The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

Panic Software , the makers of the fantastic FTP application Transmit (and other Shockingly Good Mac Software) have outdone themselves with their newest product Coda . If you are the hand-coding type, Coda is a wonderful way to improve your workflow. It combines everything you need for web development (file manager, text editor, preview, CSS editor) and then some (a terminal window and a great help book ) into one window. Coda is $79, or, if you already own a license for Transmit 3, $69. That’s a pretty great price for such a complete product, from an independent Mac software developer. If you’d like to try it, you can download a demo here .

If you have more than 1,000 messages sitting around in Mail, you are sure to have noticed things can get a little slow. Here’s a neat tip that really speeds things up in Mail.app!

http://www.hawkwings.net/2007/03/01/a-faster-way-to-speed-up-mail

This involves using Terminal, which should be used with care as it can be potentially hazardous to your system. Be mindful of where there are spaces in the commands.

Enjoy a much faster Mail experience!

We’ve had reports of some issues from a variety of customers regarding Apple OS X Mail. The issue seems to cause sent messages to occasionally end up in the Drafts folder, and appear as though they have not been sent, though they have. I have done some research to try and find a solution to this, but so far have been unsuccessful. I have noticed in my research, however, that people from all over the Apple community are experiencing the exact same issue with all kinds of different mail services, including Apple’s .Mac Mail. Evidence suggests that this is an existing bug with Mail.app.
Here are some examples:
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/
http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-57000.html
http://forum.joyent.com/viewtopic.php?id=600

If you have attempted to partition an external drive to include an OS boot disk on a new Intel Mac, you may have noticed a few options. In Disk Utility, you have three options for partitioning.

GUID Partition Table - used to create a boot disk for an Intel-based Mac.

Apple Partition Map - used to create a boot disk for Power PC Macs, or non-startup disk for any Mac.

Master Boot Record - used to create a boot disk for DOS/Windows machines.

Ever wonder what the /Library directory is for, and why there’s more than one of them?

The time has come. The time is now. I’m reviewing the basics, getting ready to recertify as an Apple Certified Systems Administrator (ACSA) for 10.4, Tiger, yes, just about in time for Leopard, 10.5 to come out (Spring actually seems very, very far away at the moment). It actually doesn’t come at too bad a time, I’m working less this week to help my wife with our new, third baby, and I’ve got time at all sorts of odd hours now to review technical details, and share tidbits with you!

The news is VMWare is producing a competitor to Parallels called Fusion, enabling Windows and other platforms on the Mac. According to reports, the private beta site describes the product: “Fusion is the codename for a new VMware desktop product for Mac that will enable Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. It is built on VMware’s robust and advanced desktop virtualization platform that is used by over four million users today.”

http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/09/22/39FEbizmac_1.html

Because technology’s usability is a primary contributor to productivity, Yager’s main premise is as the usability of Mac hardware and software continues to improve even as Apple continues to push the envelope into sophisticated enterprise technologies, IT organizations who are ready to rethink their systems in light of recent 64-bit, and other technology advances, should give serious consideration to the Mac server solutions.

A caller had a question about how to “see” his printer, and print to it, from his Mac, given it’s connected to his Windows machine by USB.

I thought that we had answered this question before, however, I see that while we did answer a Mac-Windows printing question earlier this month, we did not answer this specific question! [see this May 3 MacWork.com article about cross-platform printing ]

The straight-forward answer is probably:

As a system administrator, I have experienced one particular problem with User Names when moving users from local to network-based home directories. The long name(s) or short name(s) cannot be the same on the local machine as the one on the ODM (Open Directory Master). If the long name or short name is the same, the user just logs in locally (local NetInfo is always first on the search list).

A solution:

1. Log in as an admin user and delete your account, DO NOT PRESS THE IMMEDIATE BUTTON!, just hit return and it will create a compressed .dmg file and place it in a “Delete Users” folder.

Jim called with a question about whether or not it’s safe to defragment an OS X G4 journaled hard drive. He has a sawtooth G4 tower.

OS X’s built-in disk optimization method, in fact, only works for volumes that are formatted in HFS+ and *have journaling turned on.* So, this means in most cases it’s not necessary to defrag your hard drive if you have journaling turned on with OS X 10.2 or later.

Apple has an informative article on OS X fragmentation located here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668

Want to optimize your Mac OS X 10.4.2 or later system? Try OnyX, a free utility available here: