Leopard LaunchServices Database – How do I rebuild it?

The LaunchServices database, among other things, associates file types with the apps used to open them. If you right-click on a file and choose “open witih”, this database determines what options show up. Yay! Unfortunately sometimes it gets hosed.. under Tiger i used to get a lot of duplicate entries or whatever.

My problem now is due to Parallels and its SmartSelect feature. it allows you to have OS X show you options for Windows or OS X apps to open files with – something I really didn’t want. I do not WANT visual studio even KNOWN about by the leopard LaunchServices database, for example. Or IE 7. Or notepad. Or whatever. Unfortunately for Parallels (and me), disabling this did not rebuild my launchservices db. But eventually I got to the point of clean up where the following terminal command to rebuild the launchservices db did the trick (note: this needs to be all one online with no returns):

Update: Joe points out in the comments he found my path to the command didn’t work. I checked on the Apple site and also in my own terminal window, and here’s the command with the path I see to lsregister (for Leopard, different for Tiger):

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A
/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support
/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Again, all on one line with no spaces except where obvious in the command above.

I’m really only putting this here so I can easily find it again, but I hope it benefits a lot of you. Hehe.

PS. The Tiger way of doing this is detailed here.

And btw, I’ve now switched to VMWare Fusion.

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Lost in Space(s)

I’ve heard a couple people mention they wish you could have a different background set for each “space” in Apple’s spaces feature in OS X 10.5 so that you could tell what space you were in at all times. While this would be great, here’s another way to never be lost in space(s).

Open the Expose & Spaces preference pane in System Preferences and make sure the “Show Spaces in Menu Bar” option is enabled.

Now look at the menu bar – you’ll see a little divided square icon with a number in it. The number is the number of the space you are currently in, and it changes as you switch spaces.

In addition, you can switch spaces directly though the drop down menu when you click this icon, and also launch the expose and spaces preference pane from here.

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Stack that Leopard

Stacks were a highly touted feature of Leopard, and they are somewhat useful. Here’s a couple things that make them 1) look nicer, and 2) more useful.

1. Look Nicer

If you don’t like the look of the stacks in Leopard, the easiest way to change the icons is to get a little utility called Palette, which will let you customize them as well as configure your dock settings to make it look however you want. Here’s how it works:

Fire up Palette. The main screen looks like this below, it comes up on the Dock settings pane.

Click on the stacks pane button to see the options for stacks. Predictably, you can change the documents and downloads stacks icons.

To change the Documents stack icon, for example, click “Documents”, and find an image to drag into the window.

Now click the “set image” button.

And your changes have been applied as seen below.

Note: After I posted this, I figured out how Palette is doing this: It simply places the icon image of choice IN the folder the stack is pointing to (downloads or documents) with the same name as the folder. That means you can probably do the same thing without this app and get the same results. However, for being able to do this easily, AND the dock tweaks and menubar tweaks, all from one app, it’s probably worth the $10.

2. More Useful

You might notice the palette app icon to the right of the download stack icon, and to the left of the trash can. This is not the running apps icon… this is a “recent items” stack that can show me recently used apps, recent documents, recent servers, favorite volumes, and favorite items. It’s slick… check it out! You can add it with a simple terminal command. Below, I’m clicking on it in the “recent apps” mode to show me a quick list of apps I’ve used recently for quick and easy re-launching.

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Let me, or Don’t

A lot has been written and spoken about the Leopard Firewall and the differences between it and the Tiger Firewall. For one thing, the new firewall appears to ignore the long used freebsd based ipfw firewall and instead someone at apple decided they should roll their own. Please note that ipfw is still included in Leopard, it just isn’t used by default, and the system preference panes relating to the firewall are for the new one, not ipfw.

The main differences the computer user will notice are that the firewall’s been moved from the sharing preference pane as it is in Tiger, to the security preference pane in Leopard, and that the firewall uses a different model for configuring what gets through and what doesn’t. This is all dandy, and you may wonder why I’m bringing it up now. Well, it’s because the 10.5.1 update patch slightly changed the verbiage in the firewall preference pane, which I thought I’d point out.

Also be aware that when upgrading from Tiger to Leopard, regardless of what firewall settings you had by default, the firewall appears to be disabled in Leopard by default.

In Tiger, the Firewall was located in the sharing preference pane, and worked by allowing you to select services or ports to open or close, based on the services you wanted to run on your mac.

In addition, the services section of the sharing preference pane would also have an effect on the firewall, such as when enabling remote desktop, which would also then enable this service for the firewall.

In Leopard, click on the security preference pane instead of the sharing pane to get to the firewall.

Clicking on the firewall section of the security pref pane shows that the new firewall is configured differently: Allow all incoming connections, Allow only essential services (in 10.5.0, this was “Block all incoming connections,” which was misleading), and Set access for specific services and applications.

Choosing the last option means that you’ll set, app by app, allow or block status for things you specifically want to let through or to block.

Finally, the firewall also allows logging and stealth mode (where the firewall won’t let the mac respond to pings, etc).

The main problems with the new Leopard firewall are well detailed but the main ones were the fact it was disabled by default, the fact that even with it set to use only essential services, some things are not blocked which you won’t really be able to change, and then the fact that the firewall would code sign apps when you listed them even if they weren’t code signed previously. This breaks apps that change their signature as they run, which meant that some people found skype broken as a result of this.

I think the jury is still out on whether or not the firewall is a huge mistake or will be just fine once apple tweaks it a little. it’s just important for the person moving from Tiger to Leopard to know that it is different, and what those differences mean.

I personally prefer the services based approach of the Tiger firewall to the app based approach of the Leopard firewall, and it also appears that ipfw as implemented in Tiger had a lot fewer rough edges than the new firewall does.

More on Leopard Firewall:
Tidbits article
securosis.com article
Apple’s article on the 10.5.1 update

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Innie or Outie?

There have been a few articles panicking about Leopard’s firewall changes, but here’s a good one on TidBits that takes a thoughtful and detailed approach to analyzing the health of the Leopard firewall:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9294

I have to admit, I was a little disappointed by some of the changes to the firewall myself.

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Time Machine and You – What Hard Drives Can I Back Up?

One of the huge amazing features of Leopard that people won’t shut up about is Time Machine. And, ok, it is really cool, and hopefully it will get people backing up their systems who never have before.

On episode 98 of the Macworld Podcast, one of the guests/hosts made the comment that Time Machine would not back up their external hard drives along with the internal one.

It will, you just have to set some preferences. I found that on my system, Time Machine put all my external drives in a list of disks NOT to back up.

Here’s how to change that. Open system Preferences.

Click on the Time Machine Icon to get the Time Machine Preferences.

Click the Options button. You’ll see a list of drives NOT to back up. Highlight the drive(s) you DO want to back up, and click the minus sign at the bottom of the list. Woohoo!

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Search Your Menus (Leopard)

I heard a great tip on the Mac Geek Gab Podcast ep #125 about one of the new spotlight changes in Leopard.

The Help menu now includes a search bar at the top, and it looks like a little spotlight search bar.

Start typing something into this that matches an entry on the menu bar menus, and see what happens:

Highlight the result for the menu entry, and check it out… it points out WHERE in the menu bar menus this can be found.

Pretty cool.. a minor but interesting leopard feature that helps you find what you are looking for.

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