Macinstruct Tutorials

How to Run Windows on Your Mac with VMware Fusion

mcone — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:05:12 -0700

What You Need

- An Intel-based Mac
- Mac OS 10.4 or later
- VMware Fusion (Free to try, $80 to buy)
- Microsoft Windows XP or Vista (Starting at $200)

It's an exciting time to be a Mac user. Everyone knows that we get to use Mac OS X Leopard, the world's most advanced operating system. And now, if you have an Intel-based Mac and an application called VMware Fusion, you also have the option of using the world's second and third and fourth best operating systems! Yes, we're talking about Microsoft Windows, the operating system that the rest of the world has the ~~misfortune~~ privilege of using.

Why would someone want to go and do something like install Windows on their Mac? Good question. We're guessing that they'll probably want to use some applications that are unavailable for Mac OS X, like... Internet Explorer? Who knows. Anyway, if you'd like to do the unthinkable and install one of the other operating systems, then follow along.

What is Virtualization, and how does it work?

Before we start, we want to tell you a little about how VMware Fusion works its magic. Here are the main points you need to understand VMware:

VMware Fusion is a normal application that you install on your Mac. You can use it after you've booted into Mac OS X. It resides in your Applications folder and it sits on your Dock, just like Safari and iTunes.
After you install VMware Fusion and start the application for the first time, you'll create what's called a virtual machine. This is actually a file that lives on your Mac, but to casual users it appears to be an actual computer running within Mac OS X. For example, you can see Windows boot up on the virtual machine.
VMware Fusion will help you install whichever operating system you'd like to use on your virtual machine. Microsoft Windows XP and Vista are just two of many operating systems you can install. You could also install a Linux-based operating system, for example.
Once you've installed your operating system, you can boot into your virtual machine after you've started your Mac. In fact, you can even switch out of your virtual machine and back into Mac OS X at any time. The two operating systems are running in parallel, so you'll never have to restart your Mac to get from Mac OS X to Windows, or vice versa.

As Wikipedia states: "Virtualization is a technique for hiding the physical characteristics of computing resources from the way in which other systems, applications, or end users interact with those resources. This includes making a single physical resource (such as a server, an operating system, an application, or storage device) appear to function as multiple logical resources."

Virtualization is a popular option for those with high-power computers. In the past, when computers were relatively slow, computer hobbyists would use a technique called Beowulf clustering to connect several computers together to create one supercomputer. Today, with powerful computers such as the Mac Pro, the trend has been away from Beowulf clusters and towards virtualization options such as VMware. (Today's Mac Pros are so powerful that most individuals have trouble enough utilizing a single Mac Pro's resources!) Virtualization essentially allows individuals to turn one computer into multiple computers. This technique is particularly useful in IT departments, where many servers can be virtually combined onto one single physical computer.

In this tutorial, we'll simply show you how to install Windows on your Mac. However, VMware has many other powerful uses with which you can experiment. Don't stop with installing Windows!

Gamers Can Forget Virtualization

We know that some will be tempted to use VMware to play Windows-based games. Is such a thing possible?

VMware's website states that "VMware Fusion has experimental 3D graphics support allowing you to play select DirectX 9.0 games in Windows XP Service Pack 2 virtual machines."

How they got this screenshot, we don't know. Games don't work for us on VMware Fusion.

It all sounds great, until you actually try to install and play a game with VMware. Your mileage may vary. Our graphics look weird and our mouse doesn't respond. Sure it's a bummer, but you can still use Apple's Boot Camp to install Windows and play games. Unfortunately, installing Boot Camp is another tutorial entirely.

Why Pick VMware Over Parallels?

If you know anything at all about virtualization on the Mac, you may be wondering why we choose VMware Fusion over Parallels, another application that allows you to run Windows on your Mac. The two products appear nearly identical, at least at first glance.

We selected VMware Fusion, because at this time we feel that it's a more polished application. Fusion provides more features, and VMware provides better support than the competition. And then there's the experience factor. The guys over at VMware have been in business for years, and they really know their virtualization stuff.

Having said that, you might want to give Parallels a try. The installation process is similar to VMware Fusion, as is the price.

How to Run Windows with VMware Fusion

Before you start, make sure you have some time to allocate to this procedure. It could take you an hour or so to install Windows and set everything up. Here we go!

