Category Archives: OSX

iCloud & Contacts Disappear

Posted by on November 30, 2011 Comments Off
Português: iCloud para iOS, Mac e Windows

Image via Wikipedia

I decided to do a mass cleanup of my contacts. Being prudent, I made a backup before, and after, using the “Address Book Archive” option as we’ve been told. Then, all of the contacts disappeared. Fine, no problem, I restored from the backup. Everything looked good but a few seconds later everything was gone again. Fine, I restored from a Time Machine backup. Things went just as badly. I frantically searched for a solution and was relieved to find a post from Richard L. on MacRumours. It was an horrific experience for us to have to share. I’m posting the steps I was forced into due to this obvious near fatal bug from our dearest Apple.

1. Completely sign out of iCloud.
2. If there are somehow any remnants of your contacts in Address Book, delete them.
3. Import your “Address Book Archive File” that didn’t work for long before.
4. Make any edits and clean things up. (some were obscenely mis-alphabetized - a likely corrupted cause of the problem in the first place)
5. Drag each address book entry out of AB individually to a folder somewhere.
6. Delete everything in AB.
7. Drag the mess of vCards back into AB.
8. Log back into iCloud. (You will notice you still have contacts – that don’t sync)
9. Turn off Contacts sync in the iCloud pref pane, keeping your local contacts.
10. Turn it back on. It will kindly “merge” your contacts with iCloud.

At this point you should have a complete Address Book on your mac as well as the nicely synced data on your mac/phone/pad/pod.

Oh, Apple! It “just works,” until it doesn’t. Hopefully those good folks will fix this quite traumatic situation soon.

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iOS 5- Device Not Eligible Error

Posted by on October 14, 2011 Comments Off

You’ve gone through the process of updating your OS X to 10.7.2, updating iTunes to 10.5, syncing, downloading iOS 5, and backing up, but after all that clicking and waiting you find that “this device is not eligible for the requested build.”

The culprit would seem to be a now problematic entry in /etc/hosts. Namely, a single line at the end:

74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Well, this line is not in a pristine hosts file and should be removed or commented out. By removed, I mean delete it. By commented out, I mean modify the line to read only:

#74.208.10.249   gs.apple.com

Of course, you cannot edit the file in place, so copy it, and perhaps a backup (how about “/etc/hosts.orig”) somewhere to edit, then copy that back to the original place – all as an admin user.

Reboot. Rebackup. Rejoice.

New Terminal at Folder

Posted by on July 25, 2011 Comments Off

In the past it could be a chore to open a new terminal window at the folder you were in. Even using a launcher such as Quicksilver, you had to manually navigate to where you already should be.

In the new App Store, I noticed a little free app called Go2Shell. You could either place this in the finder window toolbar for click access, or just invoke it from your launcher whilst wherever in your folder structure.

With Lion, while looking through Notational Velocity info, I came upon a new (to me, at least) way to do the same via the Services menu – for those of that particular bent. (If you happen to be, then you already know you can set up a hotkey for any service to avoid the trouble of an unnatural right-click of the mouse). This setting is at:

System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services > Files and Folders > New Terminal at Folder

It also allows you to open a new tab in your current terminal right here if you’re the sort who just keeps it open all the time. I selected both to see if it would be aware of the terminal running status and found that if it’s not running only the New Terminal option is available.

Go2Shell still is a great non-fiddly option and I’ll keep it installed. If you have some curiosity, you might go through all those shortcuts and see what gems may be hidden away.

update: geesh … it took me hours to absently use this Go2Shell before i got “it”. slowwww ammm ayeeee.

 

See Apps Roar

Posted by on July 24, 2011 Comments Off

Whenever I get a new machine there are apps that I install for at least occasional use. I always forget some until having to become irritated and peck around at a non-pecking-friendly time. With my fresh clean Lion install I thought I’d make a list so’s I don’t have to repeat this all the time. This will be growing on an ongoing basis … as that’s really the only basis on which to grow. (n.B: “AppS” means I got it from the App Store, but probably available elsewhere, and I’m not going to even get into whether there is a MSFT version or whatever).
Apart from the obvious iApps/Office stuff, they are thus (essentials for me have an “*”): 

*1Password – keep the passwords on all systems

Adium – chat the chat

Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Editor – duh

Alfred (AppS) – updated launcher (unlike quicksilver) but giving Spotlight a go for now

CalendarBar – integrate iCal/gCal/Facebook … calendars

*DEVONthink Pro Office – keep the everything to be kept

*Dropbox – put it here … read/edit/share everywhere.

ecto – to write this

 
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Lion – Getting Some Leopard Back

Posted by on July 24, 2011 Comments Off

I installed Lion yesterday and found a few annoyances. When you open something like a disk image that has an “accept this legal stuff” type window, it seems that nothing happens. In Snow Leopard this would mean that the dmg is corrupted or something. Apparently in Lion it means that the window popped up somewhere and did not pop to the front. I haven’t found out how to fix that bit. When I open something I want something to visibly happen.

Also, a new feature lets you minimize to an app icon … but, again, there is no visual cue that there is anything open there. There probably should be some icon variation.

Then, this new “natural” scrolling a la iStuff is intuitive if you conceptualize that you’re on an iPad, but for a mouse it’s just weird and it makes me fear looking the moron when on someones MSFT machine and being so obviously incapable of scrolling. For this reason it may not be something I want to get used to. Of course, this can be changed in System Preferences, but the change affects both trackpad and mouse without letting you have a different behavior for each.

I’ll be updating this at least for my own future reference, but thought I may as will stick it up here in case someone finds it useful as well (I would quite welcome any other advice). So …

Show the library:

Show User ~/Library in OS X Lion

Launch Terminal from Spotlight or Launchpad -> Utilities, and enter the following command to show or hide the directory:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Obviously change it back with “hidden”

(osxdaily)

It might be better to just remember you can always press the option key while in the Finder “Go” menu and it will show up there. This seems the best of both worlds.

Get your back/forward swipe back for Chrome (and maybe more):

Three finger swipes still work in Chrome. The issue you’re having is that default swipes in Lion are two fingers. Go into System Prefs, then into trackpad and change the swipes from 2 fingers to 3. You can also make it both 2 and 3 finger swipes to accomplish the same thing, in which case swiping will work in Chrome and you’ll see get the cool two finger swipes in Safari that have special animations. (google forum response)

To me, the best option is to just set it to 2 and 3 finger swipes to maintain constancy.

Get Front Row back:

Front Row Enabler for Lion

posted Jul 17, 2011 1:02 PM by Ralph Perdomo [ updated Jul 21, 2011 10:36 PM ]

Since its introduction in OS X Tiger, I have been using Front Row (along with the Perian plugin) as a media center solutions for my Macs. Once I discovered that Front Row was removed from the betas in Lion I took this as an ominous sign that it would not be making the final cut. Mucking around however, I discovered that there are only a few core files necessary to get Front Row to work in Lion. Those files are:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BackRow.framework

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iPhotoAccess.framework

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.RemoteUI.plist

This little pkg will fix all this automatically as well as stick Front Row back in the Applications folder from whence Lion quietly deleted it: (frontfowenablerforlion)

Manually Enabling Front Row for OS X Lion

This will require access to a Mac OS X 10.6 installation. The following Front Row files from OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard must be moved into the exact same locations in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion:

/System/Library/CoreServices/Front Row.app

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/BackRow.framework

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iPhotoAccess.framework

/System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.RemoteUI.plist

/Applications/Front Row.app

(osxdaily)