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Filed under: OS, Mac 101

Mac 101: Remove unwanted System Preference panes

by Cory Bohon (RSS feed) on Jul 17th, 2008



Sometimes applications can install extras in the form of System Preference panes. However, when you remove the app from your Mac, you might be left with extraneous System Preference panes.

To uninstall System Preference panes, just right-click (or control + click if you have a one button mouse) on the preference pane icon and select "remove x preference pane."

When you click "remove," the preference pane will be instantly moved to the OS X Trash can where you can completely remove it from your system by emptying the trash. Please note that this will only work on System Preference panes located in the "Other" section of System Preferences.

Want to see more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 section today!

Tags: pane, preference, remove, System Preferences, SystemPreferences, uninstall

Filed under: Software, Surveys and Polls

Mac DevCenter: palettes or sidebars?

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jul 31st, 2006

Following a dilemma that Gus Mueller faced when designing the UI for his latest release of VoodooPad 3, Mac DevCenter has posted a request for feedback on this most heated of UI topics: palettes or sidebars? Preferences can easily sway in either direction, and I personally miss the old-school functionality of Mail's pre-Tiger drawer (yay for column widths that don't have to be constantly re-adjusted), though I will concede that the drawer look is old and ugly by today's slick UI standards of palettes and sidebars.

But what do you TUAW readers think? Do you prefer palettes, like in Photoshop, OmniOutliner, iWeb and Pages, or do you prefer the sidebar UI of Tiger's Mail, ecto and NetNewsWire's subscriptions panel (though it's interesting to note that NNW also uses a drawer for its site catalog)? Sound off.

Tags: ecto, mac, Mac DevCenter, MacDevcenter, Mail, os x, OsX, palettes, preference, sidebar, sidebars, UI, usability, usable, user interface, UserInterface

Filed under: Audio, Software, Video, Internet Tools

iVideoMail and iVoiceMail plugins for Mail

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jul 16th, 2006


Here's a novel idea: being able to easily send something besides text and pretty pictures in email. iVideoMail and iVoiceMail are Mail plugins that take the legwork out of recording video and audio clips for easy emailing. They install as preference panes within Mail, and once you customize a message's toolbar to add a button for either plugin (there doesn't seem to be any other way to use them when composing a message), you're ready to start emailing your beautiful mug and American Idol-worthy voice to anyone who can handle it. Just don't blame us if your friends and colleagues begin removing you from their address books.

I only briefly tried out the iVideoMail demo and it works pretty well, although the resulting 6-second 320 x 240 video in MPEG4 was 376 KB, which might be considered a little large by some. By why not judge for yourself? Demos are available via a rather annoying submit-your-email-for-a-customized-download-link process, and a license for either plugin is a mere $10 USD.

[via Hawk Wings' plugin list]

Tags: addon, audio, email, ivideomail, ivoicemail, mail, pane, plugin, preference, video, voice

Tip of the Day

Use Spotlight as a reference tool. Type any word in the Spotlight box and one of the top entries will be a definition. Click on it, and it will bring up the dictionary application to check the word in either the dictionary, thesaurus, Apple database, or Wikipedia.

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