Best Mac Tools

Today a client asked how to make the signature on emails sent from his iPhone look like the signatures he set up on his desktop system. I had t admit that I had not gotten around to updating my signature even though I made a mental note to do so every time I saw the default “Sent from my iPhone” signature added to the end of my messages!

So we had to find a solution which was workable and easy to support. This immediately excludes anything involving Jailbreaking your phone!

Within a few minutes I had installed and configured A+ Email Signature Pro from ideasUnplugged at a cost of $5.99 which I suggest is quite reasonable for the capabilities and professionalism of the application.

Here’s a brief list of capabilities:

• multiple signatures (business, private, club etc
• optional photo (avatar)
• business logo
• social network links
• links to blogs, website etc

I suggest that you still set your default signature to something more closely resembling what you would like as some emails will still be prepared with the default. If this is of concern for a particular message, just copy the message body, exit the mail application and fire up Signature to get the desired signature added. Then paste the copied content above the signature.

There is also a free Lite version which might meet your needs. However, I did not investigate this version.

All in all a successful outcome and yet another app installed!

A client called yesterday for help …  ”mail has stopped collecting my emails” was the issue. As you would expect in a business environment email is viewed locally using an imap connection to the server. Briefly, the IMAP connection allows access and updating from multiple email clients (including webmail) and ensures that all of your email history is retained on your mail server for safety.

Diagnostics showed:

• the connection with the server was ok
• other email clients could access the mailbox using imap
• there was nothing untoward in the server logs
• stopping and restarting mail.app had no effect
• stopping and restarting the iMac had no effect

The immediate workaround was to use another email client to monitor (and action) urgent emails. In this case the client was able to use his iPhone while we investigated further.

The steps to a solution were:

Previous similar cases had been resolved by vacuuming the Envelopes database. Whilst this is relatively easy to do by hand on an ad-hoc basis, it involves remembering the steps, command lines etc.

Research pointed to VacuumMail which can be used on an ad-hoc basis as well as automatically. Most of the links to VacuumMail in Google are wrong, so use this one instead.

• download and install VacuumMail
• run VacuumMail from the Applications/Utilities folder
• check to see if your problem has been resolved.

This fix works sometimes, and is particularly useful when the issue is sluggishness rather than hanging. In this case, didn’t work so we moved on to the next step.

• Find and run Disk Utility under Utilities in Applications
• Select your hard disk on the left and click “Repair Disk Permissions”

Still no joy … reverting to the sledgehammer approach:

• Remove the hanging account under Mail => Preferences => Accounts
• Shut down mail.app
• Start mail.app and set up the deleted IMAP account again

Problem solved (after some time mail reloaded and reindexed all of the mail in the account.

Remember that this works because the account was an IMAP account which means that the actual mail storage is on the server, mail.app effectively syncs a local copy of the account. That’s why we always use IMAP!

I have just discovered, purely by accident, that you can only install 180 applications on your iPhone. Why, there is a maximum of 11 pages of applications plus the 4 spots on every page.

And how did I find this? Reading an iPhone tips page told me that I could put a Web Clip shortcut on my home page for any website. Just select “+” in Safari and tap “Add to Home Page”. Sounds simple enough, right. No, when I pressed “+” there is no add to home page option.

Much research later, with nothing helping I wondered if a limit on installed apps could be causing the problem. Deleting an unused app brought the menu option back!

So, if you’re getting up there with your installed apps it might be time to do a bit of housekeeping.

And here’s a bonus tip… Got something on your iPhone screen that you’d like to share, or just remember? press the Menu button and then, while holding it down, press the On/Off button. Your iPhone will make an impressive camera type noise, flash the screen white and store a “photo” of the screen in your photos. Thai’s how I collected the proof of the limit.

I can appreciate why Apple would change in the behavior of the “Copy Address” command in Snow Leopard’s Mail.app…

Previously, copying an address using the “Copy Address” contextual menu copied only the actual email address — the parts on either side of the @. On Snow Leopard, it includes the name portion, with < > around the email part, so an address looks like Joe Smith <joe.smith@apple.com>.

However, there is a flaw in Apple’s logic… very few, if any, of the places where you paste the copied address understand the longer format and you end up having to edit out the name and <>.

Luckily, Apple implemented the change via a preference setting, AddressesIncludeNameOnPasteboard.

To set it, first quit Mail, then go to your Terminal, and copy and paste the following command (all on one line).

5a330306e4d1597ab7bce1b32d62e241000

When you open Mail again, copying addresses will revert back to the short form again.

It was good to see the new release of Mac Speech Dictate yesterday that solves the problem of Dictate not working on the latest, top end, iMacs utilising the i5 or i7 Intel CPU chips.

So, if you’ve been waiting for this release or using the pseudo-microphone workaround you should install version 1.5.8 and get back on track.

I have to admit to being a Safari convert. I now have my default browser set to Safari and use Firefox as a backup in a couple of situations.

• when I need to use firebug
• for a few administration sites which work best with Firefox

But, there are a few things that I needed to make this decision … I’ve already posted the primary tricks to force Safari to open new pages in tabs, and to always show the tab bar. Continue reading »

Thanks to The Unofficial Apple Weblog I have added a highlight box that follows my cursor when navigating stacks from the dock on my MacBook Pro.

Open a terminal window and issue the following 2 commands …


$ defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean YES
$ killAll Dock


When your dock reloads, the highlight effect will be in place.

My recent post on making Safari use tabs instead of new windows didn’t quite complete the story. This is because when a completely new window opened the tab bar was not visible. Additionally, closing the last tab left me with a tab-less window. So, the question is how to make Safari display tabs, as well as use tabs?

The solution is embarrassingly easy… When in a Safari window, just go to the View menu and set the Show Tab Bar option. Shift-Command-T will do the same thing.

Safari remembers this setting and you’ll never be without your Tab Bar again.

As a previous Linux user I naturally have a long and happy relationship with Firefox. But after switching to my MacBook Pro I made the decision to give Safari (the OSX “native” browser) a fair appraisal before carrying over my preference for Firefox.

So far the experience has been great, Safari has a beautiful rendering engine, most of the features of Firefox and an excellent Bookmarks Manager. So, for the time being, Safari remains as my browser of choice on my Mac.

However, there has been one missing feature which has been bugging me up until a few minutes ago. This was the fact that links on web pages which were set to open a new window did just that… opened the link in a new window! The result, after even a relatively short research session, was a proliferation of Safari windows.

Help is at hand! There is a way to change this behaviour so that Safari opens a new tab, rather than a new window. The way to change the default behaviour is so obscure, yet so easy, that I just had to share it with you.

Open a terminal session (using Finder you’ll find terminal under Utilities) and on the command line type…

defaults write com.apple.Safari TargetedClicksCreateTabs -bool TRUE

and press Enter.

It’s that simple!