April 2006 Double Click Main Meeting Report

by Jim Macak

The April 23rd Double Click meeting was opened by Double Click President

Jim Macak who again presented the “Beginners SIG” demonstration in Steve Parker’s absence. (Steve hopes to resume his presentations at the

May meeting.) Jim discussed the concept of different users of one

Macintosh having their own accounts and consequently having the ability to

customize their Macintosh environment differently than users of other

accounts.

Jim tied this in with his demo of the freeware utility “FolderGlance.”

FolderGlance is a small Contextual Menu Plugin for the Finder. When it is

installed, it allows one to control-click or right-click on folders to see and open their contents, as well as examine the contents of sub-folders down to

an unlimited number of levels.

The manual installation of FolderGlance requires copying two files from the

install disk image. One file needs to be installed into a “Contextual Menu

Items” folder and the other into a “PreferencePanes” folder. However, there

are potentially three of each of these folders visible to every Macintosh user. Their location is in each of the three different “Library” folders.

The “Library” folder within the OS X “System” folder is sacrosanct and is

consequently off-limits to users. The “Library” folder at the “root” level of

the startup hard disk drive holds items that are available to any and all

users of that Macintosh. The third “Library” folder is within a user’s “Home”

folder and it holds items particular to that user. Thus, depending into which

of the latter two “Library” folders the FolderGlance files are installed, the

FolderGlance utility may be available to all users of the Macintosh or just to

the individual user who installed FolderGlance.

The latter two “Library” folders contain other folders that may be used to

allow access to functionality to all users or just one user. An example would

be the “Fonts” folders that are in each of these two “Library” folders. A font

that is unique to an individual user’s “Library” folder will only be available to

that particular user.

Jim installed the FolderGlance components into his own account’s “Library”

folder and then proceeded to demonstrate FolderGlance.

FolderGlance 2.0.0

The main functionality of FolderGlance provides a hierarchical cascading

view of folder contents by control-clicking (or right-clicking with a two

button mouse) on a folder’s icon. Doing so, you get a view like this:

FolderGlance offers many other options, including:

• Adding your own custom folders to the contextual menu, enabling

FolderGlance to act as a very versatile launcher

• Moving, copying and making aliases of the currently selected files in a folder you browse to

• Control-free popups: Open the contextual menu without holding down

the control-key or using a two-button mouse

• Drag-and-drop of files and folders

• In-menu preview of arbitrary files

• Opening files with an application different than the default by using an

"Open with..." menu you can tailor to suit your own taste

• Changing the font size used in contextual menus

• Disable the menu fade effect, for a more speedy menu experience

• Browsing into package contents • Optional display of custom file and folder icons

• Customizable sorting and customizable display of hidden files and folders

• Trash files directly from the contextual menu

Requires: Mac OS X 10.3 or later (Universal)

Freeware (donations encouraged)

http://home.online.no/~stoedle/YLS/YLS-products/FolderGlance.html

The second “File of the Month” that Jim demonstrated was a widget.

xCuts widget 1.0

xCuts puts a full reference of Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts at your fingertips in the Dashboard.

This widget is powered by an external database that will be updated

periodically with new information, allowing you to easily browse or search

its contents. The benefit of this is that you will not need to update the xCuts

widget by downloading a new version of it when a new keyboard shortcut is

added. The downside is that xCuts requires an active Internet connection to

obtain its database information.

The xCuts are organized by Category, Scope, and Object, and you can even drill down to a second cross-referenced level if you need to. Or just use the

fast live search form!

xCuts includes tips on the use of certain shortcuts, and it’s designed to let

you copy and paste shortcuts to external documents. The widget is

resizable and, when you’re done checking it, you can click the title to

compact xCuts down to a tiny lozenge for later use.

In this version 1.0, xCuts covers shortcuts for the following “scopes” only:

Finder, Screen, Dashboard, App Switcher, Dock, Spotlight, Startup, and

“Universal.” It does not cover universal accessibility shortcuts or special-

character shortcuts at this time. Future versions will expand the range of

scopes covered.

Requires: Mac OS X 10.4

Freeware

http://homepage.mac.com/lscott/Software/FileSharing6.html

or

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/reference/xcuts.html

Question & Answer Session Our Q & A session included an active discussion of many different topics.

A moderate amount of time was devoted to Apple’s new “Boot Camp” beta software that allows users of the new Intel Macs to install and start up their

Macintosh under the Windows operating system. This was contrasted to

“Parallels,” another beta software offering from a third party company.

Parallels works more like “VirtualPC,” in that it allows one to run the

Windows OS within a window of Mac OS X. For more information on these

technologies, see:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

and

http://www.parallels.com/en/products/workstation/mac/

Another software utility that was noted during the session was “PopChar X,”

which some of us may remember from its pre-OS X version. PopChar X

makes "typing" of unusual characters easy without having to remember

keyboard combos.

Whenever you need a special character, PopChar X is there to help. Click

the little "P" box (next to the Apple menu) to display a table of characters.

