Month: February 2006

Little Annoyances: Mail.app

David Rostenne 5 Comments

1) Next unread message.

I prefer to use a plain list view for a mailbox, and have to open a message to view it.

Remember Eudora? I used to use Eudora, and sometimes think I still should. It has this nice feature where you hit the spacebar, causing the current message to page down web-page style. When you reach the end hit that spacebar again and you jump to the next unread message in that mailbox. Nice, eh?

That does not work in Mail.

So, how about a key command to do that? Nope, not available either.

2) Invalid Email addresses.

What is so hard about telling me you can not send the email because I was too stupid to enter in a proper email address? Mail will happily harass you about opening too many windows at once.. so why not invalid email addresses?

Yeah, I caught myself BCC’ing several people, and some of them were not actual email addresses, just the domain name. Took me way too long to figure out too!

Can you Help? Emailing pictures with iPhoto is broken!

David Rostenne 1 Comment

I have iPhoto 5.0.4, latest version before iLife 2006. I’m still running 10.4.3 though.

The problem is simple: I choose a series of pictures, click the strangely-icon-less email button and select my options, and watch as the Mac does it’s thing. Once the progress bar is done… nothing happens.

Picture 3.png

When I go to the prefs I have a blank pop-up menu in which to choose an email program.

Picture 4.png

So far I have:

– repaired permissions
– moved the old iPhoto prefs out of the way
– cleared the ByHost cache

When I checked the result of ‘defaults read com.apple.iPhoto’ I got:

MailApp = Mail;

I checked on a friend’s machine and defaults gives the same results.

Which leads me to believe Mail.app is selected, so why does it not work?

Console has the following:

2006-02-08 18:46:24.773 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSTextField setAllowsMultipleSelection:]: selector not recognized [self = 0x72d2560]
2006-02-08 18:47:27.047 iPhoto[2189] *** -[NSURL initFileURLWithPath:]: nil string parameter

Suggestions welcome! … or a copy of iLife 2006. 😉

An Applescript for playing DVD’s off of your local drive

David Rostenne

Joshua, now 2 and a half, loves to watch his Thomas the Tank Engine movies. I want to keep him away from the original media.. so the contents of the DVD is now on my drive.

Being irritated at the number of clicks I had to go through to play it, I found a script that would make things simple.

Thanks to the folks on the forums at applescript.net who also wanted to do this!.

Anyhow, here’s the script:

set prefix to “ExternalHD:”
set suffix to “:VIDEO_TS:”
set choice to “”
tell application “Finder”
set movies to the name of every item of alias prefix
set choice to (choose from list movies with prompt “Pick a movie to watch”)
set themovie to ((prefix & choice & suffix) as alias)
end tell

tell application “DVD Player”
activate
open dvd video folder themovie
set viewer full screen to true
play dvd
end tell

To use it you will need to edit the “ExternalHD:” to match wherever your movies are.