Filed under: Features, Tips and tricks, Troubleshooting, Ask TUAW
Ask TUAW: Locking the Dock, Hiding, Photo Stitching, and More
Wednesday means Ask TUAW, our weekly questions and answers column! This week we'll be tackling questions from last week about locking the Dock, hiding applications, Boot Camp, stitching photos into panoramas, and deleting files immediately from a flash drive. As always, please leave your own comments, and ask more questions for next week either in the comments to this post or using the tip form. Now let's get to it.
xioztzu asks
Question, how can you lock the dock so icons cannot be added or removed? I have a older relative that has trouble clicking and often drags when he clicks. The end result is he is always calling me to ask where application X went.
Okay, fortunately, this one is not too hard. First, you need to make sure his account is not an administrator account. (If it is already and administrator account just go into the Accounts pane of the System Preferences and create another account as admin, then log into that account and demote his to managed). Next you'll need to go into "Parental Controls" for the "Finder & System" for his account.
Here you'll need to make sure that "Modify the Dock" is unchecked. Now when he logs in under this account he won't be able to change the Dock. Since it sounds like he may also have some other difficulties using his Mac, it is probably a good idea for him not to run as an administrator, and you may want to turn on some of the other controls as well.
Jethro asks
(I am in the process of switching to a Mac) Would you please explain to me what hiding does, why it is there, and why I would want to hide something instead of minimizing it (like I would in Windows)?
My colleague Michael Rose notes that "in Windows, if you minimize an application, you've minimized the entire environment for that app... On Mac OS X, when you minimize a window, you might still have 20 windows for that application nestled in between your other items." Basically, hiding affects all the windows of an application, whereas minimizing only affects a single window. Furthermore, there is some anecdotal evidence that hiding an application brings some performance advantages that merely minimizing its windows does not (by freeing up some system resources). Here is Apple's document on hiding applications.
Alex asks
Do you know whether it will be necessary to reinstall (ie lose) my Windows Boot Camp partition when upgrading to 10.5 Leopard, or can I just run the new and improved Boot Camp installer?
Commenting on unreleased software (particularly unreleased software I've never used) is generally inadvisable, but I'm pretty sure that is that the answer is no. When you install Leopard you will do so in your existing OS X partition. This should leave your Boot Camp partition, with its Windows install, untouched. The new Boot Camp may bring some new drivers, etc., but these should not require a complete re-install of Windows.
Terry asks
I have a simple question that I hope you can answer for me. I have looked high and low and can't find a good photo stitching application for my MAC. I have the Canon application but it is horrible... I have also tried an application called Doubletake and that seems to fall short as well. Have you run across one in your many web/mac travels?
Well of course one can do this manually with older versions of Photoshop, but the forthcoming PS3 has some new features that make stitching much easier (and remember you can get the PS3 beta if you have a CS2 serial). So a few quick searches turned up a couple of commercial products that incorporate Autostich from the University of British Columbia. These are Autopano (€99) and a couple of different tools from Dekus Digital. I have not used either of the programs, but the Autostitch algorithm seems to be very well regarded.
Nick asks
Is there some way to empty the trash for only one volume? Failing that is there an easy way to remove files without them going to the trash? The problem is this... I often use usb flash drives to move things around. Generally I need to delete something from them every time I use them so I can fit something else on there. That means I have to empty my trash every time I use a flash drive... or use 'rm' from the terminal. In my Win32 days I would use SHIFT-DEL and I can't find a good OSX replacement.
Well there several possible solutions for you. I'll present them all, and you can decide what will work best for you. Mac Geekery has a post addressing exactly your situation. You can force OS X to immediately delete files from a flash drive by creating a bogus .Trashes file on it. Another possible solution is the Super Empty Trash AppleScript applet which allows you to do selective volume trash emptying. Finally, you can add a little application like Graveyard to your Finder toolbar, such than whenever you drag and drop a file onto the icon, that file will be immediately deleted.
Although it is probably overkill, you could start using the Finder replacement Path Finder which has a built-in secure delete function, among many others. I use it regularly on my main machine.
