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The User Pane |
All settings and operations in the User pane are restricted to the current user account only, the user who launched the TinkerTool System application. The name of the affected user is shown at the bottom border of the window. More user account information is available after selecting the item User Info.
Macintosh software is usually designed after very high usability standards. Technical problems are solved by the applications on their own, in most cases silently, without needing interaction with the user. There is one type of technical problem however, which can often not be handled by affected applications, namely cases where the applications' preference settings have been damaged.
Applications send messages to the operating system to store and retrieve user settings, e.g. color preferences, the preferred position for windows on screen, the last saved document, etc. Mac OS X keeps these preference settings in so called property list files, labelled with the extension "plist". If such a file becomes damaged for some reason, Mac OS X will feed the application belonging to the file with invalid preference settings, a situation which is not handled correctly by many programs, because they don't expect such a thing could happen. The application could crash or behave erratically.
To avoid this, you can verify the integrity of all preferences files effective for the current user. This includes all settings of all applications ever launched by this user. Press the button Check Preferences at the item Verify Integrity of Preferences Files to start the verification process.
Classic applications and legacy applications which have not been correctly ported to the Mac OS X platform use preferences files they have created on their own. These files cannot be tested because they don't follow any standards.
While the verification process is running, you can stop it any time pressing the STOP button. After all tests have been completed, TinkerTool System will display a report table, listing all problems found. The problems are categorized by severity which is visualized by different colors:
The report table will contain a line for each of the problems found. Preference settings that are free of errors will not be listed. Each entry consists of a short problem description and the name of the preference domain. The preference domain indicates to which application the settings belong. Mac OS X uses a special naming scheme with names of the following structure:
or alternatively
The naming scheme guarantees that each application will have a unique preference name. An example for this is
com.apple.finder
which denotes the preferences domain for all settings belonging to the Mac OS X Finder.
To display detail information about a problem found, select an entry in the table. The full path to the affected property list file and a detailed error description will be displayed below the table. In cases where it could make sense, you can either deactivate or delete the problematic preferences file by pressing one of the buttons.
You should not delete or deactivate preference settings of applications currently running because this won't have any effect. Quit affected applications and rerun the test before you decide to remove a corrupted preferences file.
When you have tested applications for a short period of time, or you have deinstalled applications which you don't use any longer, the preferences files of those applications will still remain stored in the users' home folders. TinkerTool System can analyze the preferences files of the current user account to check if the applications they belong to have no longer been in use for a longer period of time. You can then choose to delete the obsolete files to reclaim storage space.
Select the time period which TinkerTool System should consider as being "too old for actively used applications", then press the button Remove old preferences files… to let the application verify the age of the files. While the verification process is running, you can stop it any time pressing the STOP button. After all tests have been completed, TinkerTool System will display a report table, listing all files which may be obsolete.
The table lists all preferences domains which have not been in use. The exact date of the last usage is specified in the column at the right. By unchecking the buttons in the column Remove? you can exclude preferences files from deletion. When you press the OK button, all files that had the Remove? checkmark set will be deleted. If you press the Cancel button, no file will be touched.
You should not blindly delete all old files. Perhaps you have specific applications which are only run once per year.
The operating system version Tiger (10.4) has internal defects which can cause strange effects for the display of icons in the application System Preferences. If you open System Preferences and you are seeing one of the following problems in the overview of preferences panes, you can use the repair feature of TinkerTool System:
In this case press the buton Repair "System Preferences". TinkerTool System will take care of all necessary steps automatically.
The System Preferences application of Mac OS X Panther (10.3) is not defective. For this reason TinkerTool System does not display this feature with 10.3.
The Help Viewer application can sometimes be the cause for a lot of trouble: It crashes very often, may not respond to search requests, or cannot even be launched. Because Help Viewer always connects to the Internet when it is launched, it reacts very sensitively to timing problems with your Internet connection. It also appears not to handle search indexes for mixed languages correctly. For these reasons, Help Viewer becomes especially unstable in environments with slow Internet connections, and in countries where English is not the primary language, or multiple languages are spoken.
To repair Help Viewer it is often sufficient to remove its damaged work files. TinkerTool System can do this by a single mouse click: Just press the button Repair Help Viewer at the item Repair Help. Note that all preference settings for Help Viewer and offline help pages which are designed to be fetched from the Internet will be deleted. The help system will automatically create a new clean set of preference settings and will refetch offline pages on demand.
