Status-Q

Hard disks, and the filing systems that run on them, occasionally get confused. This can happen for all sorts of reasons: bugs, power cuts, software crashes, hardware glitches, to name a few. The advent of journalled filesystems make these hiccups much less of a problem than they used to be, but they still occur.

As with checking your car tyres, it’s a very good idea to be proactive about checking and fixing any small issues. Often your computer will continue to run just fine, so you won’t know there’s anything amiss, and, indeed, they may never cause a problem, but it’s much better to fix them before they do… otherwise that one broken link might just cause you to lose something important in the future.

That’s why I have an entry in my to-do system for each Mac that we have in the house, reminding me to run a check-and-repair on its main hard disk. These entries reappear automatically 6 months after I check them off. (If your to-do system can’t do that, you might want to think about getting Omnifocus.)

Anyway, on the Mac, you don’t need any special software to keep things ticking over nicely: you can use the standard Disk Utility program to run these checks, which lives in the Utilities folder within Applications. It’ve very easy: just fire it up, and on the left you’ll see your disks, and the partitions on each disk. Select one, and you can check (verify) or repair the disk layout itself, and the permissions of key files within the partition.

I never actually bother with the ‘Verify’ buttons: I just hit ‘Repair’, since that will also do a check, and it won’t change anything if the disk or partition doesn’t need repairing. I start with Repair Disk, and then follow it with Repair Disk Permissions.

However, there’s a trick to this…

The system normally can’t do much in the way of repairs on the filesystem from which you’re actually running. So you’ll probably find that the ‘Repair Disk’ button is greyed out, as in the image above, and you’ll need to boot your Mac from another disk or partition in order to run them. Ah.

Fortunately, however, on recent versions of Mac OS X, this is trivial to do, because you also have a hidden ‘Recovery Partition’ on the disk, from which you can boot in order to recover from serious problems, reinstall the operating system, restore from backups, etc. And Disk Utility is available there. What’s more, it’s a good idea to run it from the Recovery Partition anyway, because you’ll have nothing running in the background and trying to do backups, sync with Dropbox, or whatever, while you’re doing the check.

So, reboot your Mac. Normally, if you hold down the Option/Alt key while it starts up, you’ll see a list of places from which you can boot. On Yosemite, however, this probably won’t show you the Recovery Partition, so you need to know a new keystroke: Cmd-R. Hold that while booting, and you’ll get a menu from which you can run Disk Utility. Run your checks, which normally only take a few minutes, then quit the utility and the parent menu, and you can reboot back into your normal, happy, healthy world.

One last wrinkle. If you use FileVault to encrypt your disk, which I’d recommend at least on a laptop, then you’ll need to give your FileVault password before Disk Utility can open the partition and run any checks on it. Just select the partition and click the Unlock button in the toolbar, type in your password and you’ll be ready to go.

Regular, scheduled, proactive checks will help keep your Mac happy and healthy!

For the last few months I’ve switched over to using MailMate as my main email app on the Mac. Alternative mail programs are not very numerous, partly because, overall, Apple’s default one does a remarkably good job. I’ve always rather liked it.

MailMate has a few quirks, and is still in development. (Hint: Turn on ‘Experimental features’, and under Software Update hold down Alt while pressing the ‘Check Now’ to get the very latest version. This sounds dodgy, but I’ve had no reliability problems.)

Overall, I love it. Here are some of my favourite features:

• I like the ‘correspondence mode’ – when you’re looking a message, this extra window shows you all your correspondence with that person.

• I like being able to write my emails in Markdown.

• It copes well with my 11GB of mail.

• There are helpful prompts which warn you if you might intend to do something slightly different. For example, you’ve used words that suggest you’re attaching something, but don’t actually have any attachments. Or if you’ve hit reply on a message that originally had multiple recipients: it lists the other people and asks if you really wanted ‘Reply All’?

• The search facilities are awesome. If you need to find the messages that you sent to Fred, or that he sent to you, before the start of the year, that don’t contain the word ‘invoice’, it’s easy to do.

• You can save these complex queries as Smart Mailboxes. In fact, every list of messages you see is basically a database query, and you can treat them as pretty much alike.

• You can rearrange the order of the mailboxes in the list on the left. So if your smart mailboxes are more important than your folder layout on the server, you can put them at the top.

These last two have combined to make the single best feature for me. In the past, I used to mark as ‘unread’ any messages which still needed my attention. The problem was that it was too easy, when skimming through messages on one of my devices, unwittingly to mark things as ‘read’ and never get around to acting on them when I got back home. And shuffling things into different folders was too much hassle while walking the dog; I just wanted a single inbox and a way of noting what was important.

