There are dozens of applications that will place information and/or icons in the top menu bar (many of which are on this list, which is by now a little bit dated - there are many more such apps now). But why, oh why, is there no way to place those icons in a specific order and have them stay there?

You can drag icons around in the dock to your heart’s delight, and even off the dock to watch them go “poof” (which is just a little too appealing to some children - we suspect more than one parent has discovered an empty dock, because one of their offspring was having so much fun dragging the icons and watching them explode! But at least you can put the dock icons in the order you want them). But the top menu bar items can only be moved if they do not produce a drop-down menu when you click on them, and even if they don’t react when you click on them, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be moveable, nor that they will forever stay put at their current location.

For the small percentage of top menu bar icons that can be moved, you can hold down the Command key, then click and drag. But try this on an item that produces a drop-down menu, or otherwise intercepts mouse clicks for its own purposes, and it just isn’t going to work. Thus, we put up with a disorganized top menu bar, with icons in no particular order.

The thing is, if we reboot the system the icons usually reappear in exactly the same spot, so there’s got to be something, somewhere that determines the order in which they appear. But what, exactly? We doubt that Indiana Jones could discover the preference file or other mechanism that controls the order of these little beasties.

You’d think that by now some Mac software author that has an obsessive-compulsive streak (like Monk, the fictional TV detective) would have figured out how to reorder the icons and would have published the details, or even some software to assist in the process. But noooo….. So, we figure this must be something buried deep in the bowels of OS X. Otherwise, how could it possibly be that utilities that will allow you to tweak the dock seem to be a dime a dozen, but there is nothing out there that allows even the most basic reconfiguration of the top menu bar (including the icons that won’t move in response to Command-Click + drag)? If there is, we sure haven’t stumbled across it, and that unordered top menu bar is what’s making us crabby this week.

We haven’t seen too many episodes of Monk, but we suspect he’d hate the Mac, or at least this aspect of it. We know, because we’re a little OCD too, and this drives us right up the wall!

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The weekend is upon us again, and with the record high price of car-go-zoom juice, a lot of folks here in the CrabApple Forest are looking for ways to keep ourselves amused without driving too far. There are games that just pass the time, and then there are games that make you think. Reversi, also known as Othello, definitely falls into the latter category. It’s an easy game to learn, but you’re not going to master it in a single weekend!

Here’s how Wikipedia describes the game:

Reversi and Othello are names for an abstract strategy board game which involves play by two parties on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides. Pieces typically appear coin-like, but with a light and a dark face, each side representing one player. The object of the game is to make your pieces constitute a majority of the pieces on the board at the end of the game, by turning over as many of your opponent’s pieces as possible.

For more information on the game, including the rules of play, see the Wikipedia article on Reversi.

If you’ve never played Othello as a board game, it’s probably because all that manual chip-flipping can get pretty tedious, and few people have the patience for it. Of course, when computers came along, it became possible to let the computer do the chip-flipping, so the players could concentrate on the game, and that brought about a revival of interest. And, as it turns out, a computer can make a pretty good Othello opponent, in case you’re stuck at home alone and feel like playing something a bit more challenging than solitaire.

That’s where MacIago comes in. MacIago is a freeware Othello/Reversi style board game for Mac OS X.

The MacIago options are shown here:

And if you don’t like the appearance of the board, there are a handful of plugins that can be downloaded to change it.

How good a game does MacIago play? Well, it could beat BigCrab, but then that’s not sayin’ much. We think that unless you are some sort of Othello master, you’ll find it a worthwhile opponent. And we like the fact that the difficulty level can be changed, so that if you’re teaching the game to the kids they won’t become frustrated because they always lose.

The only option that we think the game is missing is to flip the chips individually, in slow motion, so you can see exactly what’s being turned. Right now it just flips all the chips at once, so you are often left with that “What just happened?” feeling. Another nice option might be the ability to go back a turn or two - not only would that be helpful when you are learning the game, so you can see the relative effects of various possible moves, but also it would give you an opportunity to see exactly what changed in the last move. Even if you could simply click a button or hold down a key and have it highlight the chips that were flipped on the last turn, that would be helpful.

