Temporarily Moving The Dock

I got an email today with the following question.

In my universe the Dock goes on the bottom of my screen.  I’m sorry, but that is just the way it is.  When it is moved somewhere else my eyes twitch, my hands sweat, and monsters appear under the bed.  IT IS NOT PRETTY.  Well, OK, maybe it is not really that bad, but you once wrote about a secret for moving the Dock around easily and quickly without constantly having to reset the Dock in the preferences. It was in your column. Can you give it again?

There is a fast and easy way to temporarily move your Dock out of the way, and since I share your need to have the Dock safely grounded on the bottom of my screen, I know how to do it.  In fact, I know how to do it in older versions of the OS and in the current versions as well, which tells you how much I do this little trick.

In older versions – Place the cursor over the vertical line on the right side of the dock and hold down the mouse button and the shift key.  Start dragging the cursor to the right or left side of your screen and the dock will pop to that side of the screen out of the way.  When you are ready to move it back to the bottom, repeat the process and the Dock will pop back to its home base on the bottom of the window.

In Mountain Lion, and as I recall, in Lion, place your cursor on that same line, hold down the right mouse button and a contextual menu opens. One of the options is “Position on Screen”.  Click on it and make your choice. Do it again to move it back in place.

Dealing With Fonts

A few years ago, maybe 4 or 5, I had a problem with a font. I tried for a couple of days to solve it, assuming, as I tend to do, that I was doing something wrong. As I recall it was not a situation that allowed me to just select a different font. Bottom line turned out to be that the problem rested within the font itself and just as I was ready to do something drastic Microsoft released a fix for the problem. Boy was I ticked. But as usual I learned a lesson.

The bottom line is that fonts can become damaged or corrupted just like any other file. This can cause problems up to and including prohibiting you from even opening a specific document in which the corrupted font is being used.

You can choose to validate fonts before you install them. Doing so won’t prevent problems down the road, but it will help ensure you are not installing problem files. You accomplish this using Font Book which has been included as part of your operating system since OS X 10.3.

The quickest way to find Font Book is to type font book in the Spotlight search field. It will probably appear on top and you just click on it in Spotlight to open it. You can also find it in the Applications folder.

Note: if you haven’t ever opened Font Book, select Font Book > Preferences and set your preferences for it just like you would for any other application.

Mountain Lion Font Book Preferences

Font’s already installed 

Font book automatically validates a font when you install it. But you can also validate all the fonts you already have installed. You can do all of the fonts currently in your Font Book at once.

Launch Font Book, then from the Edit menu, choose Select All or select ⌘A from your keyboard.

 Highlighted Fonts in Font Book

Font Book selects all the fonts in the Font column. Then from the File menu select Validate Fonts and Font Book will validate all your fonts and then give you a score. A white check mark on a solid green circle means the font appears to be OK. A black exclamation mark on a solid yellow circle means the font is a duplicate. A white “x” in a red circle means there’s a serious error and you should delete the font. To be on the safe side, you should consider deleting fonts with yellow icons, also.

Sample Duplicate Fonts Found During a Font Validation

 Font’s not yet installed

If you are worried about installing a font set that you want to download from the internet or obtain from some other source you can validate before you ever install the set. Leave the font set on your computer, your desktop is the logical place.

Open Font Book, select Validate File from the File menu. Locate the new font on your computer and click once on the font’s name and then click the Open button. You can select all the individual fonts at once using Select All (⌘A) or validate one at a time by highlighting each one as you go.

Click the File menu and select Validate Fonts. Delete any bad fonts using the same method as noted above.

Maintenance

It’s not a bad idea to run a font validation every few months just to make sure everything is still running smoothly.

The Window is To Big For the Screen

Problem: a Window on your screen is too big to resize, it looks like it is hanging off the screen. You can’t grab hold of the bottom right corner to drag to resize because you can’t see the bottom right corner. You may not even be able to see the scroll bars or the title bar.

Why does this happen? Sometimes it is because you hit a zoom function when you didn’t mean too, but frequently it happens because you are using an external monitor and there is a dichotomy in the resolution between your laptop and your external monitor.

When it has happened to me there have been times I couldn’t figure out why it happened. I just wanted it fixed.

Click in the window you want to resize. If you can see the three buttons in the window titlebar you can try clicking the green button. That should resize the window for you.

If you can’t, try this. It will work for most of the apps you have. Click in the window you want to resize and select the Window menu and then select Zoom.

Select the Zoom Function 

Now here is where it gets technical. When you click Zoom, it will “un-zoom”. Your page will resize to a normal setting and you can continue working. There are some third-party apps that don’t offer this feature, but when I can get Microsoft Excel to do it, I figure almost everything else will have it too.

A Solution For Wonky Problems

A wonky problem with your Mac is a weird problem that is driving you nuts because it doesn’t seem logical. I made that definition up in case you have any doubt. It covers a lot of territory.

One of the kind readers of this blog has been having a problem with the Stickies app that comes as part of her Mountain Lion (10.8) operating system and as she described it, it finally occurred to me that the Stickies preferences may have gone bad – thus the wonkey diagnosis.

This does happen, but thankfully you can fix it yourself. Actually, I am going to suggest a fix and a prevention – since this is Mother’s Day this is a twofer.

The app preference files, or p-list files, are found in the system library files. The app preference files are not the same as the app preferences. The app preference files control the preference. The fix is to close the app in question, find the p-list files, delete them, and then reopen the app in question. The p-list files will remake themselves and everyone lives happily ever after. The only catch being you might (most probably) have to reset the preferences for that app.

In Lion and Mountain Lion Apple hid the system library files to keep people who didn’t know what they were doing from causing themselves problem. But if you know what you are doing everything is cool.