Download and install VMware Fusion. If you have purchased a copy of VMware Fusion, enter the license code during the installation process. If you don't have a license code, just continue with the installation -- you can always purchase VMware Fusion and enter the license code later.
Start the VMware Fusion application by double-clicking its icon in the Applications folder. You should see the window shown below.
Click New to start the New Virtual Machine Assistant.
The New Virtual Machine Assistant will appear. Click Continue to start the process.
Select the operating system you're planning to install. For the purposes of this tutorial, we'll be installing Microsoft Windows XP Professional.
Enter a name for your virtual machine, and select the folder where you'd like to store your virtual machine.
Configure the settings for your Windows hard drive.
Remember that this Windows hard drive is actually a file on your Mac's hard drive, so this space could potentially be subtracted from the available space in Mac OS X. VMware Fusion will only allocate as much space as is required by Windows, so the number you specify is the maximum amount of space that Windows can use. Space cannot be reclaimed. If you install an application in Windows and then remove it, the virtual machine file does not shrink.
If you're installing Windows on this virtual machine, you'll probably want to use VMware Fusion's "Windows Easy Install" feature. It takes care of most of the installation headaches associated with Microsoft Windows. Just enter your name, a password, and your Windows Product Key.
You can also select the "Make your hard drive accessible to the virtual machine" option to access your Mac's files. This feature is a bit buggy, and think twice before enabling read and write permissions. If your virtual machine gets a virus, it could wreck havoc on your Mac!
Insert the Windows installation CD in your computer's disc drive, and then click Finish to start the installation process.
Your virtual machine will start. Notice how PC-like it looks!
If all goes well, your virtual machine will startup from the Windows installation CD and start installing Windows. You'll see a blue screen with lots of files flying by. (No, this is not what's known as the blue screen of death, although some may call it that.)
After installing critical files, the virtual machine will restart and... install some more files. It should be apparent that the Windows XP installation process is nothing like the Mac OS X installation process. Be patient!
After this main installation process completes, you'll restart into Windows for the first time. Windows will take some time to configure itself.
After Windows configures itself, VMware Fusion will install VMware Tools -- a very important set of utilities that allows Windows to communicate with your Mac's devices and VMware Fusion itself.
Note: Do not stop this installation -- VMware Fusion will not work correctly without VMware Tools.
Windows will require another restart. After your virtual machine reboots, you should finally be able to use Windows.

Use Unity to Bring Windows Apps to Your Mac's Desktop

Now that we have Windows installed on our virtual machine, we can start having fun. VMware Fusion has a great feature called Unity that allows you to run Windows applications right on your Mac's Desktop.

Here's how to do it:

In Windows, launch an application.
On the VMware Fusion window, click the Unity button.
The VMware Fusion window will disappear, and all of the open applications in Windows will now appear to be Mac applications. They will appear on your Mac's Desktop and on your Mac's dock.
To exit Unity mode, click the VMware application icon, and then select Single Window from the View menu.

Configure Your Virtual Machine's Settings

VMware Fusion does an excellence job of configuring your virtual machine's settings, but those who need more performance will want to tweak the default settings a bit.

Here's how to do it:

If your virtual machine is turned on (and running Windows), turn it off. You can do this by selecting Shutdown from the Start menu in Windows.
Click the Settings button at the top of the VMware window.
There are plenty of options here to configure! Of course, most of the settings are beyond the scope of this tutorial. We'll be focusing on the two panes that most people will probably want to mess with: Display and Memory.
Select Display from the left-hand sidebar.

Select the "Accelerate 3D Graphics" option to enable DirectX and other Windows graphical elements. This will help you to play games and see those fancy Windows effects in Vista.
Select Memory from the left-hand sidebar.

