My Mac Fixes

Because your Trash is not your Trash. In Apple Mail's sidebar, you likely see a mail folder called Trash in the section On My Mac. This is NOT the Trash used by Apple Mail. It's just a folder called Trash that contains whatever messages the app imported from the Trash in your previous setup. That's instead of moving them to the REAL Trash, where they belong.  Meanwhile, that REAL Trash, by default, is hidden from you -- along with the Junk folder. Yes, you read that right: Apple hides two folders that are essential to access. Dumb, right? And it's all the more irksome, because a simple Undo command no longer undeletes a message! To make the REAL Trash visible, hover your cursor over the "Favorites" label in the sidebar, then click on the plus sign that appears. You'll get a dialogue box with a pull-down menu. Select Trash and OK it. Then do the same for Junk. Your Trash folder, along with Junk, will now appear in the sidebar under Favorites, and your delet...

When I purchased Office 2011 in 2010, I assumed that a perpetual license was . . . well, perpetual. But apparently Microsoft has other ideas. It used to be that I could move Office 2011 freely among drives and Macs. After each move, all I had to do was supply the product key again. An online server would verify the key and activate Office in the new location, while deactivating copies in other locations. There were no limits on how many times it could be moved. So, basically, as long as you had the product key, the only thing you COULDN'T do was open copies of Office apps in two locations at once. Then Microsoft shut down the activation server. Users were now relegated to phoning Microsoft and going through a lengthy, tedious, exacting automated process to verify ownership and activate Office. It was nerve-wracking and nothing you wanted to do often, but you could still move Office or reinstall it when you needed to. Today, though, you can't even do that. Microsoft has decided ...

Adobe Bridge can be infuriatingly quirky if you've ever applied hierarchical keywords to your photos in either Bridge or Lightroom. What are hierarchical keywords? Those are the keywords organized in levels, like "Places > Washington State > Seattle" or "Events > Anniversaries > 50th." Besides being associated with each other, they can even be applied together automatically. Using hierarchical keywords is a safer practice in Lightroom, because the keywords and hierarchy for each file are kept primarily in a central database or "catalog" and can be instantly modified there for your entire photo collection. But Bridge has no such database -- nothing at all but a simple list of keywords to show in the Keyword panel. The keywords and hierarchy for each photo can only be written directly into the individual photo file or its associated XMP file. And if you modify your hierarchy in the Keyword panel, or discard it entirely, the original scheme ...

Because that's what you've chosen. When you start a keyword search or create a Smart Collection, you're given a default option to "Include All Non-Indexed Files." And right next to that appears the warning "(may be slow)." Folks, they're not kidding. When you leave this checked on a first search after starting Bridge -- or first view a Smart Collection created with this option -- the app goes through EVERY target file and folder and reindexes it, just in case any files were changed or added since the app was last open. This takes a LONG time. After that, Bridge relies on those cached indexes it just made, but it STILL scans all target folders to make sure no files have been added. This takes much less time, but it's still far from instant. Now, let's look at what happens if you uncheck this option. Boom, you're done. Bridge relies only on its cached indexes, and really, if you blink, you'll miss it. The downside, though, is that...

If you rely on old hardware or on old software you can't update, I suggest you leave Mojave alone. You're likely to run into a number of more or less serious incompatibilities without gaining much to compensate. In my own case, I had enough problems that I wound up downgrading from Mojave to High Sierra -- the first time I've ever had to revert to an earlier version of the operating system. Here are a few specific reasons you might want to stick to High Sierra. 1. Sketchy support for older Macs. With my 2010 Mac Pro 5,1, I had to temporarily disconnect all internal drives except the boot drive before I could install or reinstall Mojave. Otherwise, the installer would stop partway through with an error message. Also, Mojave required a firmware update that caused some sort of error with the saving of startup disk info. TinkerTool System identifies it as a problem with NVRAM, and though the Mac starts up on the correct disk, shutdown times can be unusually slow when swit...

Adobe's Creative Cloud app is like a virus, and a poorly programmed one at that. Though the app needs a number of background processes when it's running, they don't need to launch before then, and especially not when you start your Mac. But how do you stop them? And beyond that, how do you keep Adobe from restoring them? Most of these processes -- all of which you can identify in the Mac's Activity Monitor by the Adobe logo -- are launched at startup by files known as launchagents and launchdaemons. There are three main locations where Adobe installs these: Library/LaunchAgents/ Library/LaunchDaemons/ Users/[Your Username]/Library/LaunchAgents/ (If you don't know how to reach the hidden Library directory, pull down the Go menu in Finder while you're pressing the Option key.) The names of the files that launch Adobe processes all start with "com.adobe", and NONE of these files are essential. Most of the advice you'll find on this topic sim...