Latest Posts in Mac Gems

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.

Path Finder 5.0.2

If you find yourself frustrated by some of the Finder’s limitations, you’re not alone. For example, while the Cover Flow mode is interesting, it’d be more useful to me if the bottom section of a Cover Flow window could be switched to icon or column view. And as I noted in my article on Leopard annoyances, you can’t assign custom colors to the Finder’s Labels feature; you can't set the font size or face, or disable sections, of Finder-window sidebars; and the sidebar and toolbar are linked together—you can’t hide one without losing the other. Finally, I pointed out that Spotlight in the Finder is borderline useless for certain searches, as you can’t show more than the three provided columns in search results.

The bad news is that, given how long these issues have been with us, I’m not sure Apple plans on doing anything about them. The good news is that there’s a program out there, CocoaTech’s Path Finder 5, that does pretty much everything the Finder does, but solves all of the problems I just presented and offers many additional features. If there are features about which you’ve thought “Gee, it’d be great if the Finder did this,” the odds are that Path Finder can already do it. And with version 5, Path Finder (originally known as SNAX) is finally complete enough to replace the Finder for most tasks—I’ve been using it as such since its release.

Because it offers so many features, Path Finder isn’t targeted at new Mac users or those who feel the Finder is more than powerful enough for their needs. It's a complex program, with a slew of settings to investigate and powerful features to put to use. Learning all those settings and features takes time, and some may not find it worth the effort. From my seat, though, version 5 is a must-have program.

Finder basics plus more

One of the first things you’ll notice about Path Finder is that its windows look much like the Finder's. You’ll see a window with a toolbar at the top, a sidebar on the left, and a file browsing area on the right. Even if you never go beyond this standard window, you gain quite a few features over the Finder. First off, all of the Finder limitations I listed above are handled by Path Finder. You can use Cover Flow mode while in list, icon, or column view modes. You can set your own colors (and names) for Finder labels. The sidebar can be turned off while leaving the toolbar visible, and you can choose which sections of the side you’d like to see, as well as the sidebar’s font face and size. You can even create multiple sidebars, each with customized sections, and then switch between them as you wish.

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Big Mean Folder Machine 1.5.1

Despite the never-need-to-organize-files promise of Spotlight, there are times you want to organize your files. Perhaps you have hundreds of photos that you want to file into folders by date; conversely, maybe you have files in various folders you want to merge into a single folder. While you could do this manually, or even using Mac OS X’s Automator, PublicSpace.net’s Big Mean Folder Machine (BMFM for short) makes it a snap to organize huge collections of files.

Once you’ve decided whether you want to split files into multiple folders or merge files into a single folder, BMFM’s wizard-like interface walks you through the process step-by-step.

To split files from one folder into multiple folders, you drag the source folder into the BMFM window. Then you choose how you want to split the files: hierarchically or by batch. Batch mode automatically splits files into folders of a particular size—useful for burning CDs or DVDs—or containing a particular number of files. You decide how BMFM sorts files before splitting them: by name, modification date, creation date, size, EXIF date, or name and sequence number. (If you choose a sort method that could result in multiple files sorted identically—for example, if you sort by size and several files have the same size—you also have the option to choose a secondary sort criteria.)

BMFM's sort options when batch-splitting

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Easy iWeb Publisher 3.0

Ever since Apple launched its $100-a-year .Mac (now MobileMe) online service, the company has had the annoying habit of creating tight integration between its software and that add-on service. Not that tight integration is a bad thing—it’s just that the flip side of that tight integration is a serious lack of features for people who choose not to pay that annual fee.

Take iWeb (). Publishing an iWeb site to MobileMe is easy. It takes a single command—File -> Publish to MobileMe—to send your site flying through a series of tubes to Apple’s servers. But Apple doesn’t make it so easy for you to publish an iWeb site to a non-MobileMe server. If you want to post iWeb pages on a web site being hosted by your internet provider or a hosting company, there’s no “upload via FTP” command to fall back on. Just the bare command File -> Publish to a Folder, which leaves you with a folder full of Web stuff on your hard drive, just waiting for a ride to the big time.

