Well it took until now to successfully get a three way video chat going, between my friend Totte in Sweden and my mother. Of course my mom didn’t like popping into a 3 way chat at 6:30am with a stranger. ROFL. Interesting UI implications.

Update: After reinstalling Tiger (due to disk issues) I can no longer iChat AV with someone I did the day earlier. Sigh, Apple.

I had noticed that most of my Home calendar, including birthdays and anniversaries, was empty on both machines I .Mac sync. No idea why, but the data was gone.

So I decided from now on I’d put birthdays into address book and use a birthday tool to create a calendar from it. I could not find my Calendar file so I used spotlight to search for “home” and wow, it found all of my home events! Double clicking each one opened it in iCal to show it had expired 2 years ago, etc, so I reset the alarms and the ending date (to never) and synced up with .Mac.

Whew! Still need to find where those calendars are kept, as I like the idea of generating the calendar from Address Book vs. trusting iCal, but Spotlight came through for once!

If you are used to editing plist files, such as application preferences, you’ll find some are now compressed for better performance.

You can decompress them using the utility ‘plutil’ from the terminal.

• Open Terminal
• type: ‘plutil convert xml1 ‘(Note: without the quotes and following space is important!)
• Drag the plist file from the finder into the terminal window, which will put the path to the file in for you
• Press return to convert the file

When done you can recompress the file using binary1 in place of xml1 in the example above.

Under Panther, and it seems in Tiger as well, when I have a webdav server mounted sometimes the system locks up. Applications will lock while trying to open the Open File dialog, the Finder locks, etc.

The solution is to keep Activity Monitor on your dock. If this happens to you, launch Activity monitor and open the activity window (cmd-1). Then search for webdav and find the mount_webdav process. Then select the process and use the quit button to quit it. This will unmount your server and free up the blocked applications.

You will need to visit Panic to pick up a Tiger compatible version of Transmit, which even includes a Dashboard widget.

LaunchServices keeps track of which applications have been opened and which applications should open which documents. I’ve found that this database, which is sprawled in several locations on your drive, can become bloated or even corrupted.

Fortunately, Cocktail makes this easy to reset to the default state, which I suggest you do if you are seeing the same application in your Get Info “Open With” dialog or can’t change the application to open a file with.

Just launch Cocktail, click System, then Misc and rebuild the Launch Services database.

If you have a hard disk that you use for backing up, say with Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper!, I suggest you add that volume to the Spotlight Privacy list, as not only will you duplicate your index size, but the system will try to index the volume as it’s being indexed by Spotlight.

This means that you won’t be able to search the volume, but should you need to, you can enable spotlight and let it index then.

Move To Applications Workflow is a workflow that will move the selected files into your Applications folder. Useful for applications on the desktop or in a disk image you want to install quickly.

Simply:

• Expand the archive
• Double-click the Move to Applications workflow file to open in Automator
• Choose “Save as Plugin” from the File menu
• Name it what you want and save for “Finder”

You can now control-click (right click) on a file and go to Automator menu item in the contextual menu, and choose Move to Applications.

Or modify the original and make other useful workflows!

Sadly Tiger’s Mail has removed any indication of mail activity from the browser window. So now you either need to show the Activity Window (cmd-0) or undisclose the InBox so you can see each and every account mailbox, which will have little spinning indicators next to them while checking mail.

Bleh

Tiger comes to the rescue! In Tiger, iSync is broken into two somewhat confusing pieces.

1. .Mac Sync - This is found in your .Mac System Preference pane and is used for synching to .Mac between Mac’s only
2. iSync - In /Applications you’ll still find iSync, used to sync your Mac to your devices, such as your iPod and P900 phone.

When you add your phone, iSync will download some code to the phone to handle the sync. This is much, much, much more reliable than the old method of using the Sony code. Thank you Apple, finally!

Note that the iSync menu no longer opens the iSync application, but rather the preference pane. I think Apple needs a third pass at this to integrate it again, but for now, sync your phone with the iSync application.

It really, really, really is fast.