Problem: Some piece (or pieces) of rogue software have cluttered up your Open With contextual menu, which you can see by right-clicking or control-clicking any document in the Finder. This problem seems to be most prevalent with virtual machines that allow you to open documents with Windows applications, but tend not to clean up after themselves. After having both Parallels and VMWare installed on my MacBook Pro, my Open With menu was a mess.

Solution: Lucky for me, I noticed David Chartier's question about this on Twitter around the same time as I was wondering what to do about it. Some friendly person pointed him to a posting on Apple's discussion forum (also noted on Mac OS X Hints here and here), noting that running a specific command in a terminal window will rebuild your launch services, which repopulates the Open With menu with a current list of applications, without duplicates. It worked perfectly for me, but beware, on my system it took about 10 minutes to complete, and I suspect it could take more on a sufficiently gummed-up system.

Here's the Leopard version of the command (the path to the tool is different in Tiger, see here). I broke it into three lines for readability, but the \ at the end of the line is bash-speak for "keep on going with the same command" -- you can copy and paste it directly and it should work, or if you type it on one line without the backslashes, it will also work fine.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/\
 LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill\
 -r -domain local -domain system -domain user 

In ye olde times, with "Mack OSe 9," many users chose to keep their personal files, work, and documents on a different physical disk from their startup disk. It was a safety measure: If one disk goes down, at least the other won't. There was no structural reason to keep files in a particular disk location, other than keeping them out of the System Folder.

I visited a client yesterday whose drive scheme was set up exactly like this, and he wanted to be (finally) upgraded to Leopard. I wasn't sure how Leopard would handle the fact that his Users folder had been moved to a different drive, so (knowing I had backups of his entire system) I cautiously proceeded with the installation.

After the installer finished, Leopard had created a fresh, blank Users folder on the startup disk with a home folder bearing the same username. This wasn't exactly the answer I was looking for. I had to link, somehow, the new Users/hisname folder with his existing user folder on the other volume.

Turns out, Leopard handles this much better than previous versions of Mac OS X. Read on to find out how.

When I shared an AppleScript last week which created randomized signatures using TextExpander, I promised to revisit it when the iheartquotes.com API started working again. It's working right now, but it seems to go up and down; check this link before you try the script and make sure you get a quote, not an error message.

As before, when used with a TextExpander snippet set to the AppleScript type, this script will provide a random quote, this time pulling it from the Internet rather than our own list. The script is essentially the same, so I'm only going to explain the part which changed; visit the previous article for a rundown on the rest:

set _date to do shell script ¬
 "date +'Sent on %A, %b %d at %l:%M %p'|tr -s ' '"

 set _quote to ""

 try

 set _quote to do shell script "curl -s \\
 'http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=macintosh&max_lines=4'"

 set {astid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} ¬
 to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return}
 set _quote to paragraphs 1 through -3 of _quote as string
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid

 end try

 set _out to "
 -Brett

 " & _date & "
 ________________________________
 Brett Terpstra | myemailaddress@mywebsite.com
 The Unofficial Apple Weblog | http://www.tuaw.com

 " & _quote

 return _out

The curl call

Here's the part which makes this more interesting than it was before:

set _quote to do shell script "curl -s \\
 'http://www.iheartquotes.com/api/v1/random?source=macintosh&max_lines=4'"

First off, that really should be all one line, but is split here for formatting purposes. You can remove the double backslash (\\) and merge the lines together if you like. What this does is use AppleScript's ability to run shell scripts (Unix commands) to make a curl call to retrieve a response from the iheartquotes API. Note the "try" statement surrounding that section; it will just return our regular signature without the quote if anything goes wrong. If it gets a response, it stores it in a variable (_quote) and then trims off the last line, like this:

set {astid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} ¬
 to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, return}
 set _quote to paragraphs 1 through -3 of _quote as string
 set AppleScript's text item delimiters to astid

The first two lines (actually one line) are shorthand for setting "AppleScript's text item delimiters" -- the character that AppleScript uses to separate text items in a block of text -- to the return character and store the current text item delimiter in a variable so we can restore it with the last line. Using the paragraphs command, which automatically uses the return key to separate paragraphs, we turn the quote into a list of paragraphs, starting with the first and ending with the third from last. This is because the last two "paragraphs" are always an empty line and a permalink (even if you use the API's parameters to turn off the permalink). The last part of that line, "as string", is where the text item delimiters come into play, putting the list items back together with a return after each one, reconstructing the original formatting.

Note: You could do the same thing by adding |sed -n '$!p' to the end of the do shell script line, right before the last double quote. I suppose you might as well, as long as you're dipping out to the shell anyway ...

From there it's the same as before, just building a final output string from the pieces we've created. This method provides a much wider variety of randomized signatures than constructing your own list by making use of a small section of the wide array of data on the interwebs. The use of curl in an AppleScript can open a lot of possibilities, such as posting to Twitter in various ways. or shortening urls on the fly. Have fun.

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

When you open a Finder window and start browsing to a folder, do you lose track of the path to that folder? If you do, the Terminal command below will enable path view in the Finder -- this means that you will see the directory path to the current folder you are browsing in the title bar, instead of only seeing the name of the current directory.

To make directory paths visible atop Finder windows, open Terminal.app (/Applications/Utilities/) and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

Once you run the above command, you will also need to restart the Finder, so you can either type "killall Finder" and hit return, or use the Force Quit option under the Apple menu to relaunch it. The Finder will restart, and you will start seeing the paths to directories in the title bar.

Update: As some have pointed out in the comments below, this Terminal command will only work with Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5).
Ups

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Terminal Tips section!

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

TUAW reader David wrote us to ask how he could view .erb files (Rails development) in Quick Look. The fact is, there are a lot of plain-text files with extensions that Quick Look doesn't recognize. It's relatively straightforward to tell Quick Look to treat these files like any other text file and preview them as plain text; it does require diving into plist files and possibly breaking an application, so don't dive in unless you're comfortable and fully backed up. Read on for a short tour of Quick Look hacking basics ...