When the principal of my daughter’s school decided that all the teachers would use iWeb to generate class web pages, she came to me asking if they’d need to buy MobileMe accounts for the teachers. I pointed out that the school was already paying for a web-hosting service for the school’s main web site. I figured that was server enough for an eternally cash-strapped public school.

But how to get a gaggle of teachers, many of whom are not exactly comfortable with the concept of building and uploading web pages, to upload their sites to the hosting service without much fuss?

The tool I chose to use was Plyxim’s Easy iWeb Publisher 3.0 (), a free (donation requested) utility that makes it easy to upload iWeb sites to a hosting service. Here’s how it works: The first time you run Easy iWeb Publisher, you enter in the FTP information for your web host. (If you don’t know that information, you can look it up in the documentation or help information provided by your ISP or web-hosting company.)

Easy iWeb Publisher does what it says, the way it says it.

Once you’ve created the settings and confirmed that the address, user name, and password are all valid, Easy iWeb Publisher is ready to go. Just drag that folder you exported from iWeb onto the Easy iWeb Publisher Window, press a button, and the program uploads the whole site automatically. What’s better, it compares your folder to the folder up on the server, and only uploads the changes—so once you perform a relatively slow first upload, future upload sessions go quickly. You can even set Easy iWeb Publisher’s preferences so the upload happens automatically when you drag your exported folder onto Easy iWeb Publisher’s dock icon.

What I love about this tool is that it’s simple and designed to do one thing, and one thing only: bridge the gap left by Apple when it decided to cater to MobileMe customers and leave everyone else out in the cold. Bravo to author Scott Finney for writing the program and making it free.

DiskAid 1.5

One of the most-common complaints about the iPhone and iPod touch is that, unlike other iPods, neither device offers Disk Mode—a way to use it as a removable drive for storing and transferring files. Earlier this year, I covered PhoneView, a great utility that provides such functionality, as well as a number of other useful features relating to contacts, notes, call logs, SMS messages, iTunes media and playlists, and photos. But for people who didn’t need all these features—those who just wanted to be able to transfer files from place to place using their iPhone’s memory—PhoneView’s $20 price tag was a point of contention.

For those people, DigiDNA’s free DiskAid 1.5 may be the answer. DiskAid looks and functions much like PhoneView but without all the extra features: it simply lets you store files on your iPhone or iPod touch.

As with PhoneView, once you launch DiskAid and connect your iPhone or iPod touch to your Mac using the standard USB dock-connector cable, DiskAid displays the contents of the device’s Media Folder. (This folder is where the iPhone and iPod touch store “public” files; if you have a jailbroken iPhone, DiskAid gives you access to the iPhone’s entire filesystem.) You can navigate the existing contents using a Finder-like column view, but for the most part you’ll want to leave those files and folders alone; you’re here for the free space.

To copy a file or folder to your iPhone or iPod touch, you either drag it into the DiskAid window, or use the Copy To Device button (which lets you choose a file or folder using a Mac OS X navigation dialog). Similarly, to copy data from the device to your Mac, you either drag the file or folder from the Disk Aid window to a folder on your Mac, or you select the file or folder and then click on the Copy To Folder button. You can also create new folders on, and delete files and folders from, your iPhone or iPod touch. While data is being copied, you’ll see a small OS X-like “spinner” at the bottom of the DiskAid window.

Unfortunately, as with PhoneView, you can’t rename a folder on the iPhone once you’ve created it. And even when creating a new folder, I sometimes experienced an error that claimed I was trying to create a folder inside a file, even though no file was selected. The solution was to select a file or folder and then Command-click on it to unselect it; this convinced DiskAid that no files were selected.

Despite the Finder-column-view look of its browser, DiskAid doesn't provide document previews or information about selected files or folders—not even file sizes. Nor are Quick Look previews available. And unlike PhoneView, you can’t drag-and-drop files within the DiskAid browser to reorganize them, nor does DiskAid tell you how much free space is available on your iPhone or iPod touch.