Up the memory as much as you like. However, the more memory you allocate to Windows, the less memory you'll have to run applications in Mac OS X. And remember that if you're using a 32-bit version of Windows, you won't be able to allocate more than 3GB of RAM. See this article for more information.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Matthew Cone is a technical writer living and working in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In his free time, he does the desert rat thing and hikes and road bikes around the Southwest. The rest of the time, he studies straw-bale houses, reads Anarchist philosophy, and pretends to not be working. You can email him at: matt@macinstruct.com

How to Change Your Mac's Icons

mcone — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 00:57:44 -0700

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.5
- CandyBar ($29, Panic) or LiteIcon (Free)
- Mac Icons (Free, The Iconfactory)

We've said it before and we'll say it again: One of the best things about Macs are the icons. There are dozens of icons that come pre-installed on your Mac, and there are literally thousands more available for free on the Internet. Collectively, these little pieces of artwork put a human face on (let's be honest here) the inhuman and somewhat foreign machine that is your Mac. Fortunately, you too can install beautiful icons by simply downloading and installing CandyBar ($29) or LiteIcon (free), two applications that allow you to replace your Mac's default icons with custom icons.

We'll be using CandyBar in this tutorial, because we feel it's the easiest and simplest method. There are, however, plenty of other options. LiteIcon is a free application that works like CandyBar. And you can also change your icons the old-fashioned way by following the instructions in one of our older articles: Customize Your Mac's Icons. This method is not as easy as using CandyBar, nor is it as comprehensive.

Downloading and Installing CandyBar

Before you can start swapping icons, you'll have to download the CandyBar application. The newest version of CandyBar requires Leopard (Mac OS 10.5). Once it's on your Mac, just drag it to your Applications folder and fire it up!

You can try CandyBar for free for 15 days. After that you'll have to fork over $29 for a single user license. Not a bad deal, in our opinion. As you'll see in just a second, CandyBar makes changing your Mac's system icons a snap, something that was practically impossible prior to CandyBar.

Finding Free Mac Icons

The Iconfactory provides dozens of free icon sets, many of which are specially built for CandyBar. Just head on over to their website and look for the "iContainer" icon (below). The iContainer contains a set of icons that will automatically load into CandyBar.

Don't stop at the Iconfactory, though. There are dozens of websites that provide free icon sets. Here are some of our favorites:

After you've downloaded icons, you'll be ready to start swapping!

Importing Icons Into CandyBar

Next, you'll need to get your icons into the CandyBar application. You can simply drag and drop icons into CandyBar, or you can use CandyBar's Import feature. Here's how to do it:

Launch the CandyBar application.
From the File menu, select Import, and then select the file type you'll be importing.
Select the file. Click Open.

CandyBar will import the icon(s) into your collection. You will now be able to find them in the sidebar.

Changing Your Mac's Icons

There are two approaches to changing your Mac's icons: You can use a complete set of icons to replace all of your Mac's icons, or you can take a piecemeal approach and mix and match icons. We'll discuss replacing all of your Mac's icons with a complete set first.

Complete icon sets are rather hard to come by. In fact, to our knowledge, the Iconfactory is the only website that provides complete sets of icons for CandyBar. You'll know when you're working with a complete set of icons, because when you select the set you'll see these buttons:

Here's how to use a complete set of icons:

To replace all of your Mac's default icons with the icons in the set, click the Use These Icons button.
Give CandyBar a couple seconds to change the icons. After the "Changes are ready to be applied" bar appears at the top of the window, click Apply Icons.
CandyBar will require you to authenticate. Enter your password and click OK.
CandyBar will replace your icons. You'll have to log out and back in to see the new icons.

The Finder will now display your new icons, just like our Finder window below (set to Cover Flow view).

To change a specific icon, simply drag and drop an icon from the lower panel onto a system icon in the top pane. Then follow the process described above to apply your changes.

Restoring Your Mac's Icons

If you get tired of your custom icons, you can always restore your Mac's default icons. Simply open CandyBar and click the Restore Icons button.

Your icons will revert back to the default icons that came with your Mac.

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Get Rid of Favorite Styles in TextEdit

mcone — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 07:29:09 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later
- TextEdit

We've used TextEdit since it was first released for all of our word processing and find it does almost everything we need. Recently, we decided it was time to modify or delete some of the early Favorite Styles we no longer needed or wanted to re-title to something more descriptive.

We tried everything from deleting our TextEdit plist file to reinstalling TextEdit but we were still stuck with the same styles we created earlier and wanted to eliminate. Nothing helped us find out what we needed to do, from searching the TextEdit Help Menu to the Apple Support Forums to saying lots of bad words. Then by accident, we discovered what has to be the most convoluted procedure ever included in an Apple application. Not only that, but there is no way to edit a Favorite Style, other than to create a better named Favorite Style with the same features as the one you delete.

