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

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:

I bought the Missing Sync (www.missingsync.com ) and I have to tell you, for anyone using Palm products and the Palm desktop HotSync software I must tell you it is a GODSEND. I know a client that is using the Sony Clie and I myself am using the Palm Treo 650. Syncing it via usb cable or wireless thru Bluetooth is incredibly simple. Bluetooth takes a few minutes longer, but is still flawless in data transfer. The interface plays nicely with Palm conduits as well as the .Mac sync suite (iCal, Address Book) and even will sync up your tunes from iTunes. I was amazed at the ease of use with it. I have in the past spent many a long workday futzing with Palm HotSync and the conduit setting for my clients. Palm doesn’t seem to proactive as of yet to change the interface of their software, and until then I will gladly recommend this software title to our clients that struggle with the integrated Palm suite.

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:

Check our our WGN page here: http://WGN.OnDeckTech.com

Tonight we have Jason Snell from MacWorld on the air with us, and the lines are packed with Mac listeners! Thanks.

Carol called, and it sounds like, given she can print to her HP, that she should try installing the HP printer drivers onto her laptop. She’s getting gobbledy-gook when she tries to print. It’s good she’s getting *something*, as it means she can “reach” the printer across the network. That it’s indecipherable may be because the printer driver is incorrect. A driver is a piece of software (program, or code) that tells your computer how to communicate with another device, in this case, the device is a printer. If you don’t have the right driver, your computer may not be able to communicate properly with the device in question (again in this case an HP printer).

I was working on a calendar in InDesign recently. I pasted my text into a text frame and wanted to fill the frame with a swatch color. To do that, I needed to switch from the Type tool to the Selection tool. But there’s a problem using the keyboard shortcuts.

Since I had been using the Type tool, pressing V (the keyboard shortcut for the Selection tool) added an extra letter to my text. The trick: press the command key and click on the frame. Now press V to switch to the Selection tool.

Idiosyncrasies.org offers up a delightfully comprehensive guide for those making the leap from Windows XP to Apple’s OS X. The article gives a great list of comparable features, keyboard shortcuts, and websites where you can nab useful free software. All in all, an easy and informative read even for those well versed in OS X.

Made a mess in Flash? Use the Eraser tool.

You can change the settings to erase just lines, just fills, just the background or selected areas. Want to start over with a blank page? Just double-click on the Eraser tool icon and poof! You’ve got yourself a blank canvas.