On the other hand, one advantage DiskAid has over PhoneView is that the former is also available for Windows, so you can also access your iPhone- or iPod touch-hosted files from Windows PCs.

Mail Act-On 2.0.1

Three years ago—has it really been that long?—I reviewed Mail Act-On 1.3.1, a handy plug-in for Mail that let you invoke mail rules using the keyboard. This meant that anything you could do with a rule in Mail—move, copy, forward, redirect, reply to, or delete a message; set the color or read/flagged status of a message; or even run an AppleScript—you could do via the keyboard using Mail Act-On.

Earlier this year, I briefly mentioned a beta version of Mail Act-On, 1.3.3b, that provided preliminary Leopard compatibility. But the developer, Indev Software, has recently released Mail Act-On 2.0.1, and this major upgrade warrants a full review, as it adds many new features and makes Mail Act-On a required add-on for many Mac users.

Like the original version, Mail Act-On 2 lets you apply specific rules to selected messages at any time—in other words, only the rule(s) you want to apply, whenever you want to apply them—via simple keyboard shortcuts. After selecting one or more messages in Mail, bringing up Mail Act-On’s rules menu (accessed via F2, by default) shows any rules you’ve created. Press the shortcut key for the desired rule (or click on the rule name with your mouse, or use the arrow and return keys to choose the rule), and the rule is applied to the selected messages. Because these are rules, their actions apply only to those messages that fit the particular criteria you’ve defined.

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Fluid 0.9.4.1

While I’m a huge fan of tabbed browsers—you’ll often find me using Firefox or Safari with 15 to 20 open tabs—this approach to en-masse web surfing does have its downsides. The biggest issue is when (not if) your browser crashes, it will take down all of your open tabs along with it. There may also be times you want to leave a page open while closing all your other tabs—if you don’t think about this before hand, though, you’ll more than likely just close the window, losing the page you wanted to keep open. It’s after a big crash, or closing a tab you wanted to leave open, that you may find yourself thinking, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if I could just run that one page I wanted to view in its own little browser application?”

If the rumors are to be believed, the as-of-yet-unreleased Safari 4 will include a feature to do just that: convert any particular site you’re viewing into its own standalone browsing application. These mini-programs are known as site-specific browsers (SSBs). But who knows when Safari 4 may be released, or even if the rumors are true? The good news is that there’s a free solution available today that does the same thing—as long as you’re running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), that is. Fluid is a program, built around WebKit, the open-source Web-browser engine that also powers Apple’s Safari web browser, that converts any URL into its own Cocoa application, with a trivial amount of effort.

Fluid is incredibly easy to use—its entire interface is a single dialog box with two text fields and two drop-down menus. You enter the URL you’d like to convert into an application, provide a name for the new application, specify where you’d like the application to be saved, and then pick an icon that you’d like to use for the application.

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What's Keeping Me? 1.3

One of the most frustrating issues many OS X users experience is trying to unmount a disk image, hard drive, or network volume, only to have the Finder claim that it can’t be done because the volume is “in use”—which really means that one of the files on the volume is being used by some OS X process. Similarly, we’ve all tried emptying the Trash, only to be told that one of the files in the Trash is in use.

Unix pros know you can use one of several Terminal commands to ferret out the offending file and what’s actually using it, but for the shell-shy, HamSoft Engineering’s What’s Keeping Me? 1.3 provides a friendlier solution.

To use What’s Keeping Me to figure out why a volume can't be ejected, you just type the name of the volume and press Return; after a few seconds, What’s Keeping Me displays any open (in-use) files residing on that volume, along with the names of the programs or processes using each. To determine why a file can't be deleted from the Trash, you type the name of the can’t-be-deleted file; What's Keeping Me shows you the process or program using the file.

You can quit the offending programs or processes to “release” the busy file by selecting each process and then clicking on the Quit App button. If you plan on using the program again, you can instead relaunch it. If the program won’t quit, you can kill it, which is Unix-speak for “quit with prejudice”—although be aware that doing so will lose any unsaved work in that program.

What's Keeping Me? shows me what's preventing the volume PhotoTiles from being ejected.