Even so, we think that MacIago is a great way to stretch your mind, and you can’t beat the price. So, what’s your favorite Mac OS X freeware game? Tell us in the comments and maybe we’ll review it in an upcoming post.

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FStream is an interesting piece of software that has probably escaped the attention of many Mac OS X users in the English-speaking world, because its web site is entirely in French. It’s a small program that makes it possible to listen to, and to easily record Web radio stations and audio streams.

Features of FStream are as follows:

• Decoding of streams in any of these formats: OGG Vorbis, AAC/AAC+, MP3, MMS (ASF for WMA)
• Encoding of the streams to any of these formats: MP3, AAC, AIFF, WAV
• Recognizes the Apple infrared remote control
• Very low CPU usage
• Minimalist Interface: Simple to use, and does not take much display space
• Customizable interface
• Great flexibility in recognition of streams (among other things, IceCast and ShoutCast streams)
• Access to pre-selected lists (ShoutCast and SourceMac)

When they say minimalist interface, they aren’t kidding - there’s a lot more to this software than you might think at first glance. Normally, this is all you see on the screen:

We should note that if you don’t care for the basic style of the interface, there are a number of skins available for download. Anyway, when FStream is the foreground application and you press the SHIFT key, it changes color and now you are at the recording panel:

The button on the left hand side controls playing or pausing the stream unless the SHIFT key is depressed and you’re at the recording panel, in which case it starts or stops recording. Note that in the program preferences you can select whether pausing the audio will simply mute it, or will actually buffer it so that when you un-pause it will play the stream from where you left off (like a PVR). We wish this functionality wasn’t buried in the preferences, but instead was on two separate buttons (or a “split” button as is used on the right side), because there are times when we may want to pause but don’t care that much about what we’re listening to (as when it’s in the middle of a long commercial break) and other times when we really don’t want to miss the discussion on whatever talk show we’re listening to.

As mentioned above, the button on the right hand side of the interface is split into two halves. Clicking on the lower half reveals a volume control slider:

While clicking on the upper half brings up the main menu:

From the main menu you can select Quick Open, which lets you enter (or paste) a stream URL directly:

But most of the time, you’ll probably want to use the Streams Manager, which allows you to select any of a multitude of preset streams, or streams that you have previously saved:

FStream actually has a fairly comprehensive help file (accessed from the top menu bar, and yes, it’s in English if you’ve selected English as your primary language) and it would be a real good idea for you to scan through it if you want to utilize FStream to its fullest capabilities. Also, if you want to visit the author’s web site, we suggest using either Yahoo Babel Fish or Google Translate to translate the page to English (here are links to the translated main FStream page using Yahoo and Google).

FStream is a great FREE program, and it is the only one we know of that will give you the ability to pause live audio streams and/or record them for future listening. The only way it could be made better (other than the aforementioned suggested change in the pause control) would be to actually allow recording on a schedule, so that you could have it automatically start recording your favorite show at the time it begins (and stop when it ends), in case you aren’t home, or simply forget that the show is on. If there is a way to do this with FStream, we haven’t discovered it yet, but if you’ve figured out how to do it please leave a comment and share what you know!

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As Apple describes it, “Folder Actions is a feature of Mac OS X that lets you associate AppleScript scripts with folders. A Folder Action script is executed when the folder to which it is attached is opened or closed, moved or resized, or has items added or removed. The script provides a handler that matches the appropriate format for the action…..”

What they are saying is that by setting up a Folder Action, you can run a script whenever any of the following occur:

• the attached folder is opened
• the window of the attached folder is closed
• the window of the attached folder is moved or resized
• items are placed into the attached folder
• items are removed from the attached folder

What we’re going to show you here is how to use a folder action to make a folder that, when you drop an image file into it, will attempt to convert it to another format, in case you like to save all your images in the same format.