Here's how to do it:

Open a rich text document in TextEdit, or create a new, blank, rich text document in TextEdit.
Be sure you are in RichText format.
If the Ruler isn't visible at the top of the document window, select Format > Text > Show Ruler.
In the Styles menu, select Other from the list.
Doing so will open a new window with buttons at the bottom for Add To Favorites, Select, Apply, and Done. Immediately above these buttons are two radio buttons.
Click the Favorite Styles radio button, which will also deselect Document Styles. This will change the left-most button from Add To Favorites to Remove From Favorites.
If the style you want to delete isn't showing in the pulldown menu, pull down the menu and select it.
Choose Remove From Favorites to delete that single style.
You will have to repeat the process for each Style you want to delete.

Meet Your Macinstructor

Elaine has been a Mac user since 1986. A happily retired high school English teacher and guidance counselor, she remains active as VP, Program Chair and "SMOG|alert" writer-editor for SMOG (Southern California Macintosh Owners/users Group: http://www.ocmug.org) that meets at CreativeResources in Santa Ana, CA. She reports, "My background is anything but techie, yet I felt like I gained a second brain the day I started using a Mac in the 80s. My persona in SMOG is as the 'duh-me' and I write accordingly, that is, in simple English and without jargon." You can email her at: elaine@macinstruct.com

How to Import MiniDV Tapes with Broken Timecodes

mcone — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 01:08:29 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.4 or later
- A MiniDV Video Camera
- Final Cut Express ($299)
- iMovie (iLife '06, discontinued)

Video cameras and camcorders have become standard equipment for every barbecue, wedding, and family reunion. Unfortunately, these devices can sometimes screw up in a big way. One of the more common problems is known as the "broken timecodes" - a problem that results in your MiniDV tapes not reporting the correct timecode. If you record on a new MiniDV tape, rewind, play back what you recorded plus a little bit extra, and then record again, you leave a non-recorded section between your recorded sections. That action breaks that MiniDV tape's timecode. If a MiniDV tape has broken timecodes, it is likely that it will not import its video properly into Final Cut Express. (This is discussed in some detail in Derrick Story's excellent book, "Digital Video Pocket Guide.")

You can still import these tapes into Final Cut Express (and probably Final Cut as well). First, import the MiniDV tape into iMovie. iMovie is more forgiving of broken timecodes than Final Cut Express.

Import Your MiniDV Tape into iMovie

Open iMovie.
Turn on your MiniDV camera and connect it to your Macintosh with a Firewire cable. (Or USB 2.0 if your camera does not have Firewire.)
Set the MiniDV camera to play mode.
iMovie should enter camera mode. If not, click the mode switch to enter Camera Mode.
Position your MiniDV tape to a few seconds before the point where you want to start importing your video. (Or just rewind it all the way if you want to import the whole tape.)
Click the Import button. Your MiniDV video clips import into iMovie.
Save the iMovie project. Close iMovie.

Put the iMovie Video Clips into Final Cut Express

Now you have two options: open the iMovie project within Final Cut Express, or extract and import the video clips.

Option 1: Open the iMovie Project in Final Cut Express

This method requires that you create a new Final Cut Express project. It also requires you to keep the iMovie project because it contains the video clips referenced by the Final Cut Express project.

Create a folder to contain your video project, and move the iMovie project into it.
Open a new Final Cut Express project.
From the File menu, select Open.
Navigate to the iMovie project and click the Choose button.
Final Cut Express now asks you to save this project as a Final Cut Express project. Do so, saving it into your video project folder.

The video clips in the iMovie project appear in the Final Cut Express Browser.

Option 2: Extract and Import the iMovie Video Clips into Final Cut Express

This method allows you to import the iMovie video clips into an existing Final Cut Express project as well as a new one, and it also allows you to delete the iMovie project once you extract its video clips. You can also use this method if you have trouble opening the iMovie project in Final Cut Express.

