Developer Tidbits

While I was organizing my photos, I encountered many instances where the filenames of different photos were the same, so I couldn't place them in the same folder without renaming them. It was fine at first when there only a handful of duplicate filenames, but there had to be better way. There was another scenario where I wanted to insert the year before each video so that I could easily group them. In OSX, there is a built-in tool called Automator, which is found in Applications. Just open it and create an Application. When it opens, just search for rename and drag "Rename Finder Items" to the main window, which will ask you if you want a copy or not. In my case, I did not need a copy. You can change the parameters to something like below. Then save it to your Desktop for easy access. Inserts the year in front of the files. To use this, in Finder, select the files you wish to rename and drag them to the Automator icon that you just saved in your Desktop. I have two...

Many users must have encountered a permanent hang in Mac OSX System Preferences because searching "osx system preferences hang" on Google returns more than 300,000 results. OSX isn't so rock solid after all. This happened while I was changing the wallpaper and probably chose iPhoto. The bouncing ball then appeared. I left it like that for about 15 minutes and had to Force Quit. Rebooting the machine didn't help. This makes the entire System Preferences inaccessible so you cannot change any setting on your machine until you resolve the wallpaper issue. The following forum entry had a solution: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1194163 All you need to do is to delete a file in your preferences folder which will reset your desktop to the default. To do this, you will need to open terminal and type the following: rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist Then, reboot your Mac and you'll see the default wallpaper and System Preferences b...