Macking 125

Naming Problems
Everyone has their own way of organizing the documents that they create. Folders and files all have names that mean something to the user, to help locate them later. We have all evolved our own methods and conventions. Problem is, there are errors that we can make that will cause trouble later. Specifically, there are characters that can cause problems when used in filenames under OSX that were perfectly okay under OS9, which prohibited only the colon (:) in a filename. Best to avoid:
" / \ < > ? : * |
Any character typed with the the Ctrl key.
Any name that ends with a space or period
Any character you type with the Option key.
The latter can be okay if you never move your files from your own Mac, but can cause serious weirdness when you put them on a Microsoft server, some Linux servers, email them to a PC, and even email them to another Mac. Those characters can't even be shown in Chips, which is produced on PCs, because the option characters are high-ASCII and mapped differently on non-Mac keyboards. To see for yourself, open up a word-processor document, hold down the Option key and type every character on the keyboard. Then do it again while holding down Option and Shift. Need an example? Try enclosing a word or two in <brackets> in your email program. To some, that makes it a URL and it will appear as a link. I think only Eudora has this, but it can bite you if you don't use Eudora but send an email to someone who does.

PDFPen
A new application for manipulating PDFs was demonstrated at the last PMUG meeting by Smile On My Mac. It offers some of the most important features of Acrobat Pro for only $49 instead of $299 for the Adobe product. While you can't edit the text of a PDF, you can fill out forms on a page that was not initially designed for that purpose; you can add comments, images and other text to a page. Then save your modified PDF and send it to anyone with a standard PDF reader or use your built-in fax capability to send off the finished form.
PDFPen also enables you to reorder the pages of a PDF, delete individual pages and combine multiple PDF documents into one. A four-mice winner from Macworld, this is an excellent product. I will be getting one soon myself.
Other products from Smile include PageSender, which brings powerful faxing to OSX, way beyond the built-in features. Read about those at the PageSender page. Price: $30 with a 30-day return guarantee.
The most interesting item they demonstrated was Browseback, also $30, which saves images of web pages you visit for as long a history as you desire. Pages can be temporary and this will let you view the entire contents of archived pages along with their links and images. (Google's caching quite often does not include the entire page.) You can keyword-search your archive, export them to PDF format and quickly scan thumbnails.
The company also makes graphics programs designed to create CD labels (disk, case, spine and booklet) including templates and clipart; and a program for creating photo albums and scrapbooks. Some of these programs require Tiger, 10.4 or later, to operate.

Speaking of PMUG
I must remind you that the Mac Store in Cedar Hills offers a 5% discount on all products they sell to PMUG members. This is a fantastic deal if you are buying a new Mac because you will easily get back your $42 membership fee, and more. Then you get to take advantage of all of the PMUG services and offerings, including OSX classes, MacCamp, demonstrations like the above at the general meetings, and other events throughout the month. For more info, visit PMUG's site.

Edit Your Preferences
A lot of people use their Macs and the software they buy without changing any of the factory defaults. They are missing out on a lot of options that would help them do their jobs easier. Preferences are always included under the Application menu (next to the Apple) under OSX and usually under the Edit menu under OS9.
One of the first preferences OSX users should set is specific to OSX itself. Those are under the Apple menu: System Preferences. They are available regardless of what program you are running at the time. Open them and click on the Dock icon. Check the box for Automatically Show/Hide the Dock. This puts it below the bottom edge of the screen, freeing up that half inch of space that you can't use for anything else. Move the mouse to the bottom of the screen to pop up the Dock.
Always click the Show All button after changing a preference to lock that preference in and get you ready to change something else.
Next click on Energy Saver. Click on the Show Details button if there is one. Click the lock (if locked) to make changes. Then slide the bar for "Put the computer to sleep when it is inactive for:" to Never. Then change the slider for sleeping the display to 30 minutes or so. Don't use Never except for special circumstances. Finally, uncheck the box for sleeping the hard disk(s).
This will let your Mac stay awake all night so that the built-in Unix cron tasks can take place as scheduled every day at midnight. If you are always sleeping it at night they don't get done. With a CRT system all the energy is used by the monitor anyway and with a TFT display you want to preserve the life of the backlight. When you finish with your Mac for the night, just walk away. It will dim the monitor at the preset time.
Under OS9 you will find that your Mac wakes much faster this way. Most everything that I refer to as being part of System Preferences are in the Control Panels folder under the Apple menu.
To keep your clock accurate, go to Date & Time and check Set Date and Time Automatically. This works best when you have a broadband connection.
Open up Speech and choose Talking Alerts from the popup. Slide the timer all the way to 60 seconds and uncheck the box "Speak the phrase...: and check the box for reading the text of the alert. OSX users, check the box "Announce when alerts are displayed" and then click Set Alert Options. Set the phrase to Application Name and the timer to 60 seconds. This ends that annoying "ALERT!" you hear if you have a dialog box open and do not respond to it within 10 seconds. If you have not responded to it in a minute, it is probably because you are not looking at the screen, so this gets your attention. Apple finally got so many complaints about it that under later versions of OSX this feature is off by default. Extending the time turns an annoyance into a useful feature.
Other system preferences can personalize your Mac even further. Click on each one and read the options. Anything not obvious go to the Help menu for more information about what they mean.

