Maria’s Guides

Maybe you and your Mac just weren’t ready.

Here’s the scenario: In the months leading up to Leopard, you and many others among the Mac faithful started getting excited about the new features. Your computer has a few years on it and you wonder if it’ll run the new operating system. Then Leopard is released and you read the official minimum system requirements. Yes! According to Apple, it will run on your G4 computer! You run out and buy it, then install it and start taking advantage of all the great new features.

This is what happened to me. Although I treated myself to a brand spanking new iMac a few months ago, I still use my little 12″ G4 PowerBook extensively for mobile computing. The idea of being able to use Back to My Mac to access my iMac while I was on the road was too enticing to pass up.

According to the minimum system requirements, its 867 MHz PowerPC G4 processor and 640 MB of RAM would be enough to run Leopard. It did. But not very well.

The problem I encountered was the old spinning beach ball. Like the computer was falling asleep without closing its eyes. Sometimes I’d have to wait five or more minutes for it to get back to work. This soon drove me nuts and I decided to downgrade the machine back to Tiger.

I need to note here that I like Leopard very much. I have it installed on my production machine (the iMac), as well as the 15″ MacBook Pro I use as my “test mule.” I’m not recommending that you downgrade from Leopard to Tiger if you’re not having problems. But if you, like me, installed Tiger on an older, slower Mac — especially a G4 (what were we thinking?) — downgrading is an option you might want to consider. (A better but more costly option might be to get a new Mac.)

That said, here’s how you can get the job done. Please read this entire article before starting; there’s important information about the items you may lose after these steps are completed.

1. Back up your Home folder to another disk. If you have a .Mac account, sync your Address Book, iCal events, and Mail settings to .Mac. (You can use this as a backup to easily restore your data after the downgrade.)
2. Insert the Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installation disc in your computer’s CD/DVD drive.
3. When the Mac OS X Install DVD window opens, double-click Install Mac OS X.
4. When prompted, click Restart and enter your password. Your computer should restart from the DVD.
5. Follow the prompts that appear onscreen to select your language and advance through the screens until you get to the Select a Destination screen.
6. Select your hard disk as the destination. It will probably appear with a red X, indicating that Tiger cannot be installed on that volume.
7. Click the Options button.
8. In the Options dialog that appears, select Archive and Install. (It may already be selected.) You will not be able to turn on the Preserve Users and Network Settings check box. Click OK.
9. Click Continue and follow the remaining prompts to install Tiger on your computer.
10. At the end of the installation, the computer restarts and displays the Mac OS X Setup Assistant screens. Follow the prompts to set up your computer. You will not be able to copy existing setup information from the Previous Systems folder that now resides on your hard disk or from a backup because those settings were created with a more advanced version of Mac OS than what is now installed.

In the Options dialog, you could also choose Erase and Install, but that would erase everything on you hard disk. Although this is always the best option for installing system software since it does a real “clean” installation, you must prepare by backing up all of your documents before doing the installation. Do not choose Erase and Install unless you’ve backed up your hard disk to another disk you can restore from.

When the entire process is done, you’ll have a Previous Systems folder on your hard disk’s root level. You might also have some other folders that were created by Leopard and have been left behind in the downgrade. For example, I found one called net and another named home that appeared to be empty. If these folders are empty, you can delete them.

Around this time, if you have an Internet connection, you’ll be prompted to update Mac OS X 10.4 and other components. Perform the update. It’ll bring Tiger up to the most current version, which includes security and bug fixes, as well as system enhancements.

When that’s done, you can also go through the contents of the Previous Systems folder and delete the applications and settings files you don’t need. For example, the Applications folder inside the Previous System 1 folder will include all the Leopard applications your Tiger computer can’t run: Address Book, Mail, QuickTime Player, etc. T Tiger-compatible version of most of these applications can be found in the Applications folder on your hard disk’s root level. For some reason, however, iCal 3 is left behind and it won’t run on Tiger. (I’ve reported that as a bug to Apple.) You’ll have to get a copy of iCal 2 from another source and install that on your downgraded disk if you want to use iCal.

The data from your Address Book and iCal files and any mail stored in the Mail application are in a format that Tiger can’t read. If you have a .Mac account and synced before the downgrade, just sync again to replace the existing data on your computer (which should be nothing) with what’s on .Mac. That’ll restore much of the information. You may also be able to import your Mail messages from the Library folder in your Previous Systems folder (dig to find it) to the Tiger version of Mail.

And, of course, you’ll have to find all your old preferences files from the Previous Systems folder and put them in the right place so they’re recognized and used by your computer.

