendars. Specifically, it doesn’t check the permissions on those calendars, so it appears to let you make changes, but when you try to sync those changes with the server, you get an error.

Calaboration is smart enough to check Mac OS X’s Address Book to see if your “Me” card matches your Google Calendar account email address. If it doesn’t, you won't be able to respond to event invitations for Google-hosted calendars, so Calaboration displays an explanatory dialog with a button to open Address Book so you can create (or designate) such a card.

One issue a Macworld colleague experienced is that Calaboration showed a particular Google calendar as read-only, even though he has write access; when he forced Calaboration to add the calendar to iCal anyway, he was indeed able to edit events. Calaboration correctly displayed the same calendar as writable for me from the start.

One other minor complaint I have is that each time you launch Calaboration, you have to enter your Google Calendar email address and password. Although, to be fair, I suppose most people won’t be adding new Google Calendars to iCal frequently, and if they are, they’re just as likely to be adding calendars from different Google Calendar accounts.

It's also worth noting that Google Calendar’s iCal integration itself isn’t yet perfect; I’ve experienced a number of minor issues. But I can’t blame these issues on Calaboration, which does exactly what it’s supposed to do and is very easy to use. Kudos to Google for creating this useful utility.

Updated 12/3/2008, 4:30pm: Deleted comment about an inability to remove Google calendars from iCal; these can be removed in the Accounts section of iCal preferences.

LoginControl 2.0

Although Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) offers many improvements over Tiger, it also takes a few small steps backwards. One of those is that you can no longer choose the order in which login items open. (Login items are programs and other items that automatically open when you log in to your account; each user has his or her own list of login items in the Accounts pane of System Preferences.) At the same time, a much-requested feature that’s never been included in OS X is the ability to create different sets of login items. You can prevent all login items from opening by holding down the shift key when you log in, but you can’t create subsets of your full list—or completely different sets—and choose to load a different one at each login.

Thoughtful Tree Software’s LoginControl 2.0 offers both features in an easy-to-use package, although one with a few limitations. When you first launch LoginControl, its Live List displays the current list of login items—the same list found in Accounts preferences. To customize the sequence in which items launch or open, you simply drag them up and down the list. (Keep in mind that OS X doesn't add any delay between items as they launch; it simply launches them one after another. So if you have two items that must actually launch in sequence, you should place the first at the beginning of your list and the other at the end.) Your changes are automatically reflected in the actual Login Items list in System Preferences; similarly, if you make a change to the Login Items list in System Preferences, that change will immediately be reflected in LoginControl’s Live List.

Reordering items in LoginControl

You can also remove an item from the list by selecting it and clicking on the minus (-) button below the list, or add an item to the list by dragging it into the LoginControl window or clicking on the plus (+) button and navigating to the item. Again, your changes automatically sync with System Preferences.

But the more useful feature, in my opinion, is the ability to switch between multiple login-item lists. To create a new list, you click on the plus (+) button under Saved Lists; give the new list a name and it appears in the Saved Lists section. (If you want to create a new list based on an existing list—Saved or Live—you select the source list and then choose File: Duplicate List.) You manage these lists just as you do the Live List; the difference is that changes to Saved Lists aren’t reflected in Accounts preferences.

When you want to switch to a different list, you select it and then click on the Make Live List button that appears. The Live List's contents are replaced by the contents of the selected list; more importantly, so are the contents of the Login Items list in Accounts preferences. The next time you log in, the new list of login items will be used. (Making such a change doesn’t affect which programs are currently running; login items are, as the name implies, opened at login. Once they’re open, they run until you manually quit them.)

Switching lists of login items

Note that if you’ve made changes to the Live List in LoginControl, or to the official Login Items list in Accounts preferences, you’ll want to save that list before switching to another list; if you don’t, those changes will be lost. The easiest way to do this is to use the Duplicate List command to make a copy of the Live List. But this reveals LoginControl’s biggest limitation: Although the Live List is synchronized with the Login Items list in System Preferences, Saved Lists aren’t automatically updated. So if you make a Saved List the current Live List and then make changes to the Live List (or to the official list in System Preferences), those changes aren't reflected in the original Saved List. I’d like to see LoginControl offer an option to automatically save changes made to a Saved List while it’s the Live List.

A minor limitation of LoginControl is that there’s no way to rename a list; the workaround is to use the File: Duplicate List command, name the new list using your preferred name, and then delete the original. And, of course, you can’t choose your list of login items at login; you have to make the choice for your next login before logging out of your current session. (To be fair, I don’t know of a way for the developer to offer such a feature without some major low-level hacking of the OS.)

If you have a need to frequently switch between several lists of login items, LoginControl isn't as hassle-free as it could be. Then again, even with these limitations it’s much less of a hassle than not using LoginControl at all. It’s a nifty utility that offers features I’d like to see Apple include in Mac OS X itself.

Scosche Passport

Although all recent iPods, and both iPhone models, require a USB connection to sync with your computer, until this year’s models you could still charge Apple’s media players via a FireWire connection. But beginning with the iPhone 3G, and continuing with the second-generation iPod touch, the fourth-generation iPod nano, and presumably all future models, USB is now required for both syncing and charging.

This is fine if you regularly sync your portable with your computer; after all, whenever you sync, you’re charging, as well. But it could be a problem if you’ve invested a good chunk of change in an iPod connection kit for your car stereo, or a nice iPod speaker system, and you've upgraded to a new iPhone or iPod: many older accessories use the FireWire circuitry in Apple’s dock connector to provide power for charging. This includes many of the pricey car-audio systems Apple itself has touted. (Unfortunately, few vendors publicize which circuitry they use, so you can’t tell if an accessory will charge your new iPod or iPhone until you actually connect it. Thankfully, most new accessories correctly use USB for both charging and syncing.)

If you’ve been bitten by this change to the iPod and iPhone's hardware—and based on feedback we’ve received from readers and complaints we’ve seen around the Web, quite a few people have—there’s a solution that doesn’t involve replacing your equipment: Scosche’s $30 Passport.

ExpanDrive 1.3.1

Since the early days of Mac OS X, the Finder has offered support for FTP, letting you work with FTP servers in the Finder as if they were any other file server. You just open the Connect To Server dialog (Go: Connect To Server) and enter the server info in the format ftp://username:password@server.

Except that it doesn’t work. Never has. You may be able to connect to a server and copy files from it to your computer, but that’s it—you can’t copy files to the server, you can’t move files around on the server, and you can’t rename files on the server. The Finder’s FTP functionality is read-only (and, as many Mac users will tell you, you’re lucky if you can get that far). Not to mention that the Finder doesn’t support SFTP—an alternative to FTP that you really want to be using if you care about the security of your file transfers—at all.

Because of this, Mac users who frequently access FTP and SFTP servers have generally turned to dedicated FTP clients such as the excellent Transmit or the free Cyberduck. But an appealing alternative is Magnetk’s ExpanDrive, which gives the Finder itself the FTP/SFTP capabilities Mac users have long wanted.