Every Macintosh application is at least partially composed of resources. Resources are text, graphics, sounds, menus, dialogs, and other kinds of data used by applications, stored in a special database that's attached to the application's file. The application's program code loads these resources as they're needed to display its user interface. The primary benefit of resources to developers is that they can be changed (to adapt the program to a different language, or just to fix a spelling error) without having to re-compile the whole program. But thanks to ResEdit, a free utility from Apple, it's possible for savvy end-users to change to the way an application looks (and in some cases even the way it works) by tweaking its resources, all without making any changes to the program's actual code.
Over nearly a decade of using Macs, I've made a number of changes to the Finder's resources to streamline the way I work. Wtih the release of Mac OS 8.1, I decided to package them up and make it easy for you to change your Finder too. You'll like the way it works. (If you don't like some of the specific changes I've made, I’ve also included a document entitled “Patch as Patch Can” explaining how to use ResEdit to make similar changes of your own.) A version of the patch is provided for Mac OS 8.0, 8.1, and 8.5.
What's in the Patch?
__________________
The patch changes a number of functional and cosmetic aspects of the Finder. Here's a complete rundown:
Increased Memory Allocation If you're a Macintosh power user, you probably run a ton of extensions. Some of these extensions prefer a little more room in an application's memory partition than is normally provided. Usually it's just a kilobyte here and a kilobyte there, but this extra memory does add up. In the past I have found that I could increase the Finder's stability by giving it a little extra breathing room. It doesn't seem quite so necessary with the new Finder, but this is definitely a case of "can't hurt, might help," and so I increased the Finder's default memory partition by about 100K. As an added benefit, this may also allow you to open more windows before the Finder complains that you're out of memory, although I rarely hit that limit.
New Alias Suffix Virtually the first thing I do after creating an alias using the Finder's Make Alias command is delete the word "alias" from the end of it. Actually, I don't use Make Alias that often anymore, because the Finder lets you drag an icon while holding down Command and Option to make an alias directly in a target folder, and that alias has the same name as the original file. But for those rare occasions when I do need an alias in the same folder as the original, I like the name to end with the special character ». This character gets across the idea of an alias being a "pointer" to another file without spelling out the whole word.
New Folder Name The special character Δí has long been used as a shortcut for the word "folder" on the Macintosh. Many of the folders I create end up with that character (which is produced by pressing Option-F) at the end of the name. So I changed the name the Finder gives to new folders to a space, followed by Δí. That way, you can just hit the Left Arrow key and type the new name, without having to add the Δí. Of course, if you don't like the Δí, you can still just type the new name immediately after creating the folder to replace the default name entirely.
No Copy Suffix Normally, when you make a copy of an icon using the Duplicate command, the new item is given the name of the original item with the word "copy" appended. Further copies of the same item add sequential numbers. With this patch, the word "copy" never appears. The first copy of a item named Document is named Document 1; the next is named Document 2, and so on. (This may cause a small bit of confusion with files whose names already end in numbers; a file called NewsWatcher 2.2 becomes NewsWatcher 2. 3—note the addition of the space—when it's duplicated.) The same scheme applies when you throw more than one file with the same name in the Trash. (Note: If you’re running Speed Doubler and are using the Speed Copy feature, you’ll still get the word “copy” at the end of your copies. This is because Speed Doubler takes over the copy tasks from the Finder, and the patch doesn’t apply.)
Font Sample Text Normally, the sample text you see when you open a font reads, “Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen.” This is a trivial thing to change, but I’ve always liked “Jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz” better as a pangram. It’s shorter and punchier. Also, it reminds me of Beagle Bros (anyone remember them?).
About This Macintosh Restored When Apple started licensing clones of the Macintosh, they changed the "About This Macintosh" menu item to "About This Computer" to reflect the fact that a computer running the Mac OS need not be a Macintosh anymore. Now that cloning has ended, and because I use a real Macintosh, I changed it back. (At the risk of stating tho blindingly obvious, rest assured that the Finder still works fine on clones even if it says "About This Macintosh.")
Inspirational Message in About This Macintosh Window Once I made the previous change, the lame graphic showing a picture of the Earth and proclaiming that my computer was a "Mac OS Computer" had to go. I figure everyone already knows they're using a Mac OS Computer, if not a Macintosh, so I decided to change it to reflect Apple's ongoing advertising campaign and exhort users to Think Different.
Add Quit Finder Command You won't need to do this very often, but when you need it, you need it. You'll find this new command on the Special menu. (I put it there instead of on the File menu, where Quit commands usually go, because quitting the Finder is indeed something special you won't want to do very often. I also didn't give it the usual Command-Q keyboard shortcut so you don't do it accidentally. Sorry, you gotta use the mouse for this one.) Without the Finder running, your Apple menu will become mostly empty, and getting the Finder running again may be a bit of a trick (the easiest way is to quit everything else).