By checking the As Administrator box and providing an admin username and password, What’s Keeping Me will search with administrator privileges; this may find admin- or system-level processes preventing a volume from ejecting or a file from being deleted. It will also let you quit such processes to free up the volume or file.

Nothing What's Keeping Me does couldn't be done in Terminal with the right commands. But not everyone is comfortable with the command line, and even those who are sometimes forget the syntax of infrequently used commands. What's Keeping Me is a simple alternative.

MercuryMover 2.0

A couple years ago—it’s difficult to believe it’s been that long—I covered MondoMouse (), a great utility that lets you move or resize any window by holding down a couple modifier keys and then moving the mouse cursor—no more having to “grab” a thin title bar or a tiny resize corner. It even works if the target window is partially hidden behind other windows. MondoMouse remains one of my favorite Gems, and I still use it every day.

But what if you don’t want to use the mouse at all? In other words, what if you’re a keyboard-focused person who likes to keep your fingers on the keys? Then you’ll want to turn to Helium Foot Software’s $20 MercuryMover. This useful OS X add-on lets you move and resize the active window using keyboard shortcuts.

Once you’ve chosen the target window—likely using Mac OS X’s own keyboard shortcuts, given that you’re avoiding the mouse—you activate MercuryMover by pressing your desired key combo; the default is Control+Command+Up Arrow. This brings up MercuryMover’s helpful onscreen display (see image below), which in addition to explaining the available options, also shows the size and onscreen position of the active window. Pressing any of the arrow keys moves the active window in that direction; each press moves the window one pixel. Pressing Shift+arrow moves the window 10 pixels; Option+arrow moves it 100 pixels; and Command-arrow moves the window all the way to the edge of the screen. (If you have multiple displays, pressing Command+arrow towards the second display initially moves the window against the edge of the current screen; pressing Command+arrow again moves it to the far edge of the next screen.) Once the window is in the desired location, you press Escape to exit MercuryMover. It’s a simple and convenient way to quickly reposition a window.

But MercuryMover also lets you resize windows using similar shortcuts. Invoking MercuryMover by pressing the right-arrow key instead of the up-arrow key lets you resize the active window down and to the right; in other words, the upper-left corner is anchored in place and you can grow or shrink the window as if you were dragging the lower-right corner. Activating MecuryMover using the left-arrow key lets you resize the window up and to the left. Resizing uses the same keys and key combinations as moving to resize by one pixel, 10 pixels, or 100 pixels, or to resize all the way to the edge of the screen.

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WindowShade X Revisited

Over the many years we’ve been writing about great low-cost software, one of the most popular products—with both readers and Gems writers—has been Unsanity’s WindowShade X. This “haxie,” as Unsanity calls its system-enhancement utilities, brings back one of the favorite features of Mac OS 9: windowshade-style window minimizing. With WindowShade X installed, double-clicking the title bar of a window no longer minimizes the window to the Dock; instead, the entire window “rolls up”—complete with audio effect—into the title bar, which remains in place.

This is a great way to keep windows visible and accessible without blocking your view of other onscreen items. It’s also a handy way to quickly view something behind a window: double-click for a better view, and then double-click again to restore the window. Although Exposé, introduced in Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther), reduced the utility of this windowshade feature somewhat, it still has its advantages.

Unfortunately, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) broke WindowShade X, forcing fans to muddle through without it. Granted, most people got by just fine. But as someone who started “windowshading” when the feature first debuted as part of System 7.5 (actually before that, via third-party INITs), and used WindowShade in OS X for years, by the time Leopard was released I’d been using this functionality for nearly two decades! That’s some serious muscle memory to overcome, and, in fact, as recently as a couple weeks ago I still found myself wanting to “roll up” windows.

Why only until a couple weeks ago? Because that’s when Unsanity finally released WindowShade X 4.2 , the first official release that works with Leopard. Like previous versions, version 4.2 offers a standard windowshade mode, as well as three other “minimize” features: transparency, which makes a window translucent so you can see what’s behind it; minimize-in-place, which shrinks a window down to the size of a large icon (that you can move around); and hiding, which hides the application to which the window belongs.

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