Here's one that's been a mild annoyance for a while: My options in Lotus Notes for setting the preferred web browser are Notes, Netscape Navigator (which only sees the Classic version), Internet Explorer, and Other. Unfortunately for me, my default system browser is Navigator (Camino), and the "Other" choice only allows a few applications (Norton Antivirus? MS Word? I can't explain it) or any document. While this is clearly a problem with Lotus Notes, the way I got around it may be useful in other situations.
You won't believe how I got this to work: select "other" for internet browser. Click the button to choose the location of your "other" app, and navigate to a blank document that normally would be opened by TextEdit. I picked a readme file for VNCThing - nothing unusual. Now, when you click a link in Notes, it will first open up TextEdit, which is apparently smart enough to hand the webpage request off to the default browser! I can't tell you much more about the type of document - I wasn't able to just make an empty document of my own for some reason. So, YMMV, but it worked for me. This works, but is so hackish and ugly, that I'd love to find some explanation or more "right" way to do it. Any ideas? Should I just wave my hands, cover my eyes, and continue on like none of this happened?
Read the rest of the hint for some background on the various things I tried...
I tried making an alias to Camino - no luck.
Tried setting Norton Antivirus as the browser, quitting notes, and manually editing names.nsf to point it to Camino.app - no luck, this time because of an error in the names.nsf file structure.
Tried making an alias directly to Camino.app/Contents/MacOS/Camino - I initially got an error that the names.nsf file had been saved while I was making the change, and that my change would be saved as a "competing" change. When I clicked on a weblink, first Norton Antivirus started (odd) and then Camino started with the webpage! No problem - went into the location document again, selected Camino again... now it says "unable to launch program."
From what I can tell, Notes is just looking for a document in the dialog box, not an application. I have no idea why a select few applications can be chosen (Microsoft office apps, Norton Antivirus...)
At that point, I said the heck with it, and just picked a random document... and it worked?! I hate when that happens - "any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic" is the quote, but if you replace "advanced" with "buggy"...
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20030627172202953