Add Keyboard Shortcuts As a Mac power user, it seems to me that there are never enough keyboard shortcuts in the applications I use. Adding more was the very first Finder patching I ever did. The 8.x Finder has more than previous versions, which forced me to rearrange some of the ones I had been using, but the rest of you won't have to adapt. Some of the letters are not particularly mnemonic, I'm afraid, since I was stuck with the ones the Finder didn't already use. And in the View menu, I found myself forced to use numbers since I was running out of letters. Hopefully you will find them adequately easy to remember nonetheless. By the way, if you use StuffIt's Magic Menu, you'll be glad to know that my patch leaves the Command-S and Command-U shortcuts free for stuffing and unstuffing files.
The Keyboard Shortcuts
_____________________
The keyboard shortcuts added by this patch are as follows.
Apple Menu
Command-/ (Forward Slash): About This Macintosh *
File Menu
Command-H: Sharing *
Command-J: Print Desktop or Print Window (sorry, it's not very mnemonic is it?)
View Menu
Command-1: as Icons
Command-2: as Buttons
Command-3: as List
Command-4: as Window
Command-5: as Pop-Up Window
Command-K: Clean Up
Command-0 (Zero): View Options
Special Menu
Command-T: Emtpy Trash
Command-G: Restart (remember it as short for "Go again")
Command-B: Shut Down (remember it as short for "Bye")
* Under Mac OS 8.5, the About This Macintosh and Sharing shortcuts are not installed. Command-/ is trapped by the new Help system, and Sharing is no longer on the File menu but is a pane on the Get Info window.
You may find Alessandro Levi Montalcini's ($10 shareware) NoDesktopCleanup useful for adding confirmation dialogs to some of these menu commands. In particular, Restart and Shut Down can be rather surprising if you accidentally hit one of them and don't have a chance to cancel, although usually at least one of your applications will have unsaved data and give you the chance to halt the restart or shutdown before it really gets underway. It would probably be "safer" to leave those two shortcuts out, but I find myself missing them pretty quickly if I do. If you already have a macro program like QuicKeys, OneClick, or KeyQuencer, you can easily set up macros to display the confirmation dialogs (that's what I do, with OneClick). NoDesktopCleanup has the advantage of being able to trap the item when it is selected from the pull-down menu as well as when it's activated by the keyboard shortcut, though, and it can incorporate a timer so that if you hit Command-B and walk off without confirming, your computer will still shut down after giving you a few seconds to change your mind. You can download NoDesktopCleanup at http://www.montalcini.com/.
Installing the Patch
_______________
Before attempting to install the patch, make sure you have a disk that will start up to the Finder besides your usual startup disk. The recommended procedure for installing the patch has a very brief period of time during which your System Disk is "unblessed." If your Mac should happen to crash during those few seconds (which really shouldn't be a problem, but you know how computers are) you won't be able to start up from that disk until you "bless" the folder again by putting a Finder in it. Your emergency startup disk can be a Mac OS CD-ROM, or a Zip disk on which you've installed a bare-bones System Folder, or whatever, as long as it starts into the Finder. If you have converted your usual startup disk to the HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) disk format, make sure that your "emergency disk" contains Mac OS 8.1; earlier versions can't access HFS+ drives. You should have a disk like this anyway, for other reasons; this is just a reminder.
Quit all applications but the Finder before installing. This isn't strictly necessary, but you'll have to restart after this is done anyway, and quitting other programs now will lessen the possibility that some other flaky program will crash the computer while you're installing the patch.
You will need about 8 MB free on your startup disk to install the patch. (You will get all the disk space back in the end; it's just that installation involves making a couple of copies of the Finder, which is a few megabytes in size.) Since Mac OS 8.5 doesn’t support 68K machines, its Finder is PowerPC-only and you’ll only need about 5 MB free to install the patch. If there's not enough room on your startup disk, you can use another one to hold the copy of the Finder, but you'll have to drag the Finder to that disk instead of to the Desktop as directed in the steps below. It's still easy but the steps will be a little different (exactly where and how should be fairly obvious, though).
Do not attempt to install this patch on anything but a U.S. version of Mac OS 8.0, 8.1, or 8.5 Finder.
OK, with the warnings out of the way, I hasten to reassure you that this process is not only easier than it looks, it's not even all that risky after all. I have needed the emergency disk only once in the years I've been doing this, and that was due to pilot error (i.e. my mistake), not a flaw in the procedure. But if something can go wrong, it will, and I want you to be prepared.
To install Jerry's Finder 8 Patch 1.2:
Open your System Folder and drag the Finder to the desktop while holding down the Option key. This makes a copy of the Finder on the Desktop. You cannot modify an application that's running, and you can't quit the Finder because you need it to launch the patch program. However, you can make a copy of the Finder and modify that, which is what we'll do here.
Double-click the patch application’s icon. Use the version that’s right for the version of the Mac OS you’re running—8.0, 8.1, or 8.5. An introductory screen will appear summarizing these instructions. Read it, then click Continue. A standard Open dialog will appear to allow you to choose the copy of the Finder to be patched.