As I said, start by closing the application that needs fixing. Make sure you are in the finder window and then hold down the option key* while you click on the Go menu and the Library option will appear. Open the Library folder and scroll down to the Preferences folder. That Preferences folder will have a bunch of stuff in it. Just keep going till you see stuff that says com.apple…..  Those are all the p.list files. Find the ones that pertain to the app you are trying to fix and move them out to your desktop. Move ALL of them. In the case of the Stickies app you are looking for

com.apple.Stickiers.plist
com.apple.Stickies.plist.lockfile

Just leave them out on your desktop and open your app back up and see if the problem has been solved. If it has, trash the p.lists you put on your desktop. If the problem is still there, then you can choose to put them back in the library file, only to prevent yourself from having to reset any preferences you may have lost.

*Thanks to Nathan Lott for this Library shortcut

Here is the second part of this twofer. A few months ago I installed a wonderful app called CleanMyMac 2 from MacPaw. It cost US $39.95 for a single license and there are discounts if you get more than one license. I run it on a set time schedule and not only does it release all kinds of free space on my drive, it fixes things as it goes. I have not had to deal with bad preference problems a single time in the months that I have been using it. Prior to that, it was a routine occurrence for me to have to utilize the fix mentioned above. There is also an app called CleanMyDrive from the same company. I have met these folks (Macworld) and this is a topnotch company. I recommend checking them out.

Page Up, Page Down, Get Where You Want To Go

Sometimes I surprise myself with how obtuse I can be. Granted, I looked for a solution for this particular problem, but I didn’t look in the right place and I didn’t ask. I have put up with a very annoying problem since the day Mountain Lion was released and all the time the solution was right on my keyboard.

I use an external monitor and external keyboard with my 13 inch MacBook Pro. I also use a mouse, determining almost from the first that I do not like the trackpad. I frequently work with very long documents created in Pages. Many are 40 or more pages and I frequently have to scroll up and down throughout the documents for various reasons.

In Mountain Lion when you use the scroll bars you don’t have a lot of control over where you “land” on a page. Sometimes the scroll bar will take on a life of its on and move up all the way to the beginning of the document when you don’t want it to. Sometimes when you try to use the scroll bar to move up between pages, you have no control over how far it goes up, or where it stops. I know I can place my cursor inside the scroll bar and click to move the pages up in small increments, but they are usually not the increments I need.

When I am alone and this happens, I say bad words.

Well, turns out my extended keyboard has these two little keys labeled page up and page down. Well, whatayouknow. They work! And if you hold down the option key while you press either one the cursor will jump to the middle of each page, allowing you to do what you need to do or see what you need to see on that page.

 

Looking Up Words The Fast Way

I can’t spell worth a darn. Never have been good at it and never will be. I like to blame it on brain damage I suffered at birth. (I am a twin and I was breach.) It is as good an excuse as any, right? Anyway, I use the dictionary a lot in spite of the fact that I never could understand how I was supposed to look up a word that I didn’t know how to spell. As an adult I have solved this problem by using the Thesaurus. I look up a similar word and hunt through synonyms until I find the spelling of the word I need.

Hey, it beats asking my children.

I also use the Thesaurus for the intended purpose of finding more appropriate words to enhance my writing or my descriptions of products. I mean, how many times can I say a product is awesome before someone gags.

In the past the steps have been to open Safari, open Dictionary.com, switch to Thesaurus and then enter my word for a search. There is a shortcut that might be of interest to those like me to look up words frequently.

I want to look up awesome. In Mountain Lion I enter it into the URL field since that also doubles as the Google search field. In earlier versions I would enter the word into the specific Google search field. Then I hit return and I get all kinds of choices. I select the one I want, thesaurus.com, it opens with my word displayed and researched, and I have a whole list of Synonyms:

• Part of Speech: adjective
• Definition: amazing
• Synonyms: alarming, astonishing, awe-inspiring, awful, beautiful, breathtaking, daunting, dreadful, exalted, fearful, fearsome, formidable, frantic, frightening, grand, hairy*, horrible, horrifying, imposing, impressive, intimidating, magnificent, majestic, mean, mind-blowing*, moving, nervous, overwhelming, real gone, shocking, something else, striking, stunning, stupefying, terrible, terrifying, wonderful, wondrous, zero cool
• Part of Speech: adjective
• Definition: great
• Synonyms: awesome*, bang-up, capital, champion, excellent, fine, first-rate, fly*, top, whiz-bang, wonderful

I find this to be a great (awesome, excellent, wonderful) time saver.

Individualize The Vibration Notifications On Your iPhone 5

Common courtesy tells us that there are places where ones phone should not ring. Theaters, places of worship, meetings, etc. That is one reason many people use the vibration option on their phones. But what happens when you have a call coming in that you absolutely must take? When your phone vibrates, you have to look and see who is calling. Fine when you are at the back of the room, but what if you are chairing a meeting at work and waiting for your wife or your child to go into labor? Been there, done that. When you have to stop talking about an important issue to pull out your phone to see who is calling, it might as well have just rung – the interruption has occurred.

With iPhone 5 there is a nice solution. You can choose custom vibrations for calls or texts just like you can choose custom rings. You can also create your own.

Start with Settings > Sounds > Ringtone > Vibration. There you will find a list of existing, alternate vibration patterns, along with the ability to create new ones.

Individual Vibration Screen

 

To assign a specific vibration to an individual just open that person’s record in the Phone App, click edit, and add a vibration choice to either/or the ringtone and text tone.

Indicate Individualized Vibration Choices

 To create an individualized vibration, click on “Create New Vibration”. Tap the screen to begin and firmly tap your pattern. Tap stop when you are done and save when you are happy with it. Name it and it is part of your options.