In the Finder, right click the iMovie project.
From the pop-up menu, select Show Package Contents. A window opens showing the contents of your iMovie package.
In the window showing the iMovie project contents, open the Media folder. You will see a list of the video clips in the iMovie project.
If you are creating a new Final Cut Express project, create a folder that will contain your video project, and create a folder inside it to contain the iMovie video clips. If you are using an existing Final Cut Express project, create the video clips folder close to that project.
Drag the video clips from the iMovie Media folder to the video clips folder.
Either open a new Final Cut Express project and save it in your video project folder, or open an existing Final Cut Express project.
In the Final Cut Express project, select Files:Import:Files..., navigate to the video clips folder, select all the video files in the folder, and click the Choose button. (You can also select Files:Import:Folder..., navigate to the video clips folder, and click the Choose button.)

The video clips appear in the Final Cut Express Browser. (If you imported the video clips folder, that folder appears in the browser.)

Save the Final Cut Express project.
Delete the iMovie project. (It is broken anyhow, since the video clips are moved out of it.)

How to Avoid Broken Timecodes on MiniDV Tapes

You can avoid the broken timecode problem by blanking your MiniDV tapes before you record on them (this tip is from Derrick Story's book).

Insert a fresh MiniDV tape into your MiniDV videocamera.
Put the lens cap on the videocamera.
Mute your sound (or have your MiniDV camera in a nice quiet place).
Record over the entire MiniDV tape.
Rewind the tape.

You now have a miniDV tape that has no unrecorded sections, thus no broken timecodes.

Meet Your Macinstructor

By day, Dave Strom is a technical writer who makes short goofy videos and likes his Macintosh, coffee houses, comic books and cartoons (just the good ones!), Keith Knight's "The K Chronicles," Pho, boogie boarding in San Diego, and living in the San Francisco bay area. By night, Dave uses his mutated super-sarcasm powers (gained from a radioactive iced mocha) to save the world from a continuous invasion of mind-controlling alien spider-slugs on a weekly basis. He never misses Macworld Expo or the San Diego Comic Con.

How to Customize Your Mac's Clock

mcone — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 01:57:08 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later.

Every Mac comes with a little digital clock built into the Mac OS's menu bar. You probably already knew that. But what you might not know is that your menu bar clock can be customized, taken off the menu bar, and even hidden completely. Or, if you're so inclined, you can turn off the digital clock and switch to an analog version. Here's how to do it:

From the Apple menu, select System Preferences.
Select Date & Time.
Select the Clock tab.
Play around with the settings until you find a configuration you can live with. Note that you can place the clock in its very own window by selecting Window under the View in options.

You can also remove the clock entirely by unchecking the Show the date and time checkbox.
Close System Preferences.

That's it. You're finished!

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Update Apple Software

mcone — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:38:11 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later.

Updating a Mac's system software is an important maintenance task that every Mac user should perform periodically. Using the newest versions of Mac OS X and other Apple applications can protect you against malicious attacks, adverse system performance, and strange bugs that can cause applications to randomly freeze and crash. The first step is to automate Software Update, and the second step is to actually perform the software update. We'll show you how to do both in this tutorial.

How to Automatically Check for Software Updates

You can, of course, manually check for updates with Apple's built-in Software Update tool. But it's much easier to simply automatic the process and have Software Update notify you when it's found updates. Here's how to set Software Update to automatically check for updates:

From the Apple menu, select System Preferences.
Select Software Update.
Make sure that the Check for updates checkbox is checked. Select a short time interval, such as daily or weekly.
Close System Preferences. You've successfully configured Software Update to run automatically.

How to Run Software Update

To actually update your software, you'll need to run Software Update. Here's how:

From the Apple menu, select Software Update. Your Mac will connect to Apple's servers to search for new software.
If new software is available, quit all running applications and unplug unnecessary devices from your Mac (such as USB hubs), and then click Install Items.
Software Update will download and install your new software. Depending on how much software you're installing, this process could take a while. When it's finished, you'll need to quit Software Update. You may need to restart your Mac.

That's it! You're finished!

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Add Email Accounts to Apple's Mail

mcone — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:06:26 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later.
- Apple's Mail.app (Free)

Every Mac comes with Apple's very own killer email client. It's called Mail, and in our opinion, it's one of the greatest applications ever. Thanks to Mail, you don't have to check each of your separate email accounts online anymore. Just pop them all into Apple's Mail and you can read all of your messages in one simple application.

