TagOSX

Click Finder Renaming

I was going over updating various statements and photos for the new year. Many of the files had an unhelpful naming convention which did not sort logically in list view. Additionally, while filenames such as IMG_002342 sort well enough, they don’t convey much to jog your memory of any event. To fix this, I was going to go for a shell script or the Better Finder Rename application. Before going that route, I idly highlighted the files and right clicked, to get quite a shock.

There is now a context menu option to Rename X Items. This is not just a simple find and replace operation, either; You can prefix or suffix names, and even conform them to an incremental or dated format. This will allow you to have more meaningful names than IMG_002342. Try replacing IMG_ with Christmas2014_ and you’ll immediately see how clarifying and convenient this is.

For more complex situations, Better Finder Rename is a professional powerhouse, but for occasional quick renaming needs, this Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10) capability is a fantastic time saver.

Steam Accessibility Yosemite

Keep getting asked to enable the assistive devices permission for the Steam app even though it already IS enabled?

Close Steam and go to System Preferences\\Security & Privacy\\Privacy\\Accessibility and disable Steam. Open Steam. When it asks you to enable support for assistive devices, deny permission. Close Steam. Go back and enable Accessibility. Open Steam. Rejoice.

Mavericks Gmail Horror

Oh, shiny new Mavericks. Seems okay. Then, you use Mail.app with your Gmail account. You had gone through the list of tweaks that were necessary to make it “just work” up until yesterday. Now, you go about your business dragging messages to their resting places, have a look at what’s in another folder for a moment, and return to your inbox – to find yourself blinking for because there are all those messages you just moved. Hm, some wonky sync, and you do it again. Upon return to your inbox the blink becomes a twitch of annoyance, but a google search provides an irritant balm in the form a TidBits article by Joe Kissell, “Mail in Mavericks Changes the Gmail Equation.” Basically you must expose the All Mail tag in your Gmail account to IMAP (Gmail:Settings:Labels>>All Mail>>Show in IMAP). I share his sentiment:

I find it particularly upsetting that Mail doesn’t tell you about the need to enable All Mail. Mail could pop up a little message saying, “Hey there! I noticed that you have a Gmail account and I’m not seeing All Mail. That’s going to be a problem from now on; here’s how you fix it.” But this is something you just have to work out for yourself — a major architectural change that isn’t even mentioned when you choose Help > What’s New in Mail?, let alone addressed in a helpful error message.

NOTE:  This is not a nice solution and will cause Mail to freak for quite some time, but it settles itself down … eventually … I am told. All your folders will seem to be empty. Have a look at Activity under Window to see all the unnecessary.

UPDATE: This situation has led me to Airmail, and I’m really quite impressed. The beta is free and the full app is in the store for just $1.99. I may just stay with this even when Apple gets around to bandaging themselves.