rgbdream.com

I never see it coming, but it happens all the time: I go to minimize a Safari window down to the Dock, but the yellow button is grayed out. Hitting Apple-M doesn’t work, and “Minimize” isn’t available in the Window menu.

Srsly, wtf?

Well, it turns out to be a weird bug in Leopard’s window manager. If you’ve run into this yourself, let me guess: you have Spaces turned on, and you have something like VMware or Quicktime Player in full-screen mode in one of your spaces.

I can’t explain it any further than this. If you put an application in full-screen mode on one of your spaces, then use the arrow keys to switch to another space and back, the active application in the space you switch to will lose its minimize buttons. It happens in more than just Safari, but almost any application in the space you switch to.

The solution? Open yet another full-screen app, like Quicktime player, in the affected space. Simply switch to fullscreen mode, and then exit. The minimize buttons in the affected app will be restored.

Yesterday, it seemed as if Mail.app wouldn’t allow me to attach a file to a message all of a sudden. I created a new message to send a small file to our senior chemist, but the file just snapped back to the desktop. I quit and re-launched Mail, opened a new message, and got the same results. Logging out and back in, restarting, trying different files… all with the same results. I was baffled, and I was preparing for drastic measures like rebuilding my mail accounts or re-installing Mail.

It turns out, there’s a small bug in Mail.app that prevents attaching a file to an empty mail message if you have “Always Insert Attachments at End of Message” selected. If you drag the attachment, the icon will snap back, and if you use the menus or toolbar button to attach the file, it will appear as if nothing happened.

You might also see this in the log in Console.app:

*** Canceling drag because exception 'DOMException' (reason '*** NOT_FOUND_ERR: DOMException 8') was raised during a dragging session

As a workaround, just be sure you enter some text in the message body before attaching the file. Alternatively, you can uncheck Edit > Attachments > “Always insert attachments at end of message.”

In the end, my own faulty troubleshooting method was affecting my results. The reason it kept happening to me all the time, all of a sudden? I was so focused on testing the attachments, I never typed anything into any of the messages first. When I finally typed “ARGH” in frustration before attaching the file, I had the eureka moment.

“It’s the ants!” — Dr. Robert Campbell

If you’ve updated to Quicktime 7.5 and your Windows Media videos are coming up black, go back to the Flip4Mac preference pane and check “Open local files immediately” under the “Player” tab. There appears to be an interaction between Flip4Mac and the latest version of Quicktime that breaks video playback during the background conversion. Having the video converted completely ahead of time takes care of it.

Hopefully this will be fixed in updates from one or the other!

Administrators, you already know the reasons you might need to change the product key on an Office installation, so I won’t need to explain or justify them here. Unfortunately, questions about this procedure are met with a terse response from Microsoft, blog posts about the procedure are way out of date, and the responses you’ll find in forum threads manage to be unhelpful, despite their unspoken self-righteous condemnation of your presumed piracy.

Making matters worse, the procedure offered by Microsoft is a pack of lies that will guide you to total removal of Office on your system; at least, Microsoft removed in 2008 the function they describe for Office 2004. And on top of that, reinstalling Office after following this or any other procedure still won’t clear the registration information.

To change the serial number, product key, CD key, license key, or whatever you want to call the string of characters required to activate a Microsoft product on an existing installation of Office 2008 for Mac, follow these simple steps:

1. Quit all open Office applications to prevent them from clobbering your work
2. Delete the file /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Office/OfficePID.plist
3. Delete the file ~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist
4. Launch one of the Office applications to go through the Setup Assistant and enter the new license key

Notes:

• Removal of both these files is important, as they appear to back each other up and will “repair” each other when you launch Office.
• There’s no need to disconnect the network, as suggested in Microsoft’s note.
• You can modify OfficePID.plist directly to change the registered name, but the serial number is not stored here, so …good idea, but no dice. Only the Setup Assistant can deal with a new license key.
• You may want to delete the “Microsoft Office 2008 Settings.plist” file from the home directory of every user on the system, to prevent one of them logging in and repairing the OfficePID.plist file with stale information. This happened to me once, logging in with my username and then switching to another user, but I couldn’t make it happen again, so I can’t tell exactly what happened.

I’m fairly annoyed that the “Remove Office” tool described in Microsoft’s technote doesn’t behave as described. Holding down the Option key never actually reveals any “Remove License Information Only” button in the tool that comes with 2008. Another fine oversight.

Hopefully this will be the worst snag in your deployment of Office 2008. Unfortunately, however, I have a feeling I have a few more things along these lines yet to post. Good luck.