I use a Mac Mini with a KVM switch (to share display, keyboard and mouse between it and my PC). My keyboard and mouse combo is the Logitech MX 900 for Bluetooth kit, although this tip may well apply to others also. Under Tiger, I found that every time I switched between machines on my KVM, the Keyboard Setup Assistant would run, asking me to press the key directly to the right of the left-hand Shift key. When this first happened, I thought it was a great way for OS X to tell whether I has a US, International or Japanese keyboard. However, having it appear every time I used the KVM (and even sometimes when simply waking from sleep!) was becoming a real annoyance.
I found that renaming the KeyboardSetupAssistant application prevented it from starting when I switched back to the Mac. NOTE: For convenience, make sure your keyboard is working how it should be before continuing. In my experience so far, OS X remembers the last setting (mine is ISO) even if KeyboardSetupAssistant is disabled. To disable the Keyboard Setup Assistant:
Open a Terminal window and type the following commands (the $ is the prompt):
$ cd /System/Library/CoreServices
$ sudo mv KeyboardSetupAssistant.app/ KeyboardSetupAssistant-OFF.app
Enter your password when asked. As with all things UNIX, if it worked, then you'll simply not see an error. The Keyboard Setup Assistant will no longer run when the keyboard is apparently reconnected after switching between machines with a KVM.
You may still run the Keyboard Setup Assistant by opening the renamed application -- KeyboardSetupAssistant-OFF in /System/Library/CoreServices.
Mac OS X 10.4 has as changed the method by which the periodic system tasks periodic (daily, weekly, and monthly) are called. You can no longer change their execution time by modifying the system crontab. If you wish to change the times these tasks run, you will have to make changes to the following files. All live in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, and each is named:
Daily: com.apple.periodic-daily.plist
Weekly: com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist
Monthly: com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist
Since these files are owned by root, the easiest way to change them is with sudo and your favorite command line text editor:
Spotlight and Dashboard and Mail 2.0 etc. may all be cool and sexy crowd pleasers, but the Tiger feature that has made me the most happy so far is so small that you almost don't see it at first: It's modifier-key remapping, built right into the Keyboard & Mouse System Preferences panel! Yes, uControl has been enabling this feature for many dot releases now, but it's great to see that Apple finally decided that it was important enough to support out of the box.
To access it, bring up System Preferences, select Keyboard & Mouse, and then click on Modifier Keys...
You can now remap Caps Lock, Control, Option, and Command to your heart's content! My only remaining wish is that you'd be able to control them on a per-keyboard basis, just like in uControl -- my internal and external keyboards have different key layouts. Oh well; I guess there's always 10.4.1...
When running a Cocoa application, you can control-click on any word and select "Look up in Dictionary" from the pop-up menu. This will invoke the new Dictionary application, which will define the selected word. While this is handy, there's an even quicker method (undocumented, as far as I can tell).
Instead of selecting the word, hover the mouse over the word and press Command-Control-D. This will pop-up a a mini-dictionary at the mouse location, containing the word's definition, as seen at right.
Also, if you keep Command-Control pressed, the popup definition window will follow the mouse, showing a definition of any word the mouse visits.
[robg adds: If you prefer the mini-dictionary to the full-blown window, you can make even a "normal" lookup use this style -- just go into Dictionary's Preferences and set the Contextual Menu button to "Open Dictionary panel." Just for fun, I made a short movie of the rapid-fire lookup feature. If you're not running 10.4, you'll still need QuickTime 7 to view it, as I used the H.264 codec to encode it.]
Here is how you can add support for your Motorola A1000 phone to Tiger. The procedure is much simpler than the one in Panther, as iSync has been completely rewritten (or at least, much of it has) and it's now much more stable and organized. You simply have to change this file:
Add this entry to the file -- add it all just before this line:
<key>com.sony-ericsson.P910</key>
To open the file, use this command from Terminal:
sudo open -a TextEdit /Applications/iSync.app/Contents/PlugIns/
ApplePhoneConduit.syncdevice/Contents/PlugIns/
PhoneModelsSync.phoneplugin/Contents/Resources/MetaClasses.plist
Modify the file, and be sure that TextEdit is saving the file as Plain Text (in its Preferences), and save it (keep a copy of the original just in case). At this point, simply redo the pairing, and it'll work just fine (iSync will first install an iSync agent onto your phone).