To start with, in Finder go to the location you want to create your “Drag and Drop” folder and right-click and select New Folder:

Rename the folder as you like (we called it “Convert to PNG”) and then right-click on the newly created folder and select “Enable Folder Actions” (note that you may have to navigate through the “More” selection, as shown here):

Once you have done that, right click on the folder again, and this time select “Attach a Folder action…”

A file picker will appear - you want to navigate to /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/ (note this is off your primary drive’s root folder, not your user folder) and then click on Choose:

Once you’ve chosen the Folder Action Scripts directory, choose the actual script to associate with the folder. In this case we’ve chosen Image - Duplicate as PNG.scpt:

Now drag an image to the folder that’s not already a PNG (such as a GIF or JPG) and it should be converted to PNG. The original is not deleted, so you should find both inside the folder. As you may have noticed, there are also scripts that will “Duplicate as JPEG” and “Duplicate as TIFF”, so the possibilities exist to make “Drag and Drop” folders for those formats as well.

This just scratches the surface of what Folder Actions can do. Apple’s site has a section on Folder Actions, including a page showing how you can write your own Folder Action Scripts, and descriptions of the Folder Action Scripts found in /Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/.

Apple’s site also has a couple of additional Folder Action Scripts that you can download and use if you wish. They are:

Archive Added Items - This script will make an archived copy, in ZIP format, of the individual items added to the attached folder. Archived files are placed in folder named “Done” within the attached folder.

Auto-backup Script - This script will automatically backup specified items any time a particular hard drive is mounted on the desktop.

In addition, if you search the web you can find other Folder Action Scripts that people have created.

We would be remiss if we did not mention that this is the Apple way to do things, and it’s always possible to do things differently. For example, in an article entitled “Use launchd to replace folder actions” at Mac OS X Hints, the author of that article notes that “Folder actions are quite slow, and on 10.5.x, I found them to be not really fun to play with. Another way to watch a folder is to create your own launchd script.” He then goes on to explain how to do that, though admittedly we didn’t quite follow what he was doing. He still winds up calling an AppleScript, but he uses a launchd script to actually watch the folder, and since our most recent previous article was about Lingon, which assists in creating launchd scripts, we thought we’d at least mention it so that the “true geeks” could try their hand at using that technique. As for us, we probably aren’t going to care all that much if it takes the Mac an extra second or so to notice that we dropped something into a folder!

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Lingon is one of those tools that at first blush may seem to be something only a true geek would love, but it’s actually fairly practical. What it does is to allow you to launch scripts or programs according to certain criteria. If you have previous experience with Linux or Unix, you can think of it as a way to set up something similar to a cron job, except that you have more flexibility.

One thing you can do is set up scripts or applications to launch at startup. Now, you may already know how you can launch applications at startup - you go into System Preferences, click on Accounts, and then (while your account is selected) click on Login Items. Once there, you can add or remove applications you want to launch at startup by using the + and/or - buttons. And, that’s the preferred way to launch an application at startup for the logged-in user.

But what if you want to launch an application based on some other criteria, or you want to launch a script of some kind? What if you need an application to start no matter which user is logging in? Or, what if you want to tweak an existing startup item that’s run by the system (as an agent or a daemon) and not by a particular user? That’s where Lingon comes in. Lingon lets you edit and create configuration files for launchd (and maybe you are asking, what is launchd? Well, according to Wikipedia, “launchd is a unified, open source service management framework for starting, stopping and managing daemons, programs and scripts.” Aren’t you sorry you asked?).

