control of the system

[egypturnash]

People with Macs and Adobe CS2: annoyed at the fact that Adobe insists on putting that 'Adobe Help Center' thing in your Applications directory, and won't let you access the help from within Photoshop/Illustrator/etc if you move it?

Go to /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Launch/helpcenter/1.0 and get info on the 'Adobe Help Center' alias. Open up the ownership and permissions section, change its ownership to you (you have to be an admin user for this), then hit 'select new original' and navigate to wherever you moved the Help Center app to. (Like, say, a subdirectory of Applications with all your art tools.)

Now change the ownership of this alias back to 'system' and bingo, f1 summons help again. Don't even have to relaunch anything.

I think I miss type and creator codes.

Comments

[secretagentmoof]

I didn't like NextStep in the nineties, and don't like it now.
(I'm one of those fuddy-duddies who think Sys7 was the last 'real' MacOS.)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I don't have any sentimental attachment to Classic. I came in on 9.something and spent most of my time on it with a dual-cpu machine, which acted like a single-cpu machine unless I was using maybe two programs. Plus the broken multitasking - manual memory allocation, no flipping out of splash screens to let a big program load in the background? Once Illustrator ran under X, and I got a new scanner that had X drivers, I was glad to leave Classic behind.

I do miss a few things, like the way you could move files around and not have to go fix aliases afterwards.

[secretagentmoof]

Oh, the underlying OS was certainly more fragile, with the cooperative multitasking, lack of memory protection, non-autosizing, etc. I don't miss that at all; I miss the ease/cleanliness of the user interface, which (IMVHO) they severely skullfucked.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

The interface was cute and clean and certainly looked nicer than (insert any other operating system), but I suppose Apple wanted a candy-coated interface to match the glossy plastic casing.

I rather like having a nice BSD system available without sacrificing a good UI, though. I never had a Mac before OS X, so I'm grateful for what I have.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

How exactly do type and creator codes factor into this, though? I'm not sure I understand.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I wrote this while distracted; what I really miss here are the way file aliases used to work on the Mac. Actually, now that I poke at it a little, I think the alias Adobe creates to their help viewer deep in /Library isn't updating when I move the actual app because of permissions issues...

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Aha. But I had read somewhere that if the file isn't found, then it uses some internal file ID referenced in the alias to fetch the file; does it require that the alias is modifiable by you to even do that? Weird.

It would be lovely if aliases were implemented a little bit more like hard symbolic links and less like Windows shortcuts (even if they are at least better integrated) though. Some flag or metadata instead of information in the resource fork. Argh, my Linux is showing. And so is my poor writing skill.