Click the Desktop button in the Open dialog to maneuver to the Desktop, then select the copy of the Finder you made earlier and click Patch. The patch will be applied; it takes only a few seconds. When it's done, the copy of the Finder on your desktop has been patched. (The icon may move to a different place on the desktop; this is normal. If it seems to have disappeared, look harder.) If the patcher tells you that you don’t have enough dsik space when you obviously do, see the Read Me file in the Raw Resources folder inside the Jerry’s Finder 8 Patch 1.2 folder.
Open your System Folder again (if you closed it already) and drag the copy of the Finder there to the Trash. You'll see the special folders in the System Folder window (Extensions, Control Panels, etc.) lose their special icons and revert to regular folder icons. This means that your System Folder is "unblessed." You won't be able to start up from this disk until you put another Finder in. (Don't try to empty the Trash yet; you won't be able to, since that Finder is still running.)
Drag the patched Finder from the Desktop to the open System Folder window. Make sure you don't drop it into one of the System Folder's sub-folders, but leave it "laying loose" in the System Folder, right where the old Finder was. You'll see the Extensions and Control Panels folder icons turn back into their special versions. Your System Folder is now "blessed" again, and your startup disk is bootable.
Restart the computer. This is necessary to load the new copy of the Finder and to allow the old one to be deleted. After restart, verify that the Finder is working as it should, then feel free to empty the Trash (try the new Command-T shortcut!) to delete the old Finder. Alternately, if you're the paranoid type, stuff the old Finder and keep it as a backup.
Keep the patch application around. If you ever need to re-install the system software, a fresh copy of the Finder will be installed and you'll need to re-install the patch. (You could make a backup copy of the patched Finder instead, but the patch application's much smaller, and installation is not that difficult.)
By the way: another way to install the patch is to start up from your "emergency" disk. Then you can install the patch directly onto the copy of the Finder on your normal startup disk. Restart from that disk and you're back in business. I prefer the other way, though, because it's faster (only one restart) and you only have to dig out your emergency disk if something goes wrong, not at the very beginning of the process.
Disclaimer and Legal Stuff
____________________
The creator of Jerry's Finder 8 Patch 1.2 is me, Jerry Kindall. I'd enjoy hearing from you if you like this patch or have any suggestions for other Finder modifications I might include in a future version of the patch. E-mail me at mailto:kindall@manual.com.
Jerry's Finder 8 Patch 1.2 is absolutely free. Not only is it absolutely free, the patches themselves are not copyrighted (not, of course, that they ever really could be). Give copies to all your friends and make their lives easier. Although the patch is free, I sure would appreciate it if you would visit my company's Web site at http://www.manual.com/. At Manual Labor, we're technical communications experts. If you need end-user documentation, marketing materials, Web development, application automation, multimedia design, or desktop publishing, or anything else that might fall within the scope of our abilities, please do keep us in mind. Our clients include Bare Bones Software, Management Software, id Software, BoxTop Software, ResNova Software, and Scantron Quality Computers.
The patch application itself was created with ResCompare, Michael Hecht's indispensible free utility. The code that installs the patches belongs to Michael and is copyrighted. If you want to produce your own freely-distributable patches for an application you've modified, download a copy from your local Info-Mac archive. (Can't find an Info-Mac archive? Search for the latest version of ResCompare at http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/HyperArchive.html).
Since Jerry's Finder 8 Patch 1.2 is free, I accept no responsibility or liability for any problems or damages you might encounter. You use this software at your own (rather minimal, really) risk. ResCompare has been widely used and extensively tested for years, and my patch doesn't change any actual code resources, so it should be very safe; however, you should apply this patch only to a copy of the Mac OS 8.0, 8.1, or 8.5 (U.S.) Finder, and verify that the modified Finder works properly before permanently deleting the old copy. Always have a bootable CD-ROM or Zip disk handy so that if your System Folder ends up "un-blessed" you'll be able to get back to the Finder and correct the situation.
Version History
____________
Version 1.2 adds a Mac OS 8.5 version of the patcher, adds a section to the “Patch as Patch Can” document on setting the Finder’s memory partition, and cleans up some minor inconsistencies in the documentation displayed in the patcher itself. Under Mac OS 8.5, Satoru Iwatsu’s ‘fmn2’ ResEdit template is actually installed into the Finder to make editing menus easier. (I did not re-compile the 8.0 and 8.1 versions of this patcher to add this feature, as it’s largely for convenience, although I did stick it into the raw resource files. I’ve still included the stand-alone version of the template.)
Version 1.1 makes the patch compatible with Mac OS 8.0 as well as 8.1 due to popular demand. Because of this enhancement, the package’s name has been changed to “Jerry’s Finder 8 Patch” (rather than “Finder 8.1 Patch”). The documentation and the instructions in the patcher itself were changed to include the changed font sample text, which was undocumented in the last version, and generally updated. A copy of Satoru Iwatsu’s ‘fmn2’ ResEdit template was included to allow users to edit their own menus using ResEdit. A copy of all resources which were changed for each patch are included so that users can install with ResEdit in case of difficulty with the ResCompare patchers. Instructions for installing the patches with ResEdit and for modifying the patched features further were written.
Version 1.0 was the first public release of this package.