But how do you get your email accounts into Mail? Or, if you're already using Mail, how do you add other email accounts? We'll show you how to do it!

Editor's Note: To use your Gmail account with Mail, please see this Macinstruct article.

Open the Mail application. You can find it in the Applications folder, and it's usually also on your Mac's Dock.
From the File menu, select Add Account.
Select your email account type from the Account Type menu. Generally speaking, most email accounts are POP accounts. Enter your full name and email address.

Click Continue.
Enter your incoming mail server (also known as the POP server), user name, and password. In some cases, your user name might be your full email address. If you don't have this information, contact your service provider.

Click Continue. Mail will now try to log into the POP server you provided. If the test fails, click continue anyway. (Mail's test doesn't always work -- even if you've provided the correct information.)
If your incoming mail server requires authentication, check the Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) checkbox and select an authentication type.

Click Continue.
Type in your Outgoing Mail Server (also known as a SMTP server). If your outgoing mail server requires authentication, check the User Authentication checkbox and enter your user name and password.

Click Continue.
If your outgoing mail server requires SSL, check that box and select your authentication.

Click Continue.
Make sure the information you have entered is correct. Click Continue.
That's it! You've added a new email account to Mail. To add another email account, click Create Another Account. To finish the process, click Done.

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Back Up Forgotten Items

mcone — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:46:59 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later.

We're pretty good when it comes to backing up important files and folders, but like most people, there are items we forget to save from time to time. This tutorial will show you how to find those commonly used items and back them up for future reference.

Bookmarks

Before a recent hard drive "mishap," we had a long list of bookmarks in Firefox that we overlooked when it came to backing up. So the first thing we did is use Spotlight to find the word "bookmarks." We found it in our home Library with the path Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/wpifdkoy.default/bookmarkbackups/. There were five files, each one created by date. It seems that there is a new file created every time a new bookmark is added or changed.

We have a separate folder labeled "Downloads" from our home directory which we use to store internet downloads, which we then save to a CD or DVD. When the Downloads folder reaches a certain size, we simply save those files and folders to a CD or DVD. Now after backing up repeatedly but forgetting the bookmarks, now we copy those bookmarks and save them to our Downloads folder periodically.

Paid Shareware

Have you ever paid a fee for shareware, only to have forgotten to back up the new program and then have to pay for the program again? Sadly, we’ve made the same mistake before. Luckily, there were a few programs we were able to rescue thanks to checking our PayPal history and reregistering without having to pay another fee.

Some programs, after being registered, give you some type of key sent through your email that unlocks the features of the rest of the shareware program, while other programs just give you the peace of mind knowing that you legitimately paid for a quality shareware product. When we receive these “keys,” we print out the receipt and store it away, or in the case of a software key, we save those specific emails offline to another hard drive. It’s beneficial to get in the habit of saving these items right away. It may benefit you to purchase rewritable media so that you don’t waste an entire DVD or CD simply saving those program keys.

Passwords

Other commonly forgotten items are logins and passwords to various websites. To see this list, we open Firefox, go to Preferences, then to the Security icon. There's a row for Passwords and a button that reads "Show Passwords..." We press the button, and then a window appears showing the sites that have our login information and password saved. After clicking on the "Show Passwords" on the pop-up window, we're asked as to whether or not we really want the passwords to be shown. We click "Yes" or press Return, and that pop-up window will now show the sites, the associated logins and passwords.

Copying and pasting the list won't work, and neither will highlighting the list and dragging it to the Desktop. The only quick way to save the information is by taking a screenshot by pressing Command+Shift+4, clicking and dragging the mouse using the cross hairs to create a window around the list, then releasing the mouse button. This will create a Preview file which we rename appropriately, then save to the Downloads folder.