MailMate’s smart mailbox came to the rescue. I now flag messages that need further action, instead of leaving them as unread. My number one mailbox collects the unread and flagged messages from all my inboxes into one place, and doesn’t show anything else.

This is brilliant, because I know that anything I flag, from any program on any device, will appear there, along with any messages I haven’t yet seen. In other words, these are the only things that require my attention. It’s usually a nice short list, and it’s where I spend almost all my time.

MailMate costs $50, which is a hard sell when the Mac comes with a very good email program, and there are free alternatives like Thunderbird. There are a couple of minor features that I miss from Apple Mail, like its handling of images. And it took me a couple of weeks to feel really at home with MailMate.

But there’s a 30-day free trial, and I paid for it long before my time was up. Recommended.

Something I’ve just discovered…

If you plug a MacBook Pro running Mavericks into an external display, it will try to select a screen resolution, or offer you a list based on what the display says it can manage.

But, particularly if you’re connected by VGA or through some kind of extender, the resolutions offered may be very limited. This is what I got from a reasonably modern TV connected by VGA to my Thunderbolt-to-VGA adapter in a university meeting room:

Even when the resolution is high enough, these are all 4:3 aspect ratios and don’t make good use of anything wide-screen.

However, if you hold down option/alt and click on the ‘Scaled’ button (even if it’s already selected), you get a whole lot more options:

There’s no guarantee that the screen/projector will be able to cope with any particular resolution selected here, but there’s a pretty good chance, for example, that a modern TV will at least do 1280×768, and that certainly worked for me.

Hope it’s useful!

In late October, Apple released new versions of its iWork office suite – Pages, Keynote and Numbers – which had all been rewritten from scratch. Upgrading was easy, the new versions were free, and so lots of people hit the download button, myself included. The apps are pretty, with a nice simplified layout, and are designed to match the iOS versions very closely – with full document compatibility.

Now, I’ve been a big fan of iWork for a while. It’s been years since I used Microsoft Word voluntarily, because for most documents I prefer Pages. Keynote leaves Powerpoint way behind – haven’t used that for years either. Excel, though, is still definitely superior to Numbers, if you’re a power-user, but for simple stuff I prefer Numbers too.

However, with these new versions, there were issues, basically because many features had not yet been rewritten, and hence were just left out. Uproar ensued. The first thing I missed was the ability to customise the ‘presenter display’ on Keynote. Rose has just found out how inferior the ‘Export to Word’ functionality is in the new Pages. And a quick glance at the ratings on the Mac app store will give you a whole list of other things that have caused distress to others.

Fortunately, none of this is fatal. If you have iWork’09, the upgrade process doesn’t remove it, and the two versions will coexist quite happily. I fairly soon just put the old versions back in my Dock, and carried on. If you have created any documents in the new packages, you can export them back to the older formats. I guess it may become more tricky over time to buy iWork’09, but it’s not hard to find it on Amazon at present. And finally, Apple have admitted that these new apps weren’t quite fully-formed at birth, and have produced a list of all the bits they’re going to fix in the next few months. Remember, these new apps are not at all bad, and they are free. Many new Mac owners won’t need anything else. It’s just that the old versions were already cheap, and much better. As Joni said, don’t it always seem to be that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone…

This has been quite a publicity disaster. So much of the good will that might have been associated with a high-quality and completely-free office suite has been squandered because Apple didn’t admit beforehand that this was a cut-down version to get started. And you’d have thought they would have learned their lesson by now, because the last thing they did this to was the video-editing package Final Cut Pro – another complete rewrite – which was one of the biggest launch disasters for some time, losing huge numbers of loyal users in the film industry to Adobe’s competing package, Premiere.

But Final Cut is also the thing that gives me hope for the future of iWork. Because over the next couple of years, Apple quietly pushed out update after update – 10 in all – to the point where Final Cut Pro X is now a very fine piece of software, which I’ve enjoyed using extensively in recent weeks.

Rewriting or replacing a major software package is an enormous task, and many companies just don’t have the guts to attempt it. I suspect that, in future, we’ll see that what Apple can do with both FCPX and iWork — because their underlying chassis has been modernised — will give them big competitive advantages. But they need to learn, when they introduce such radical changes, to make it clear that this is not the same as the previous version and to show a development roadmap so users can feel confident about hanging on, rather than jumping ship.

Sadly, it’s not in Apple’s nature to admit, in advance at least, that anything is not perfect. But it’s better to do that than to be forced to admit it in retrospect. The first implies confidence, planning, and honesty. The second implies that you were either dishonest, unprepared or foolish. I wonder if the marketing guys can understand the distinction.