Tag: apple

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TextEdit and Blank Documents

From Mountain Lion and beyond, launching TextEdit results in being confronted with the Document Picker. Fortunately, the old behavior can be restored by running a simple defaults write command in Terminal.

defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

The post-Lion behavior can be re-enabled by running a defaults delete command in Terminal.

defaults delete -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile

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Valid DVD Drive could not be found -70012

Long story made short, I use my SuperDrive in an external USB enclosure.

When opening DVD Player.app, it will present an error stating: Valid DVD Drive could not be found [70012]

A little web search turns up a thread with a great solution on tonymacx86.com.

Step one is making a backup copy of DVDPlayback.framework with this command in Terminal.

sudo cp /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback.bak

Step two is to patch the DVDPlayback.framework file with this command in Terminal.

sudo perl -pi -e 's|\x49\x6E\x74\x65\x72\x6E\x61\x6C|\x45\x78\x74\x65\x72\x6E\x61\x6C|g' /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback

The thread on tonymacx86.com didn’t explain what the above command does exactly, so being the curious type, I wanted to find out what operations the command performs. The simple explanation is that the command uses Perl to add a line of text to the DVDPlayback.framework file.

The more detailed explanation of the flags used with the perl command are below, found on StackOverflow.

  • -p: Places a printing loop around your command so that it acts on each
    line of standard input. Used mostly so Perl can beat the
    pants off awk in terms of power AND simplicity.
  • -i: Modifies your input file in-place (making a backup of the
    original). Handy to modify files without the {copy,
    delete-original, rename} process.
  • -e: Allows you to provide the program as an argument rather
    than in a file. You don’t want to have to create a script
    file for every little Perl one-liner.

If for some reason the DVDPlayback.framework file needs to be restored from the backup that was created in step one, just reverse the command. The restoration command is below for easy copypasta into Terminal.

sudo cp /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback.bak /System/Library/Frameworks/DVDPlayback.framework/Versions/A/DVDPlayback

This issue occurs and is resolved for myself on macOS High Sierra.

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The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals. The same engineers who built strong encryption into the iPhone to protect our users would, ironically, be ordered to weaken those protections and make our users less safe.

http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
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That little green button

The zoom button, or at least that is what it used to be for, has always been a bit odd, but mostly predictable. Clicking that little green button would make a window in OS X zoom to fit the contents being displayed. Now, in Yosemite, the zoom button acts as the fullscreen button. Ever since my move to OS X back in the days of Tiger I quickly developed a disdain for fullscreen apps. One mild annoyance I have noticed in my recent upgrade to Yosemite is that little green button is now the button for making an app fullscreen. However, there are a few workarounds to restore the zoom functionallity to that little green button.

Any seasoned Mac user knows the wonders that the Option key holds. When exploring menus, try holding the Option key and see what other menu options may appear.

  • The first, and most easily discovered workaround for me is to hold the Option key while clicking that little green button, that will restore the zoom functionality.
  • The second workaround I discovered was to double-click the title bar of a window. To make this work, one must open up the Dock System Preferences and be sure to un-check “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize.
  • And the thrid, and perhaps my favorite workaround, is to set up a trigger in BetterTouchTool. Now I didn’t figure this out on my own, so I shall give credit where credit is due, and link to the instructions I found on Apple Stack Exchange.
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Free up valuable hard drive space by getting rid of unused iPhone Apps in iTunes

Free up valuable hard drive space by getting rid of unused iPhone Apps in iTunes

I was trying to discover what was taking up large amounts of space on my MacBook Pro; while investigating I discovered that there was a little over 15GB of iOS apps in my iTunes folder.  The vast majority of the apps that were on my Mac weren’t on my iPhone, therefore I wanted to get rid of them.  The issue I ran into was trying to figure out if I could safely delete these iOS apps.  Fortunately, I discovered a nice write-up from the from Chris on the OWC blog that I was able to successfully follow and I figured I’d share it with others.  Go give it a read, it could save you a few GB of hard drive space.