This is a temporary fix only. Only Apple could permanently repair the technical problems inherent to the help system. Help Viewer might crash again after using it for a short time, and you'll have to repeat the repair procedure.
This feature is only needed for users who have selected a language other than English as their primary language.
If you enable the Finder's option Show all file extensions, all its translation features for system folder names will no longer work correctly: The pre-defined folders, e.g. the Desktop folder, will appear with its internal name Desktop, not with the translated name of the user interface, e.g. Bureau in case French is selected as primary language. All other navigation panels for saving and opening files will still show the correct names, but the Finder can no longer display them.
By pressing the button Repair and Relaunch Finder the preference settings of the Finder will be modified to the effect the problem is avoided. The Finder is automatically relaunched, so you should make sure the Finder has no open tasks running (e.g. burning a CD or moving some files) before pressing the button.
Apple has repaired this defect in Mac OS X 10.4 or higher. For this reason, this feature is no longer needed in Mac OS X Tiger or later OS versions. TinkerTool System will not display the feature on systems that don't need it.
If you have configured your user account to use a non-English language when working with Mac OS X, the Finder will display all folders that have special meaning with translated names (for example the Desktop folder is displayed as Bureau folder if you have set your primary language to French). This feature does not work correctly for folders in your personal home folder if you have updated your system from Mac OS X 10.1 to Mac OS X 10.2 or a later version.
You can repair this system feature by pressing the button Establish Home Folder Translation.
Mac OS X keeps an internal database which lists all applications. This database is used to display the correct icons for documents, and to keep track which application should be launched when you double-click a document. In rare cases, this database might contain invalid information. Typical symptoms are:
In this case you can force Mac OS X to rebuild the database for the current user. To do this press the button Rebuild database at the item Rebuild Launch Services Database.
This will also reset the security feature which prevents that documents are opened with unknown (potentially dangerous) applications. If you open a document connected to an application which has never been used before, Mac OS X will ask for reapproval to launch the application.
If applications have been installed outside an Applications folder (which is generally not recommended), Mac OS X will forget that they exist, so they may disappear from the Services and the Open with menus. You'll have to launch the affected applications once to make Mac OS X aware of them again.
Among a lot of other settings, each application keeps track what documents have been opened for the last times you have used the program. The entries are listed in the submenu File > Recent Items of each application. Additionally, there is a central list of recently used documents and applications in the Apple menu, and the Finder maintains a list of servers to which manual network connections have been made.
To protect your privacy you may want to remove these entries because they allow to keep track on what you did with the computer in the past. The server list may also contain passwords in the clear that should be protected.
Select the recent items you want to have removed for your user account. You can choose between the following categories:
After selecting at least one entry, press the button Remove selected items. This will delete the entries, of course not the documents these entries refer to.
For technical reasons applications won't allow their recent items to be removed while they are running. To delete entries in as many programs as possible you should quit all applications you don't currently need before using this feature.
Classic applications or legacy applications which store recent items under their own control (which is not compliant with Mac OS X software design standards) cannot have their recent items removed automatically.
AppleWorks version 6 is not fully compatible with Mac OS X. Among other features, the recent items menu in the application does not work correctly. For this reason Apple recommends to delete the recent items entries of AppleWorks in regular intervals. To learn more about this, please refer to Apple Knowledge Base Article 300140. TinkerTool System only supports English or German versions of AppleWorks 6 and you must run TinkerTool System in the same language as your copy of AppleWorks.
Login items are entries for applications, documents, or network volumes which should be opened automatically by the Finder when you log into Mac OS X. TinkerTool System can automatically check your personal list of login items to verify if some entries are out-of-date. Items referring to objects which no longer exist on your computer can be removed automatically.
Apple has changed the name for this type of objects several times during the lifetimes of Mac OS and Mac OS X. In some versions, Login Items are called "Startup Items". TinkerTool System always uses the current and correct designation "Login Items".
To verify the list of login items for the current user, press the button Verify Login Items. After a few seconds, a report table will be displayed which lists the status of all items. By pressing OK, all out-of-date entries will automatically be removed, by pressing Cancel no change will take place.
The last entry in the User pane is for informational purposes only. It lists the core information of the user account entry for the user who has started the application. This feature is fully compatible with Mac OS X Directory Services technology, so the information is also displayed correctly if your computer receives its user account list from a network server.