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Changing the default PDF viewer

April 24, 2008

 

Last week a friend sent me a PDF that had some rich content embedded in it; a small  video that Mac Preview would not let me see. I really like Preview but figured I might as well grab the free Acrobat Reader so that I could view the more advanced PDFs people were creating.

 
 Adobe Acrobat Reader is a pretty big install but after doing so I was able to see the PDF file - and its embedded video - just fine. There was a catch though; Acrobat is slower than Preview and now it was my default PDF viewer.
 
 
For the life of me I could not figure out how to make Preview my default viewer again. I right clicked on a PDF file and from the pop-up menu selected Open With - the sub menu that appeared allowed me to open it in Preview but not set that as the default.
 

 
At this point I did what I always do - Google up the problem and look for a solution. One of the first solutions I found was to use RCDefaultApp - a preferences pane add-in that allows you to see and set the default applications for file types, MIME types, etc. It worked great but I kept thinking that it was silly that I would need an add-on in order to do this. I am going to keep RCDefaultApp around though - it’s pretty handy.
 
Finally, the way to do it in OS X
 
I finally managed to find it with a little more Google work. Right click on a file, select Get Info and, at the bottom of the Get Info window was an "Open With" area. From there I could see and set the default viewer and also click the Change All button to change it for everything.
 
Not long after I put this up Jerome put in a comment that you can hold down the Option key while right clicking and the menu selection changes to Always Open With - no need to even go into the Get Info window. Thanks Jerome!
 
Now I can see my PDFs quickly in the native Preview application and use Acrobat Reader when I need the extra features it affords

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Desktop Theatre, Sc. 4: Don’t Be Cruel

April 23, 2008

Written by Bradley W. Lewis · Filed Under Desktop Theatre 

Where did all my disk space go?

April 23, 2008

 


I recently bumped up the disk storage on my MacBook. The 120GB stock drive could not handle all of the things I wanted to do on the machine. Between my photo collection, videos for editing and all the software I’ve been trying out, I needed more space. So I got as much disk as would fit (at the time) into my MacBook: a 320GB drive from Western Digital. Formatted it dropped down to just under 300GB but that was plenty of space for what I needed.

I became very cavalier about my disk usage since I had so much and just 6 weeks into my Mac experience I was burning up over 240GB of disk space! Okay, a lot of that was video but there’s a lot of other things in there too.
 
Paul, a commenter on one of my blog posts recommended that I try out Disk Inventory X, a tool for determining where all the space went. Disk Inventory X builds a graphical tree of where your disk space is being used and gives you some basic management capabilities while in there - which is deleting files for the most part.
 
It takes a little while to load - at least against the 240GB of files I had - because it rips through your entire hard drive looking for every file. Took about 2 minutes to display the main window, though it’s plenty quick after that. There’s a MacBreak Minute video the author hosts that walks you through the application - it’s a link on his home page.
 
If you are low of disk space or are just wondering where all that free space went, check it out.

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Gmail Notifier for Mac

April 22, 2008

Since I made the switch to Gmail as my primary e-mail tool I had settled into what I figured was a good model. I would leave Safari running Gmail up in a window and then have Mail running in another "Space", polling my e-mail through the IMAP interface.

 
I liked this because Mail then kept all of my mail synchronized locally. If I unplugged for a bit and needed to grab a message, most of my mail was current and I could get to it. I still use Safari and the Gmail interface to create and generally read my messages though.
 
 
The problem is Google’s implementation of IMAP apparently leaves much to be desired. What I found in Mail was that if I sent it from Mail a new label was created in Gmail called Sent Messages. I didn’t really like that. In addition the Junk Email filter in Mail was getting false-positives on some of my e-mail, and a new label called Junk Email was created in my Gmail account; Mail would move what it considered junk into that label.
 
So, in the end it has become a little painful. Not too bad mind you, but enough to make me look around. What I really wanted was near instant notification of a new message arriving in my Gmail account.
 
I had already been using Gmail Notifier on my Windows XP machine and found it quite handy. Sure enough Google had a Mac version when I checked so I figured I’d give it a spin.
 
I’ve now put Mail on the back burner and am using this to keep track of not only my e-mails but also my upcoming calendar events. It’s pretty cool.
 

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Windows vs Mac - can’t we all just get along?

April 21, 2008

 In the spring of 1992 I lived in Los Angeles, Ca. Not long after the riots commenced Rodney King, the man beaten by LAPD officers and the incident that proved the flash point for the riots, made the now famous plea "Can’t we all just get along?" Read more

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Windows vs Mac - can’t we all just get along?

April 21, 2008

 In the spring of 1992 I lived in Los Angeles, Ca. Not long after the riots commenced Rodney King, the man beaten by LAPD officers and the incident that proved the flash point for the riots, made the now famous plea "Can’t we all just get along?" Read more

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

Desktop Theatre, Sc. 3: Feast

April 21, 2008

 

Desktop Theatre, Sc. 3: Feast

Written by Bradley W. Lewis · Filed Under Desktop Theatre 

The Nikon D300 Camera at Work

April 21, 2008

My job as a Still Photographer in the motion picture industry requires me to get the best possible images for publicity purposes. This requires me to constantly update my equipment when new and better technology is developed.

Such is the case with the Nikon D300 camera which hit the market in Dec 2007 and is now available without the waiting list that it had for several months. I had been using the Nikon D2x and the Nikon D200 cameras for several years, and a Nikon D100 and D1x prior to that. Read more

Written by Van Redin · Filed Under Digital Lifestyles, Editor's Choice, Featured Stories, Photography, Workflow 

The Tao of I. T. Al # 12

April 20, 2008

 

 

 

Written by Aikido Al · Filed Under The Tao of I. T. Al 

Now I want to buy my wife a Mac

April 18, 2008

 I am married to a wonderful woman - for the last 21 years I’ve been blessed with a fantastic life partner. She’s a brilliant lady with several graduate degrees to her credit, an accomplished attorney and teacher, someone that has succeeded in virtually everything she has set out to do. She even pulled all this off while we raised three incredible children.  Read more

Written by David Alison · Filed Under Parallel Desktops 

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