Okay, that'll do it for now. See you next week, and keep those questions coming!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Aaron Bennett said 3:12PM on 3-14-2007
There is a really nice open source app for photo stitching called Hugin (available for Mac/Windows/Linux/etc) at http://hugin.sourceforge.net/
I've long used both Windows and OS X versions; the only big caveat is getting autopano (automatic similar point generation) to work under OS X is not very simple. All my panoramic photos have been stitched with hugin. See http://www.aaronbennett.com/photos/panoramas/
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m said 3:33PM on 3-14-2007
i have a studio display hooked up to an imac which works great, but have several questions. how do i get quicktime movies to play in full screen on the studio display without making the imac go black? is there anyway i can have the dock show up on both screens? and not all programs remember their position (i.e. firefox on the studio display, final cut pro on the imac) upon rebooting. does anyone have any solutions? thanks! m
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James said 3:33PM on 3-14-2007
The Kekus product Calico, is actually a very nice wrapper on the licencsed autostitch technology. It is by far the easiest and best results on 95% of my panoramas. For those cases of bad shots and lack of overlap, some of the manual products like hugin and the other product PTMac from Kekus fit the bill as they let you specify exactly where duplicate points are on each image.
Anyway, for the money Calico is a bargain that saves me HOURS on almost any decent sized panorama.
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Jon Q said 4:44PM on 3-14-2007
For selectively emptying trash, you could also use Compost which has a hot-keyable utility that displays trash info on all volumes and allows you to selectively empty the trash and a particular volume.
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jim said 7:00PM on 3-14-2007
Photoshop CS2 already has stitching: File > Automate > Photomerge
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Eric Sadoyama said 7:05PM on 3-14-2007
As originally written, AutoStitch is a Windows application -- but it runs just fine under CrossOver Mac in OS X.
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Bill said 8:59PM on 3-14-2007
Calico 1.3 by kekus.com is by far the best panorama stiching software I have used, and I own several. It does cost $39 (~1/10 —1/15 the cost of the "big boys") but the results are quick and nearly foolproof even for hand held overlapping shots.
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bobm said 9:02PM on 3-14-2007
For stitching I really recommend PTgui, it runs on both windows and os x and although you have to pay for it it's worth it if you have a lot of photos to stitch or like doing fine tuning on the images.
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Mark said 10:01PM on 3-14-2007
With regards to the "changing" of the Dock- there may be a possibility that the user needs to keep using an Admin account, but still wants the Dock unchangable. FOr example, if Grampa likes to install software, I'd hate to have to explain how to log into another account to do it!
Some ideas:
-Remove "write" permissions for that user on com.apple.dock.plist, located in ~/Library/Preferences. This won't prevent actual changes in a session, but a simple restart will bring it all back for him the way it was.
- You could write a simple script to replace the file above with a hidden, untouched copy on login- this would achieve the same as above.
Mark
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talonsensei said 11:14PM on 3-14-2007
I bought an HP Inkjet printer a few months ago. It comes with a CD full of photo management apps that are actually not bad for almost free. One is an iPhoto type photo management software, but there is another one simple called "Stitch" that does and amazingly good job of making panoramas from individual images. It is a one trick pony, but it does it very well.
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NeilS said 4:37AM on 3-15-2007
Hello! I have a question. I have a NAS box on my network (a Thecus N2100), which, like my Mac, connects to my switch via ethernet.
Everything works fine; I 'Connect to Server' and get a drive for it on my desktop.
However, occasionally when I'm done using the NAS box I turn it off - but forget to eject the drive first. The result is a horribly locked up Mac, with spinning beachballs in most/all of my applications.
Eventually, the Mac realises, and brings up a box saying that the connection has been interrupted and gives me a chance to eject the drive, but this takes several minutes - and sometimes the Mac seems so locked up that it doesn't happen at all.
I've tried some unsuccessful Googling on this; do you have any advice to prevent the lockup, and get the Mac to "give up" on the broken connection sooner?
Many thanks!
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John said 5:59PM on 3-17-2007
I've been really happy with DoubleTake thus far.
http://echoone.com/doubletake/
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Jameson said 12:15AM on 3-19-2007
I just purchased a Powermac G4 Quicksilver edition (2002 model with 800Mhz processor). I was wondering what the best brand of processor would be to upgrade with. I know for sure I'm upgrading the RAM to 1.5GB, but I'm not exactly sure what I should be looking for. I want to use photoshop CS and final cut express on it, but I'm not sure as to what processor I should get. I want something cheaper, and I think either a Single 2Ghz or a Dual 1.6 or 1.8. Any ideas on what speed and brand to look for.
Jameson
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Aaron Davies said 4:04PM on 3-21-2007
Regarding hiding apps, one of the few features I really like about the Windows taskbar is the ability to click the button of the frontmost app to hide/minimize its windows. Does anyone know if anyone's done something similar for the Dock--i.e., you click again on the icon of the frontmost app and it hides? I know there are at least three other quick ways to do this (option-click elsewhere, cmd-H, right-click on dock icon and "hide"), but what I'm looking for is something that would make my windows habits developed at work function identically at home.
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