SnowLeopard posts

One gem in Mac OS X that sometimes gets glanced over is the Services menu. Lots of readers may not know yet that Snow Leopard brought with it the ability to create your own customized service in Automator -- in other words, you can get additional selections on a contextual menu when right-clicking within a certain context, say a file within a Finder window. To create a customized service, all you have to do is launch Automator and select "Services" from the "Choose a template for your workflow" window, and then insert your own service from there.

Here are five customized services for you to install on your own Mac.

I recently wrote about Ross Carter's Snow Leopard Creater Code discoveries and his solution, LaunchCodes. It turns out there were a few issues with the initial implementation, such as Apple Events not being passed along. Normally when you find a file in Spotlight, a PDF for example, opening it launches Preview and the query that was used to locate the file shows up in the search field in Preview. This was no longer working in LaunchCodes, though Ross says he's working on that right now. In the meantime, Michel Fortin has produced Magic Launch, and it solves the majority of the issues that have been presented.

Magic Launch installs as a System Preferences pane, and you can drag and drop applications to it to register their file type. Then, you can choose a default application, but optionally specify that it should launch in it the application which created it, when possible. Probably the coolest feature, though, is the rule handling. Similar to rules in Mail.app, you can set up a series of criteria to determine when a different app should open the file. You can have multiple rules, and each rule can check things like file location, file name or extension, text contents, hex contents and/or ASCII contents. That's pretty nifty, and goes beyond the default functionality that was available before we even needed apps like this.

Magic Launch is free to try out, and costs $14US for a license. If you're still finding documents annoyingly launching the wrong applications, go download it and give it a try.

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard introduced a lot of under-the-hood changes and many are not very obvious. One such change is to the authentication requirements for logging in remotely via SSH.

In 10.5 logging in remotely via SSH was a pretty standard affair. In 10.6, however, security has been beefed up a bit to require case-sensitive login credentials. While this requirement has already been imposed on passwords, Snow Leopard now requires a case-sensitive user name as well.

In other words, when logging in via SSH, Snow Leopard differentiates between the username "aron" and "Aron." This threw me for a loop for quite some time and is another one of the numerous reasons I have held off upgrading my Mac mini to 10.6.

In Mac OS X (and back into OS 9 history), a creator code is a hidden value attached to a document and bound to a preferred application, allowing the OS to know which application to use for opening that file. This is particularly helpful for filetypes that have multiple valid 'target' apps (JPEG, PDF, etc.); the creator code lets Preview 'own' its PDF or image files, TextEdit automatically open its text files, and so on.

Those who are familiar with the process are already (painfully) aware that Snow Leopard ditched this system a while back (some great details at Ars Technica). For many users -- especially Windows switchers -- the new method is an improvement, allowing a more standardized response to double-clicking a document file that's driven by the file name extension (.doc, .html, and the like). If you're in the former group, though, and missing your creator codes, the developer behind PageHand has a treat for you: LaunchCodes.

LaunchCodes is an extremely simple utility which restores the creator code functionality to Snow Leopard. The creator codes never went anywhere; they're still in the metadata. LaunchCodes just tells the system what to do with a filetype. Setup is fast and easy, just enter the extension for the file and assign an application to it (similar to "Always open with"). It runs quietly in your menubar and directs OS X to open the application you prefer for any given type of file.

LaunchCodes is $4.95US and is available as a free trial at the PageHand website.