Select the desired character and it instantly appears in your document.

Price: $30 (a free "trial mode" is available)

http://www.macility.com/products/popcharx/

Double Click Elections

Our April meeting agenda also included the annual Double Click business

meeting and officer elections. The incumbent officers all stood for reelection save for Treasurer Pat Thompson, who will be moving out of state later this

year. After some pleading for a nominee for Treasurer, Mal Bertsch

volunteered for the position and the now-complete slate of officers was

elected by unanimous consent.

Thus, the Double Click, Inc. officers and board members for 2006-2007 are:

President: Jim Macak

Vice-President: Gene Braun

Secretary: Jerry Smaglik

Treasurer: Mal Bertsch

Director: Bob Stone

Director: Chuck Floading

Director: Patricia Lidicker

Thanks Pat!

The Double Click board wishes to extend its gratitude on behalf of all

Double Click members to our “retiring” Treasurer, Pat Thompson, whose noble and capable service to Double Click over the past several years is

greatly appreciated.

Main Demo Presented by Jim Macak, Double Click President and an Apple Certified Help Desk Specialist and Macintosh help consultant for the Milwaukee area. His website is

http://www.yourmacdoc.com/

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iweb/

After the mid-meeting break, Jim Macak also presented the main demo for

the April meeting.

iWeb is the new component of Apple’s iLife software suite, having been

added with the debut of iLife ’06 this past January. iWeb is a website

creation application and it excels in its integration with other iLife

components and Apple’s “.Mac” Internet service.

iLife retails for $79. Its system requirements are:

• a Macintosh computer with a PowerPC G4, G5 or Intel Core Duo processor (733MHZ or faster required for iDVD); 256MB of RAM

• Mac OS X v10.3.9 or Mac OS X v10.4.3 or later

• DVD drive for installation

• 10GB of disk space to install iLife ’06 applications

Producing a basic website with iWeb couldn’t be much easier. Jim said he

created the photo site that he later showed as a part of his demo in about

10-15 minutes using iWeb, having never used iWeb in the past! Thus he

found that iWeb fulfilled its billing of being easy to use, intuitive and well-

integrated with iPhoto, etc.

Jim noted that there are a few quirks to iWeb. When one “Saves” a website

in iWeb, no “Save” dialogue appears. Rather, iWeb auto-saves its file in one

particular location under a file name that the user cannot change. This

behavior limits the user to working on one website at a time and even

keeps one from saving different websites without performing a few “tricks”

behind iWeb’s back.

iWeb templates

Jim started up iWeb and proceeded to create a “new baby” photo site. Upon

startup, iWeb presents a choice of various templates for basic themes of the

website. After choosing a theme that fits the style of the website you will be

creating, one selects a page template and then iWeb opens to the page

creation screen. You can then start customizing the page, replacing

“placeholder” text and pictures with your own content.

iWeb’s Media Browser

Using the “Media Browser” tool of iWeb, you can access all your iLife

content — photos, video, audio — without leaving iWeb. Jim used the Media

Browser to select several pictures from his iPhoto library for use on the web pages he was creating. Adding photos is a simple matter of dragging a

photo from the Media Browser and dropping it onto the placeholder photo

on the iWeb creation page.

Text font size, color, formatting and style can be customized and photos

can even be adjusted from within iWeb.

The “Publish” button

Once the new website is created, if you have a .Mac membership (even a 60-day free trial membership), you can publish a site to .Mac by clicking the

Publish button. If you don't have a .Mac membership, you can publish your

site to a folder and then upload the site to the server of your choice.

If you don't publish your site to .Mac, these features are unavailable:

Password protection

Hit counter

Slideshow with viewing controls

Once you publish a website to your .Mac account, to delete the first site,

you publish another site to replace the first site. (You can't completely

delete a site if it is the only one in iWeb.)

Websites published to .Mac are available to others using any browser at:

http://web.mac.com/[Your.MacName]

The website that Jim created for his demo can be viewed (for the next

couple of weeks) at:

http://web.mac.com/doubleclickinc/

At the end of his demo, Jim was about to show some iWeb related links

when the Double Click PowerBook decided to become uncooperative. (The

PowerBook seems fine now…) Here are those links:

This site offers a blog with some iWeb tips:

http://web.mac.com/curlytool/iWeb/iWebTryout/Welcome.html

The following site offers some extra iWeb templates:

http://www.11mystics.com/blog/

Here is a review comparing iWeb to some other web page design programs:

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2006/03/08/web_builder.html

Here is another author’s opinion of iWeb:

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2006/03/putting_iweb_to_the_test.ht

ml

May Meeting Preview:

“Email with Eudora” and “Email Tips and Etiquette”

The next Double Click main meeting will be Sunday, May 21st.

The Eudora application

Louise Dahms will demonstrate “Eudora,” an email application that tends to

engender a “love it or hate it” relationship with its users.

For the second part of the email demonstration, Jim Macak will talk about

email tips and etiquette.

Check the Double Click website for more meeting information.

http://www.double-click.org