Compacting Sparse Image Files

Murphy has been using SuperDuper for backups for a while now. Its flexibility and ease of use have helped it build up quite a following. Usually, Murphy sends his SuperDuper backups to a sparse image file. The sparse image file is a container that grows as you add more content. But what if content is removed from the sparse image file? That’s a good question.

The answer is that the sparse image file needs a little help to shrink. For example, let’s say you backed up your drive on Wednesday to a sparse image file. Then you deleted some big video files on Thursday and did another backup with SuperDuper on Friday. Your video files aren’t in the sparse image file anymore, but the backup is still taking up space on disk as if they were. The solution is simple. Use a simple command in the Terminal to reclaim the wasted space in your sparse image file. Just type everything in the line below, replacing the path and file name with the path and file name of your sparse image. Read more »

Creating icns Icon Files

In a previous screencast we used Photoshop to make an image suitable for a folder icon in Leopard. Now we’ll turn that Photoshop file into an icon and apply it to the Finder folder.

It’s probably more steps than you might have guessed, but it’s very straight-forward once you have all the tools in place. Murphy installed the Developer Tools from the Leopard install DVD which include a utility called Icon Composer. The first step is to drag the Photoshop file we created earlier into Icon Composer. The icon is created in various sizes appropriate for Leopard and we export to an icns file.

The catch is that the icns file doesn’t use its own icon content as its icon. That sounds confusing, but when you see the file you’ll know it’s not right. The background isn’t transparent. But that’s no problem. Just drop the icns file onto an application called IconDroplet. A new file will be created that uses the icns file’s content as the icon.

From there, the process may be familiar. Open the Get Info panel for the file created with IconDroplet. Select the tiny icon in the top left corner and hit Command-C on the keyboard to make a copy. Then open the Get Info Panel for a the folder or file that needs a new icon. Select its tiny icon and hit Command-V to paste it in. That’s it.

If you’re confused Murphy slapped a screencast together. For a general look at changing icons on files there’s an old post on the subject too. But keep in mind, using an icns file is the way to go for best results in different Finder views, like Cover Flow.

Make a Custom Leopard Folder

The folders in Leopard definitely have a certain look and feel. Just open your home folder in Cover Flow or Icon view and the style jumps out at you. We’re going to show you how to make a folder with the same look, based on your own image.

Murphy downloaded a template posted by guifa on the Mac Rumors forums. You can download the template when you’re ready to get started.

The template includes two layers that look like a Finder folder. The top folder layer is masked by the layer below it. When you add content to the mask that content is etched into the top folder layer. If you’re good with Photoshop you’ll probably do better than Murphy did. You can even add a subdued bit of color if that’s what you’re after.

Guifa knows his way around Photoshop. He used an unsharp mask because hard edges work best in the mask layer. He also applied some blur effects to kill artifacts in the image. If you’re not a Photoshop wizard you can still probably come up with something decent. Your image will end up small on your folders, so you won’t notice every imperfection you spot while editing in Photoshop.

In the tutorial Murphy shows how the mask layer and a folder layer are combined in Photoshop, clipping the contents of the folder layer. Then he takes a VMware Fusion logo and selects it. (Murphy wants a custom folder for storing his virtual machines) With that selection active he clicks on the mask layer and starts painting - black with the brush tool. The mask layer has shadow effects applied to it, as well as lowered opacity. The end result is a custom image that matches up well with the folders that ship in Leopard.

When your image is ready check out this post and apply it to a file or folder.

Note: This isn’t Murphy’s normal screencast layout. We’re trying something new. We suggest you right-click and download the Quicktime file rather than playing it in your web browser. The navigation doesn’t seem to work quite right in a browser.

iMovie 08

We’re getting ready to make our first iMovie 08 screencast - and we’ve hit a snag. Has anyone gotten the audio to fade in and fade out? There are a few unanswered threads on Apple Discussions and elsewhere so maybe some other users are having issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s a background audio track or a clip attached to a video segment, neither work. Even though 2 seconds is selected with manual fade, nothing happens. At least nothing Murphy can discern.

As for the rest of iMovie 08: It definitely has its good points. Things are missing from iMovieHD - we’ll get to those in a minute. First, the good points.

It’s nice to have all your events (source video) accessible in one tidy pane where you can combine them into one project. The old iMovie let you drag from one project to another, but many users may have found that cumbersome. Murphy doesn’t keep a lot of video on disk as it takes up a lot of space, so this feature may go somewhat underused. But that brings up another point: Archiving your raw materials.

You can easily delete an event from iMovie and leave the project in place. The project won’t be fully functional until you bring the source video (the event) back online. Murphy copied some source video to an external drive, deleted it from iMovie, then put the source back. The project recognized the source video as soon as it was back. Even if it was just copied back into Finder. That’s pretty nice. There’s no mention of this in the help file, so your might want create a backup before testing this out.

Editing seems far more intuitive in iMovie 08. There are some nuances but it seems far better than the awkward interface of iMovie’s past. Murphy made a whole screencast about using the in and out markers in iMovieHD because they seemed so unintuitive. It’s nice to have lots of thumbnails and an obvious dropzone to deposit your video into. There’s a preference to make all your transitions the same kind too, which may or may not have been in the previous version.

The big problem many users will have with iMovie 08 is effects. Slow motion, fast motion - not there. Many forum posters have mentioned work-arounds - like taking your project back and forth into the older iMovie. In fact, one poster has mentioned in numerous places on Apple Discussions that this iMovie is not an upgrade to the older iMovies. (scroll to ziatron’s posts) If that’s true they really shouldn’t have named it iMovie. Granted, it’s a whole new product. But I don’t think Apple’s plan was to distribute two versions of iMovie, as the poster suggests. iMovie 08 feels incomplete, if not a little rushed. Falling back on iMovieHD (’06) couldn’t have been the preferred solution.

Murphy has spent more than a reasonable amount of time trying to get audio to fade in or out. Please post your success story, if you have one. Taking the audio to Garage Band or the older iMovieHD doesn’t count!

Watch for a screencast about iMovie audio soon, maybe even tomorrow.

Schedule a Command without Cron

If you only have a few minutes to schedule a job you might not feel like digging into cron for your kickoff tool - especially if you’ve never used it before. In fact, Apple is kind of discouraging the use of cron in favor of launchd these days.

If you came from Windows you might be happy to see OS X has the AT command you might be oh-so-familiar with. Until you realize Apple doesn’t really want you using that either. That’s a shame, because AT is quick and dirty and supports some simple syntax, like now + 3 hours, to set a time for kickoff. In fact, you can specify teatime as a time, which really means 4pm.

If you’re sleepy and want to schedule a job and you don’t want to mess around, iCal might be the answer. You can use the alarm feature of an appointment to run an Applescript. Just set the time and pick your script like you see in the picture.

Your script can be pretty simple. Something like the screenshot below should work. Just replace the text following “do script” in the double quotes with whatever your terminal needs require.

The articles linked above mention the downsides of cron and AT - mostly dealing with sleeping machines and hard drives that can’t rest because AT is frequently checking to see if it has anything to do. That’s why OS X doesn’t enable AT by default. If your machine will be sleeping when you need the command to run you can wake it up with the Energy Save in System Preferences.

No screencast for this one. If you want to shed any light on how you schedule your routine jobs let us know in the comments. As always, be careful with the Terminal. You can break something very easily!