Magic(er) Mouse
I just got rid of my Mighty Mouse and bought Apple’s new Magic
Mouse. I like it, but I didn’t realize that it only has two buttons. The
old Mighty Mouse had four buttons that I could configure to trigger
Dashboard and Exposé and Spaces.
Your question sums up our main disappointment with the Magic
Mouse. Although the new mouse features a multitouch surface, Apple
didn’t include any way to customize this surface for features that were
standard on the Mighty Mouse for years. This leaves you with barely
more than a normal two-button scrolling mouse.
Thankfully, some helpful shareware called MagicPrefs (donations
requested, vladalexa.com/apps/osx/magicprefs/) gives you the full
ability to customize your Magic Mouse in more than 25 ways. The utility,
which installs in your menubar and System Preferences, lets you define
what happens when you use different finger combinations to click, tap,
swipe, drag, and
pinch. You can
trigger Exposé,
Dashboard,
Spaces, launch
applications, run
AppleScripts,
whatever.
MagicPrefs even
lets you increase
the Magic Mouse’s
tracking speed,
which many users
find too slow.
MagicPrefs answers all of our wishes and prayers for
the Magic Mouse.
Case of the Missing Login Items
I’ve installed some programs that place useful icons in my menubar.
But after I restart the computer, a bunch of these icons disappear. I
even upgraded to Snow Leopard, and the same problems remain.
You’ve stumbled upon a long-standing bug that dates back to the
days of Mac OS 10. 5 and is still troublesome in Snow Leopard. It isn’t
a problem with your menubar icons per se, but rather a problem with
the login items mysteriously disappearing from System Preferences >
Accounts. Judging by the number of complaints about this issue on
Apple’s Discussion Forums, we assure you that you’re not alone in your
frustration. The bad
news is that there’s no
current solution to this
problem, though we
do have some useful
options for you. But to
start, we recommend
submitting your bug
report to Apple’s Mac
OS X feedback page
( www.apple.com/
feedback/macosx
.html). In the Keep an eye on System Preferences > Accounts for mysteriously vanishing login items.
Locking the loginwindow.plist file in
the Finder will prevent any changes,
unintended or not.
meantime, a few workarounds can help. Your login items are controlled by the loginwindow .plist file located in your ~/Library/ Preferences folder (that ~/ means it’s inside your home folder, by the way). So after you’ve set all of your login items the way you like ’em, make a backup copy of this file. The next time your login items misbehave and remove themselves, restore your backed-up file to its original location, log out of your Mac and log back in, and hopefully the login items will stay put. Another useful tactic is to lock the loginwindow.plist file in
the Finder. Click once on the file,
choose File > Get Info, and select
Locked. This will prevent your login
items from removing themselves, but it will also prevent new login
items from being added. So remember to unlock this file before making
any changes to your login items, and then lock it again afterward.
The Top Tiger
I’m running Tiger (Mac OS 10. 4. 11) on my six-year-old PowerPC
iMac. I want to upgrade my OS to as high as it can go and then
upgrade some applications as well. I got a series of OS upgrades
from apple.com/download, which I thought would take me from
10. 4. 11 up to 10. 4. 6. But unless I can get 10. 4. 2 installed, I have no
hope of moving further. When I attempt to install 10. 4. 2, I get
a message saying, “You can’t install Mac OS X Update on this
volume. This volume does not meet the requirements for this
upgrade.” Is the problem that I’m upgrading from 10. 4. 11 rather than
10. 4. 1? I don’t have 10. 4. 1 to go back to. Any wisdom, or am I stuck
in a sinkhole?
You’re going to love this
answer. Mac OS 10. 4. 11 is the
highest version of Tiger, so
your quest was accomplished
before you even started.
Blammo!
It seems the confusion is
about version numbers. 10. 4. 11
doesn’t come between 10. 4. 1
and 10. 4. 2; software version
numbers don’t work exactly
like decimals in actual math.
In math, 10. 4. 11 is between
10. 4. 1 and 10. 4. 2, but software
versions ignore the rules of
trailing decimal places and
just go sequentially. Check Tiger stopped at 10. 4. 11, so your only upgrade path from here is Leopard.