To give you an example of how Lingon can be used, we set it up to start the CallerIDpop perl script from the Michigan Telephone, VoIP and Broadband blog. This is a script used with Linksys/Sipura VoIP adapters (and some phones) that, when there is an incoming call, provides a Growl popup showing caller details and the time the call was received (it can also write this information to a log file). Previously we had been using their suggested method of running an AppleScript (saved as an application) at startup, the AppleScript containing the line that actually starts the Perl script. Although this works, it’s a fairly convoluted way to do it and it seems to eat up a lot of system resources. So, we set out to find another way to invoke the script at startup. Here’s how we did it using Lingon (which, by the way, seems to get the script running a lot quicker, and the script itself seems to be running in a more stable environment):

When you first fire up Lingon, you get this screen:

Click the small button labeled “New” (with the + on the button) in the upper left-hand corner, and you get a dropdown as shown here:

We selected “My Agents” because we only have one user account on that system, and didn’t really want the script to have root privileges. You should think long and hard about running anything as a daemon, because if anything goes wrong (whether due to programming error or malicious intent) the script will be running as root and can do just about anything to your system. Having selected that, we got this window:

As you can see, everything is fairly straightforward. In section 1 you give the agent a name, in section 2 you insert the command just as you would enter it if you ran it directly from a terminal window (or you choose the application to run, if you are running an application), and in section 3 you pick the options you want to use to trigger running the script or application. If you’re not sure about any of the options, click on Help (in the top menu bar) and then “Lingon Help” and it will bring up a PDF file in Preview that explains how to use Lingon. The Help menu also gives you access to the man pages for launchd.plist, launchctl, and launchd, in case you are making changes in any of those files.

Note the “Expert Mode” button in the lower right-hand corner - this shows you the actual XML code, and allows you to write keys and values directly if you are comfortable doing that.

Don’t forget to click the “Save” button at the top when you are finished - we forgot to do that and had to start all over! We sort of wish that the “Save” button were underneath the other three sections, maybe in a section 4!

Unfortunately, to make everything work properly you’ll have to log out and login again, or reboot your Mac, as Lingon will remind you:

Not only can Lingon be used to make your own script or application launchers, but it can also be used to edit existing system agents and daemons. While you normally shouldn’t do this, if you know what you are doing it can sometimes improve system performance. On the other hand, if you don’t know what you are doing, you could render your system totally inoperable! As an example of why you might want to do this, we recommend you see the article, “The Case of the Slow Mac (and how to fix it)” at Maciverse. If you think that your Mac is running a bit sluggish, or if you’re seeing the “spinning beachball of death” a bit too often, this article explains one possible reason, and a suggested fix that’s much easier to make if you use Lingon.

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The deal here is that you can go and download this free game called Cubes, which comes in Mac and Windows versions. The company behind it offers several other games but most of them are not free, and you can’t tell which are free and which are not from the main page. You should assume that if you are downloading a demo version of one of their games, you’ll only be able to play a limited number of times. We suspect that Grass Games is giving away Cubes in the hope that you’ll come back and perhaps download something else and buy it (and this is reinforced by the fact that you see an ad for another of their games when you exit Cubes), but as far as we can tell you can play Cubes as often as you want without payment or registration.

So, what is Cubes? It’s a falling brick game - in other words, it’s whole lot like a very popular computer game of Russian origin, that’s been around for at least a couple decades now. The game is highly configurable and has more options than you might expect, and while we couldn’t find any documentation, the effects of most options are fairly obvious. The nice thing is that you can pick the screen resolution you want the game to run in (up to 1920×1200!) and run it in full screen mode, or in a window (interestingly, there seems to be a bug where you have to select your desired resolution while full screen mode is selected, and only then switch to windowed mode). If you run it in full screen mode, the effect is much like playing on an arcade machine, except that the sound of your Mac’s fan screaming may alert you to the fact that your CPU is being pushed to the max (unless maybe you have a newer multi-core system). You can mitigate this somewhat by going into the options and under the “MISC” section, set the “PROCESSING POWER” to a lower value.

