Bill Gallop Consulting

Between September 2005 and July 2011 I was a regular contributor to MacFormat in the UK.

Whereas I’m posting the published articles for my MacWarehouse writing, with the MacFormat ones I’ve decided to post the text as submitted, including any comments that I included for design. I am, however, allowing myself a few small edits for clarity.

The particular one is my fourteenth column, written in October 2006. This is presented purely as a historical record as much, if not all, of the information contained in it may well have changed in the meantime.

Image Capture

There are a number of features in Mac OS X that are not well publicised but which can be very useful. This is one of the downsides of most software, operating systems included, coming with virtually no documentation or indeed only coming with virtual documentation in the form of PDFs or help files. Mac OS X Server comes with nearly 2,000 pages of documentation in PDF form but few people will bother to read all of them due to the pain of having to print them all out and then bind or staple them, is it a surprise then that many OS X Server users don’t know about all of the really great features that it has. Having electronic documentation means that you can post updated versions of the web as soon as they are available, and Apple are very good at doing this, but we ought to at least have the option of purchasing a printed copy which we can browse through and make notes in the margin of. The growth of on-demand publishing sites such as Lulu.com and Blurb.com show that it is possible and Apple once used a similar service for their developer documentation. Blurb.com even have their own OS X software that you can use to create books in a manner similar to iPhoto’s photo albums.

When I got my first Mac, a 1990 vintage Mac Plus, not only did I get a proper printed manual but there was a very cute on-screen tutorial called Mouse Basics that taught me how to use a mouse. These days all you tend to get is a fairly slim booklet telling you how to plug everything in and a few pages on the basic interface. If you want to know more you need to look in Mac Help. The problem is that if you don’t know that a feature exists how would you ever be prompted to look in Mac Help to find out more about it?

One such feature is camera and scanner sharing, which is tucked away inside the Image Capture application. This is the ability to attach a scanner or digital camera to one Mac on your network and access it from another. You can have one Mac with central resources attached and then make use of those resources on all of your Macs, thus helping to cut down on your costs a bit. Scanner sharing is more fully developed than camera sharing, it will work with most scanners that have TWAIN drivers whereas it is a bit hit-or-miss telling if a camera can be shared or not as Apple don’t publish a list of compatible cameras.

Open up Image Capture, choose Preferences… from the Image Capture menu and then select the Sharing tab. You should now be able to check the box next to Share my Devices and then check which devices you want to share. Now quit Image Capture or else you won’t be able to access your device from another Mac as the Mac you are sharing it from will report that it is in use.

You now have two choices about how you access the shared device from the remote Mac. Firstly you can launch Image Capture on the remote Mac, go to the Devices menu, choose Browse Devices… and then Remote Image Capture devices from when you should be able to see your scanner or camera. Secondly if you selected the Enable Web Sharing option when you set-up sharing you can access your device with Safari. You can either enter the URL that is shown under the Enable Web Sharing option or more simply you can tell Safari to look for devices on your local network, though this only works if you are on the same sub-net as the device you want to access. Open Safari, from the Bookmarks menu choose Show All Bookmarks, or click the Bookmarks icon, and then select Bonjour from the collections list on the left-hand side. If Bonjour isn’t shown you will need to enable it by going to Preferences, selecting Bookmarks and then putting a check mark against Collections: Include Bonjour. You should now see your shared device in the list of bookmarks so double-click it. Whichever way you access your shared device you can now use it from the remote Mac.

With a shared camera you can see thumbnails of the images on the camera, download some or all of them to the remote Mac or delete pictures from the camera. If your Camera supports it, and again there is no definitive list of which ones do or do not, you can even take pictures remotely.

Want to know more? Now that you know the feature is there open Image Capture and select Image Capture Help from the Help menu and then See all Image Capture topics. Don’t just do this for Image Capture, open any program that you regularly use and look through the help files to see if there are any other hidden gems that you are missing out on.

Between September 2005 and July 2011 I was a regular contributor to MacFormat in the UK.

The particular one is my thirteenth column, written in September 2006. This is presented purely as a historical record as much, if not all, of the information contained in it may well have changed in the meantime.

Meet the Parents

If you have more than one person that regularly uses your Mac you may well have set up separate accounts so that each person retains all of their preferences and items such as desktop pictures as well as having their own mail and iChat accounts. You may have also set your Mac up so that some of the users do not have rights to administer the computer, which would prevent them from installing any applications that use an installer and will also stop them saving files anywhere apart from their own home directory. If you have young children who use your Mac, Apple offer an even tighter set of controls over what they can do through the use of the Parental Controls tab, which can be found in the Accounts preference pane. The whole concept of parental controls in the Mac OS can be traced back to At Ease, which was an add-on for System 7 back in the early nineties.

Whilst it is not immediately obvious, Parental Controls are extremely valuable for controlling not only what websites our children can visit but also who they interact with on the internet. The Mail and iChat controls allow the administrator to specify who the user that the controls apply to can send and receive emails to & from, and who they can chat with. If an email is sent to a controlled user from someone who is not on the list they don’t receive it, and instead it gets forwarded to the Mac’s administrator for approval, so you can prevent a lot of spam reaching your children; though of course any email that spoofs the address of an approved user will still get through. If the controlled user tries to send an email to someone who is not on the approved list they are warned that they are not allowed to send mail to that person, but are then given the opportunity to ask permission from the administrator. With iChat if someone is not in the approve list you can’t chat with them at all; there is no option to request permission from the administrator you simply have to ask them. The Safari controls prohibit a controlled user from accessing any website that does not appear in Safari’s bookmarks; if the user tries to access a site that is not in their bookmarks Safari will tell them that they can’t access it, and will give the administrator a chance to enter their password and create a bookmark for the site.

That’s the theory at least.

What Safari’s controls actually do is allow access to any website within the same domain as a site that is the same domain as one that has a bookmark. In one way this is completely understandable as if Safari was completely literal about not allowing access to other sites then the administrator would have to bookmark every sub-page on the site. There is no way of limiting access to pages from the same server or those within the same path, e.g. you may be quite happy to give your 5yr old access to http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbeebies/ and if you authorised the site you would probably be quite surprised that they could now access the BBC’s subsite on sexual health in just three clicks. No parental controls are ever a substitute for a parent being there to ensure that their children only access sites that they want them to access.

Another managed item that is valuable when your Mac is used by the very young, or by others that are challenged by technology, is the Finder itself. You have an option to give the user some limits or to use the Simple Finder. With Simple Finder the Dock is reduced the Finder itself, three folders, My Applications, Documents, Shared and the Trash. The My Applications folder contains just the applications that the administrator has specified that the controlled user can run. These applications are presented alphabetically in a single window; if there are enough they will be spread out over multiple pages with forward and back arrows and numbered buttons for each page. Launching an application takes a single click, which is ideal if Junior has not yet mastered double clicking. The Documents folder again uses a single window and any items in there can again be opened with a single click.