As you can see, this isn’t a small task. In my case, I put it off as long as I could. But when you spend more time waiting than working, you know you’ve got to take steps to fix the problem — even if they’re drastic steps.

It doesn’t have to be Safari.

By default, Mac OS X is pre-configured with Safari, Apple’s Web browser, set as the default Web browser. That means clicking a link to a Web URL in an e-mail message or other document will automatically open that link in Safari.

But you can easily change it to a browser you prefer. Here’s how:

1. Open the Safari Web browser.
2. Choose Safari > Preferences to open the preferences window.
3. If necessary, click the General button in the preferences window’s toolbar to display General options.
4. Choose the Browser you prefer from the Default Web Browser pop-up menu. If the browser is not listed by name, you can choose Select from the menu and use the dialog that appears to locate and select the browser you want. (Obviously, the browser must be installed on your computer to select it.)
5. Click the window’s close button to dismiss it.
6. Choose Safari > Quit Safari to quit Safari.

Changes take affect as soon as you quit Safari.

Note that the preferences window shown here is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. These steps also work in Tiger, although the preferences window may look different.

Chapter and Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about related topics:

• Connecting to the Internet, Chapter 18
• Mac OS X’s Internet Applications, page 419
• Using Safari, pages 445-447

Information from Software Update.

Security Update 2007-009 is recommended for all users and improves the security of the following components:

• Core Foundation
• CUPS
• Flash Player Plug-in
• Launch Services
• perl
• python
• Quick Look
• ruby
• Safari
• Samba
• Shockwave Plug-in
• Spin Tracer

For detailed information on this update, visit http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798.

A little-known use for the alarm feature.

I thought I’d written about this somewhere here, but I guess I didn’t. So here it is: a very easy way to trigger scripts and Automator actions on your Mac.

1. Open iCal.
2. Create a new event for the date and time you want the script or action to run.
3. If the action should be repeated — for example, run every day at the same time — use the Repeat options to set up the frequency.
4. Choose Open file from the Alarm pop-up menu.
5. By default, iCal appears in a menu beneath it. Choose Other from that menu and use the dialog that appears to select the script or action you want to run. When you click the Select button, its name appears under Open File.
6. Set the time option to read 0 minutes before.
7. Save your settings.

From that point forward, the script or action will run on schedule with no additional effort on your part.

This works in the current version of iCal (part of Leopard) as well as the version that came with Tiger. I don’t know about earlier versions. The screenshot here is from Leopard.

A few bonus tips:

• If you don’t want these events cluttering up your calendar views, put them in their own calendar and turn off the check box for it in the Calendars list. The events will continue to work, but you won’t have to look at them.
• Be sure that neither Turn off alarms option is enabled in iCal’s Advanced preferences. If you turn off alarms, this alarm obviously won’t work. If alarms are turned off when iCal is not running, you’ll have to keep iCal running all the time for this alarm to work.
• iCal 3 (which is part of Leopard) enables you to set multiple alarms for a single event. use this to run multiple scripts or to run the same script multiple times in a day.

Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about related topics:

• Adding iCal Events, page 254
• Setting Event Details (including alarms), pages 255-257
• Adding Calendars, page 261
• Using AppleScript and Automator, pages 613-636

A little housekeeping in Apple Mail.

If you use Mail, you know that it looks up addressees and displays a menu of possible matches as you type. So if you type in John, it’ll look up all the people with those characters in their name or e-mail address.

If you’re sharp, you’ve probably realized that the people who appear on this list aren’t just the people in your Address Book file. They’re also people who you have sent messages to in the past: previous recipients.

Over time, your list of previous mail recipients gets long and awkward. When you attempt to enter an address, unwanted — or perhaps even invalid — addressees appear. Fortunately, you can clear out these old addresses using the Previous Recipients window.

To display the Previous Recipients window, choose Window > Previous Recipients. As you can see, it lists all people you have sent e-mail messages to. Names preceded with a tiny Address Book icon are people in your Address Book file. You can sort the list by any column; just click it.

To remove a recipient, select his or her entry and click the Remove from List button. The entry disappears. Keep in mind that if you remove an entry with an Address Book icon, you do not remove that entry from your Address Book — just from this list.

To add recipient to your Address Book file, select his or her entry and click Add to Address Book. The entry is created in your Address Book and a tiny Address Book icon appears next to the name in the Previous Recipients list.

Page References

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide includes more information about related topics:

• Creating Messages (including addressing messages), page 425
• Replying to messages, page 430
• Adding Address Book Cards, pages 241-242
• Editing Contact Cards, page 243

Information from Software Update.

This update improves overall stability and addresses issues with file export to iPhone.