Application Preferences
Start with Finder Preferences. These control what you see when you ask for a New Window (Command-N): the contents of Macintosh HD (or whatever you have named your startup drive), Computer (a window that shows all drives and CDs on the desktop), Documents, Home (which shows Desktop, Documents, Music, etc.) or Other, in case there is a folder that you want to always display whenever you create a new window.
Check the box "Always open folders in a new window" if you want to return to the OS9 way of handling folder windows. Check "Open new windows in column view" if you like and use the Column View feature, new to Mac with OSX. Many people don't ever choose Column View but it has its uses.
The Advanced tab in Finder Preferences displays check boxes for Show all file extensions and Show warning before emptying the Trash. It's a good idea to get used to file extensions because now that the MacOS is actually UNIX, we are stuck with them. Make your own decision about giving yourself a warning before emptying the trash, but you should never put something in there unless you would not mind if it were deleted immediately. Although you can fish something out of the trash if you change your mind, once it's empty you should assume it's gone for good. No more easy undeleting like with Norton under OS9.
The Sidebar tab is a checklist of what shows in all Finder windows. You can uncheck Network, Connected Servers and iDisk if you have a solo Mac and never use networks or iDisk. Labels are handy for sorting things in List view or otherwise identifying specific items in a group of your own choosing. Label names can be changed here.
There is a separate set of options under the View menu. They are pretty self-explanatory. Try changing them. If you have a lot of stuff on your desktop you might want to try the Keep Arranged By setting so they will all organize themselves by Name, Date, Size, Label or Kind.

Safari
There are many important settings here that you should customize. If you want a different Web browser to open up when invoked by clicking on a link in some other program (Acrobat, your email program, Word or others) then this is where you make the choice.
If you tire of Safari going to a web site every time you start it up, usually Apple's sales and news site, then click the popup menu New windows open with and choose Empty Page. Next choose your favorite web site to be the Home page, which will load whenever you click the Home icon at the top of any browser window. No home button? Safari's View menu lets you customize the items that show here. From the defaults I always add Text Size, Home and Status Bar.
The General preferences also controls where downloads are saved. Normally it's Desktop, but if you already have a Downloads folder on your desktop where your email program puts attachments, you can set Safari to use this folder too.
It's a convenience but also somewhat of a security risk to check the box Open "safe" files after downloading. I like the fact that they put "safe" in quotes. This makes decompressing of downloads automatic, but if there is ever any Mac malware you don't want it auto-opening. I accept the risk and leave it checked, but be aware that there is some risk involved.
There are too many other settings to detail here, but do enable Tabbed Browsing, and check the box to save User names and Passwords. There is a small risk here, too, especially if a stranger gets his hands on your Mac, but it is very convenient to have this info auto-typed into a login window on a web site that requires it. Most banks and other risky sites block this feature as a protection scheme.
You can block popup windows in the Security section, and also under the Safari menu itself. Since some sites do not respond well to blocking, you can easily turn it on and off as needed. Accept Cookies only from sites you navigate to. I also check the box to Never use font sizes smaller than 9; you may prefer 12.
Netscape's preferences and options are many times more complex and somewhat poorly organized. Read through them and most will be obvious. Don't change any of them if you don't know what they do. Version 7.0.2 and later have an option to block popups and limit cookies to the originating site as well; of course Explorer has neither but what would you expect from Microsoft?

AppleWorks
There are dozens of changes you can make here. I recommend you do not use Fractional Character Widths because many people experience printing problems when this is checked. Show Invisibles will display, but not print, symbols for space, tab, return and others. This is useful because you can see instances of embedded tabs where they do not belong, double spaces, etc. Beware of using Smart Quotes because this is the cause of backwards apostrophes. You see this error everywhere because the public schools have not made an issue of punctuation in decades so many people have no idea that an open-single-quote character where an apostrophe should be is dead wrong. Obvious example: The '90s. Here you see the straight up-and-down typewriter quote. Using a Web character you see The ’90s. To see how it should work in your word processor, turn on smart quotes and type The'90s without a space. Then go back and put in the space. On this Web page there is code to make the “curly” apostrophes and quotes correct, but sometimes Web software makes even worse mistakes and you see all kinds of bizarre characters like Òthese.Ó
The software companies could have fixed this by setting the default to type a close-single-quote aka apostrophe in all cases, with an option to not do that. The public eyeways would then be mostly free of this error. But nope, didn't happen, won't ever happen according to the few decision-makers I have queried about this. Since Europe makes more extensive use of single quotes, they say, they would get too many complaints. So get used to it. Besides, only trained typographers and other grade A English students and graduates recognize it and groan. Soon we will all die off and English will be officially changed to use the backwards apostrophe as an opening character.
The discussion of preferences could go on for a book. There is only so much room in a monthly column. My point is, take some time to inspect your programs' preferences. There are a lot of useful features buried within and it could make your Macking life much easier when you get familiar with them.

No Microsoft products were used in the production of this column.

email mp at moonmac dot com. (I took out the mailto link because that's how the spammers find me.)