Tiger Tips

A collection of useful articles and tips picked up since Tiger was released last week.

Installing Tiger
Write Your Own Automator Actions
Writing and distributing your own Automator Actions
Password Assistant
Tiger includes a new Password Assistant which helps generate passwords when setting up user accounts. To access, click the Key icon you see when adding a password to a user account (in Accounts in System Preferences).
Broken PHP
It’s not really broken, the Apache webserver has been updated so you need to re-enable it in the Apache config file :

  1. Open the Terminal
  2. type sudo pico /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
  3. enter your password (must have admin rights)
  4. scroll down (CTRL-V) to the Dynamic Shared Objects section
  5. uncomment the line beginning LoadModule php4_module
  6. scroll further down to where the AddModule directives are
  7. uncomment AddModule mod_php4.c
  8. Save changes (CTRL-o)
  9. Exit pico (CTRL-x)
  10. Restart Apache by typing sudo apachectl graceful
  11. PHP 4.3 should now be re-enabled
Using the new built-in Oxford Dictionary
When running a Cocoa application, you can control-click on any word and select "Look up in Dictionary" from the pop-up menu. This will invoke the new Dictionary application, which will define the selected word.
Safari is broken
A strange one this. Installing Tiger broke Safari on my G5. I suspect it’s a isolated problem with my Mac but it became annoying because my default web browser had been reset to Safari. In it’s wisdom Apple has put the option to set the default browser in the Safari preferences, so I had to use More Internet to change back to Firefox.
Remove Dashboard dock icon
As Dashboard runs all the time and is activated by your chosen hotkey, you don’t need it’s icon taking up valuable space in your Dock, so why not remove it?
Useful Widgets

Posted 4 years, 10 months ago

Another Dictionary.app tip is that you can hold down Cmd-Ctrl-D and hover over a word to get a little drop down definition. It doesn’t work in all apps, Omniweb for example, but it seems to work in most.

Tommy · www · 4 years, 10 months ago

More essential reading on Tiger : Ars Technica’s review (all 12 pages of it) -
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars/

Phil · www · 4 years, 10 months ago

What a brilliantly clear and well-written tip - thank you so much!

Zelda Rhiando · www · 4 years, 6 months ago

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My name is Phil Lindsay, a web guy from Scotland, now living in Newcastle upon Tyne in England. I also run a web design company called Presence. You can email me at phil@xlab.co.uk, read more ramblings on my Twitter stream and view my photos on Flickr. You can grab the RSS feed for this weblog here.