Mail

We have a separate folder for saved mail. This consists of things such as forgotten passwords (see Paid Shareware, above), email that will come in useful down the line, etc. We have it saved separately so that in the event that it does get accidentally deleted from the mail server, hopefully it will be tucked away locally so that the data will be saved. Fortunately in the event of a hard drive failure, we also have it backed up to a second hard drive. We were able to set this up using Automator, the application that comes with OS 10.4. Here's how we designed it:

After opening Automator, our next step was to get specific items in the Finder. From the Library, we chose "Finder" instead of Mail since we were going to be working with whole files, not just pieces of mail. In the Finder Library, there's a command listed as "Get Specified Finder Items," so we double-clicked the entry to the blank area to the right. Now we had to pick and choose what mail items wanted, and we did so by clicking the plus sign in the first command. Rather than being too selective, we just chose the whole Mail folder which was found in the home folder/Library/Mail. We also took another step and decided to backup the Firefox bookmarks also. They were found in the home folder/Library/ Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/wpifdkoy.default/
The next command in the chain is to copy said Finder items, so we double-clicked the "Copy Finder Items" to the right under the first command. The command was asking where to put the selected items and the default setting was set to the Desktop. We wanted the files and folders set to a different drive, so we chose a different internal hard drive there and created a folder "Backup" on that drive and set the copy command to save the items to that folder. There is an option in the command to replace existing files, but this is a personal choice. We left ours unchecked to keep any older originals. Now it was time to test it.
In Automator, there's a button on the upper right hand corner marked "run". We pressed that and it began the workflow. The first prompt showed the two folders we had set to save. Even if one selection was highlighted, the program would save both folders to the external hard drive. If we wanted one of the two selected folders saved, we had to highlight the entry we didn't want, and then delete it by pressing the minus key on the prompt window. Fortunately the entries were not set in stone, so even if we wanted to backup more files than the two listed, we could add more files and folders on the fly if we wanted.

Bonus Gift

I've included the same type of file here as a workflow for you to use (if you too are using 10.4 or greater). You can customize it to your liking and save it as an application, and you can get an idea how simple but versatile Automator is. If you're handy with AppleScript, you can write a similar program to back your files up to one folder, then have the script test the size of the Backup folder to check if the size is more than 700 MB (to save to a CD ROM) or more than 4.2 GB (for backing up to a DVD). Enjoy!

Meet Your Macinstructor

Eric Buczynski says it all started with the Apple II in grade school. Years later, he moved on to a Performa 6360 and then PowerMac G4s. He's still interested in emulation, HTML, and icon design, but these days his creativity goes mostly to Mac hardware hacking and customization. Contact him at eric@macinstruct.com

How to Automatically Open Applications

mcone — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 00:35:54 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.2 or later.

Did you know that you can set applications to automatically start when you turn on your Mac? It's an extremely useful feature that can save you a couple minutes every day, especially if there are certain applications you use all the time.

Here's how to do it:

From the Apple menu, select System Preferences.
Select Accounts.
Select the Login Items tab. To add applications to the start up list, click the + button and select the application.

That's it! The applications you added will automatically start when you turn on your Mac.

Meet Your Macinstructor

How to Publish iCal Calendars to the Web

mcone — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 07:07:07 -0600

What You Need

- Mac OS 10.3 or later.
- iLife '06 or later ($79)
- .Mac account (Optional, $99)

Apple's iCal is one of the best applications you can use to keep track of events, appointments, meetings, classes, and other everything else scheduling. But when you're away from your Mac, how are you supposed to find out what you have lined up for the day? If you use iCal's publish to web feature, you can simply visit your website for the latest and most up-to-date version of your calendar.

It's easy to do this! Here's how:

Open the iCal application. You'll find it on your Dock or in your Applications folder.
Make sure your calendar is up-to-date with the latest events and appointments.
From the Calendar menu, select Publish.
Name your calendar. If you have a .Mac account, you can publish your calendar there. Otherwise select to publish on a Private Server. (You'll have to enter your server's FTP information if you select this option.) We selected all of the other options, but you can mix and match however you like.
Click Publish to upload your calendar. The process could take iCal a minute or two.
When iCal finishes uploading your calendar, it displays a window telling you where the calendar can be found online. Since your friends can subscribe to your calendar with their own version of iCal (or another calendar application), you might want to click Send Mail to send them the link to your calendar.
We clicked Visit Page to take a look at our new online version of our calendar. Not bad!

That's it! You've successfully uploaded your calendar to the Internet.

Problems and Workarounds

One problem with this publishing iCal to Internet thing is that there's no two-way synchronization. Which is to say, you can't update your calendar from the website when you're away from your Mac. One way around this is to use something like Spanning Sync or gSync - applications that will sync your iCal calendars with Google Calendar and update changes in iCal.

Meet Your Macinstructor