Tips & Tidbits

By Scott T Boyd, Editor

Tip/hack of the month

Startup Items: Nice Guys Finish Last

You can put any kind of programs, folders, or aliases in the Startup Items folder in your System folder, and they will open automatically when you startup your Mac. Some people put an alias of their most commonly used folder into their Startup Items, so it will open and become the frontmost window in Finder.

Startup items open in alphabetical order, and the last item opened will be the one that stays in the foreground once the startup is complete. Unfortunately, the last one opened may not be the one you want up front. Here’s how you can force a particular Startup Item to open last.

Make an alias of the item you want opened last, and rename it to Option-z, the Omega character ‘ ’. It sorts alphabetically after most other characters and seems very appropriate.

Drop the alias into the Startup Items folder; it will open last. If it’s has already been opened and switched into background, this last startup item will force it to the foreground.

My startup item is an alias of the hard drive itself, which opens the root directory of the drive and pulls the Finder into the foreground. That’s the way I like it, but if you’d rather just have the Finder in front without any particular folder or window open, here’s a hack that’ll do it:

1) Create an empty folder in the root directory of your startup drive, and name it “Desktop_Folder” (note the underscore in the name).

2) Create an alias to that folder, and rename it (omega is option-z).

3) Throw away the empty “Desktop_Folder” folder and empty the trash.

4) Launch ResEdit and select Open from the File menu. Check the box for “Use alias instead of original file” and open the alias.

5) Open the “alis” resource and find each instance of the string “Desktop_Folder”; it appears in 2 places. Change the underscore in each to a space, so it reads “Desktop Folder” instead.

6) Save your changes and quit from ResEdit.

7) Put the alias into your Startup Items folder and reboot.

When Finder opens the alias, Finder will come to the foreground and stay there; no folder will open because the Desktop folder is already displayed.

- Lee David Rimar, Absoft Corporation

Fat Gold

I found a neat way to build “fat” applications with CodeWarrior Gold:

1. Create a 68K project & resource file.

2. Build the 68K project & set the application name to something like “app.PPC.proj.rsrc” so it will appear as a resource file to the PPC project (the type & creator can still be what you’d have for an application).

3. When you build the PPC project, the 68K application will be included as the project resource file.

You’ll now have a “fat” application and you can also use the 68K-only “resource file” as the 68K version or for debugging if you're running on a non-PowerMac.

- Mike Cohen, ISIS International