By default in 10.4, Spotlight won't index the content of mounted disk images. If you're like me and keep your mail (and other sensitive documents) on an encrypted disk image, none of that content is searchable from Spotlight -- whether from the Finder or even in an application like Mail.app -- because all searching is done through Spotlight indexes.
To enable indexing on a read/write disk image, you can use 'mdutil' (meta data utility) from the Terminal. Here's the command:
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/name_of_image
After a few moments (depending on how much data is in the image), you'll find your mail in Spotlight results. You can also do a man mdutil to see the rest of its commands.
SpotLight uses a database at the backend. If the database is corrupted and you want to rebuild it (or if you just want to force a rebuild), you can do so:
In SpotLight system preferences, go to the Privacy tab and drag and drop the volume you want to re-index into the table. That will erase the index of that volume, as you've asked it to now be non-searchable. Just remove the volume from the table, and indexing will re-start and create a new database. This can also be achieved in the Terminal by using the following command:
sudo mdutil -E /path/to/volume
For example, sudo mdutil -E / will erase the boot volume database. See man mdutil for more options. Read the rest for some more advanced Terminal and Spotlight tips...
You can do some mighty cool stuff with the new audio system in Tiger. Want to apply realtime AudioUnit effects such as reverb or pitch to your main sound out? Or perhaps you want to have quadrophonic sound by connecting two sound systems to your computer? Read on...
Here's how to play with real-time Audio Unit effects:
Install the freeware Soundflower. You'll need this for virtual sound channels. It's a nifty tool; check it out even if you're not going to use it for this. Might require reboot to activate.
Install Apple's Developer Tools. Even if you're not a developer, there's some real nifty stuff on there (Quartz Composer, etc.). What we want is the AU Lab application.
Open up Audio Midi Setup (in /Applications/Utilities). In the Audio menu, go to Open Aggregate Device Editor. This lets you stuff audio streams together as if they were one single device. Create a new aggregate device, name it "Virtual + Built-in" or whatever. Put the Soundflower virtual device first (2ch or 16ch, doesn't matter), THEN the built-in audio (you can drag and drop). Don't forget to check the "Use" buttons!
Click Done. Set the Default Output dropdown to the right to the new virtual device. Now you won't hear sound for a lil' while.
Open up the nifty AU Lab tool over in /Developer/Applications/Audio. You'll now be wanting to create a new document. Use these settings:
Audio Device: "Virtual + Built-in" (or whatever you named it).
Outputs tab: Drag the red box to the two channels in Stream 2, these will be at the far right, either 17 and 18 or 3 and 4.
Inputs tab: Click the "(+) Add Input" and drag that little red box to channel 1 and 2 in "Soundflower Input Stream #1". Click OK.
You should now be able to hear sound again.
In the small green boxes with a "B" button before them in the Effects section, you can now add effects. I'll let you play with that on your own.
You could've done all this stuff with Audio Hijack Pro, too, but this way is more fun. To revert these settings, quit the Au Lab tool, and then just go to the Sound System Preferences panel, click the Output tab, and choose 'Built-in.' You can also remove Soundflower using the uninstaller on its disk image.
Read on for a 'bonus hint' to create "Quadrophonic" sound...
In 10.4, when you press the '+' symbol in the bottom left corner while Dashboard is active, the Dashboard shelf slides up into view containing all your widgets. The background image used for the shelf can be found here:
You can replace this image with any PNG image you like and it'll be tiled, or you can use a single, full width image. The shelf is 118 pixels high and as wide as your monitor (1024 pixels in my case), so you can use those dimensions to construct your own shelf background. Also in the same directory are the images for the next and previous arrows on the shelf.
Go be creative!
[robg adds: As seen below, I replaced this image with a non-perforated gradient background, and I'm now a much happier Dashboard user. It's not that I mind the perforations all that much, but they were a bit too strong for regular viewing.
The bottom area (where the widget names appear) will need to be lighter in color for best results, as the text is both light and shadowed. The height of the text area is 14 pixels. Note also that you do not need to make your PNG file the full width of your monitor -- the image will repeat horizontally if it's not full-width. I used a tiny 2KB PNG to create the above full shelf background.]
For some reason, Tiger and the Xerox Phaser do not work well together. The easiest solution I have found to get this printer to work with Tiger is to go to the Samsung site and download the driver for the CLP-510 (search for that model on the linked page). Since the printer is made by them anyway and the driver works well. Actually, I think it works better than the one Xerox supplies. Anyway, I hope this helps some of you out while moving across to Tiger. Hopefully Xerox will correct this problem soon, but my email to them remains unanswered...