One nice feature of Internet Explorer 5.1 is to be able to drag&drop any pictures(.jpg or .gif) from a web page as a bookmark into the button bar (I'm not talking about the favorites bar, but the actual toolbar bar). Let's say, I wanna have macosxhints.com as a bookmark up there. I simply drag&drop the logo from the top of the page of macosxhints.com home page into the button bar (you should see a small vertical cursor before dropping).

Although that's it for the basics, read the rest of this article to see how to customize the name, the URL, or to use a local image.

[Editor's note: Very cool feature; I had no idea you could do this!]

TinkerTool 2 has now been officially released for OS X 10.1. This cool application has been indispensable for me ever since OS X shipped. With version two, Marcel's included all sorts of cool tweaks that have been covered here in their more direct form:

• Desktop background picture options for tile, center, etc.
  
• Dock placement in screen corners
• Dock "suck in" effect
• Four options for scroll arrow positons
• Startup language setting (this would require a reinstall of OS X to change otherwise!)
• System font replacement and anti-aliasing
• Terminal transparency

TinkerTool 2 is simply the easiest way to tweak these esoteric OS X settings ... and it's freeware!

CarvWare has released GamePad Companion, a slick little shareware application that lets you assign keyboard keys to USB device buttons. This $15 shareware app can help fill the void until developers get around to coding their own controller support in OS X.

I tried it on a couple programs with my USB gamepad, and it worked as expected ... if I played more games that used controllers (I'm a Quake3 addict ;-), I'd consider this a very worthwhile investment. They have a demo version available so you can try it before you make a purchase decision.

With the iTunes visualizer enabled, press the Q or W keys to move back and forth through a list of visualizer configurations. The A and S keys let you control the basic waveform being used to seed the visualization. The Z and X keys cycle through color palettes. Press the C key to display the current configuration.

Use of the ? key to control basic config (framerate, etc.) is documented, but as far as I can tell, the hotkeys above are not.

Want to NOT run Classic, and have a UNIX filesystem? Getting can't install on a Network server error? For those of you who installed OSX with a Unix filesystem (UFS) and now have trouble installing/ running OSX apps like Mozilla 0.95 or Quicken 2002 (OSX version), here's a workaround.

Use diskcopy (in the utilities folder) and create a blank image file, sized appropriately for the application in question. Example, I created 30 meg blank disk image, using Mac HFS extended, and then just copied the 24.5 Meg Mozilla folder over to the mounted disk image. Mozilla runs fine now. Did the same thing for Quicken 2002, and the installer was perfectly happy writing to the HFS disk image.

Seems many of the app programmers, in their rush to get these apps to market, haven't really ported all the file I/O routines to the Darwin OS calls.

Well, this is a work around at the expense of some disk space. One nice benefit is I can copy my quicken data and programs from my OSX laptop to my OS9 desktop with one file image, and back.

Background: my email is delivered to my OSX machine via sendmail. My ISP sends mail every time I make a connection. I leave Mail.app running 24x7 and have set it to scan my Unix mailbox every minute.

There's a bug in OSX 10.0.* and 10.1's Mail.app that prevents audio notification for unix mailbox deliveries. A simple solution for this is to use Mail.app's mail filtering rules. Enter Mail.app's preferences, then ...

select "Rules"
select "Create Rule"
select Criteria "To" + "Contains"
type "@" in the text field.
Enable "Action "Play Sound"
Choose a sound to play when mail arrives.
Click 'OK'

Now drag you new rule to the top of the list. Note: I used "To:" "Contains" "@", so that any mail with an "@" in the recipients address triggers the audio notification. Local mail, e.g. cron generated output, is sent without "@" in the address, so I don't hear their arrival.

SnapzPro (the screen capture program from Ambrosia) works fine under 10.1, but the registration program does not. I had an issue where, after the 10.1 upgrade, my SnapzPro thought it was unregistered. The registration application crashed badly, though, so I was stuck with "Unregistered" tags on my recorded movies.

Ambrosia has now released an updated registration application that works on 10.1. If you'd like to register SnapzProX, it's now possible in 10.1. Also, if (like me) you lost your registration during the upgrade, simply send an email to lostcodes@AmbrosiaSW.com and you'll receive a new code for use with the new registration program.

There's an update to SnapzPro in the works, too -- you can read about some of the changes on Ambrosia's SnapzPro 1.01 web board.

In OSX 10.1, you can use DiskCopy to burn disks, straight from a .dmg image. This makes it possible to duplicate cross-platform CDs properly, and also means you can keep the disk image after you have burned it - a lot more flexible than the standard Burn tool.

If you use IE in 10.1, you may find that on some FTP links that IE will hang with a message stating "Set passive mode" at the bottom of the window. If this happens to you, you should be able to fix the problem through your System Preferences.

Load the Network preference panel, click on the Proxies tab, and make sure the checkbox that reads "Use Passive FTP Mode (PASV)" is checked.

This should allow passive FTP downloads within Explorer on 10.1.

I have a quite old UMAX Astra 600S (SCSI) scanner that I haven't even tried to use in OS X in over a year, as UMAX has not released an OS X driver for it -- and probably never will, given that it relies on SCSI and is very old. So I'd been rebooting into OS 9 whenever I wanted to scan something.

I'd seen occasional notices on the web about VueScan from Hamrick Software, but never paid it much attention as it was always described as an application for "film scanners". Still, I put it on the list of things I'd like to take a look at just to see if it might work ... of course, that list is quite long and there's always interesting stuff coming out that gets added, so it takes a while to get to everything :-).

This morning I finally got around to downloading and running VueScan for OS X ... and I now have a very functional UMAX SCSI scanner in OS X! VueScan is actually an incredibly capable general purpose scanning program which supports tons of scanners over a number of interfaces - SCSI, FireWire, and USB. There's a complete list (along with a short list of unsupported scanners) on the VueScan web site.

VueScan is a $40 shareware application which can be fully tested without registering - but all scans get a grey cross-hatch until you registor. So now I'm into research and decision mode between keeping my old SCSI scanner running or investing a bit more money in a newer, smaller, higher resolution FireWire model with OS X support (any thoughts on Agfa, HP?). But at least now I have a choice; until this morning, I thought new hardware was my only alternative.

If you've got an unsupported scanner, give VueScan's web page a quick look to see if they support your model.