Our screenshot (showing the options selections) don’t really do the game justice, because we selected a low screen resolution to minimize page download time. They could have used a typeface that renders a bit better, but it’s not as cramped as it looks here if you’re using a decent screen resolution. Not that it matters when you’re playing the game - you’re looking at colored falling bricks, which could probably be successfully rendered on an old Apple II, though the overall effect wouldn’t be nearly as good as what you are getting here.

We do wish this game didn’t monopolize the CPU quite so much (we watched the Activity Monitor during one run in Windowed mode and Cubes was far and away the biggest user of CPU power, even making Firefox look like a lightweight), but then we did play it quite successfully on a dual-core Mac Mini without any apparent problem (well, except for the fact that Big Crab stinks at these kinds of games!)

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photo credit: mac_vegetarian

Every so often we like to call your attention to some cool Mac-related articles, even if we didn’t write them. In this case, the articles cover a couple of ways to explore your Time Machine backups, and both of them are from the folks over at TidBITS. The first, “Prune Your Time Machine Backups Selectively”, tells you how to use a modified version of GrandPerspective to see which files are hogging space in your Time Machine backups. If any of these are files that don’t need to be backed up, you can exclude them from your Time Machine backups to make additional room for the files you do want to preserve.

The second explores a new command-line utility called tms, which is coincidentally enough written by Robert Pointon, who is also the author of the fseventer program that we reviewed previously. That article is called “Time Machine Exposed!” and it explains how you can use tms to get much more information about your Time Machine backups than has hitherto been available.

Now, we are not usually a big fan of command-line hacks here in the CrabApple Forest - if we’d wanted to use the command line we’d have stuck with MS-DOS! Mac users (moreso than, say, Linux users) seem to appreciate the value of a good Graphical User interface (GUI). So we are sort of hoping that either Mr. Pointon or someone else will write a GUI “front end” for tms sooner or later. But in the meantime, those of you who are into doing things from the command line, along with those who simply want to be able to delve into your Time Machine backups and find out “what’s in there”, will surely appreciate the information contained in the above-mentioned two articles.

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Those used to downloading files and software intended for use on Windows-based machines know that there are a wide variety of compression formats out there. Mac users have it a bit easier - it is very rare that you will see a file intended for use with a Mac compressed using anything other than the zip formap. The main exception is that once in a while you’ll get a file with a .tgz extension, which is a compressed Unix tarball, but that’s fairly rare. The main reason for the standardization of the zip format is that it’s the format the Mac uses natively, for example when you right click on a file or folder (or a group of files and/or folders) in Finder, and choose the “Compress” option.

Compressing files saves a lot of space, but one drawback has been that you can’t use Spotlight to find the file within the archive. However, one interesing thing about Mac OS X is that you can extend its capabilities by using plugins. Bartas Technologies offers Ziplight, a freeware Spotlight importer plugin that lets you use Spotlight to find files within zip archives.

We know of only two limitations with this plugin. The first is that it only works under the Tiger or Leopard versions of OS X. The second is that Ziplight will only search the names of the files within a zip archive, not the actual contents (so you can’t search for a text string within a compressed file, for example) - it would take far too long to uncompress every file on every volume on your system, in an attempt to find the searched-for string. But if you know the file name (or a significant portion thereof), and you have installed this plugin, Spotlight should be able to find it for you.

Installing Ziplight is easy - double click on the .dmg file, agree to the license terms, then view the included “Read Me.pdf” file for installation instructions. If you’re new to the Mac you may not quite understand what they are telling you to do, so let us break it down for you. You have to drag the Ziplight plugin (the Ziplight.mdimporter file from the disk image), but since it’s a plugin and not an application, you do not drag it into your Applications directory. Instead, you drag it into a particular directory specifically intended for Spotlight plugins. Easy enough, except there are two such directories on your system - /Library/Spotlight and ~/Library/Spotlight/ (the first is off the root directory, the second off of your user home folder).

If you install the plugin in ~/Library/Spotlight/ it will only be available to you, not to any other user on your Mac. This is probably not what you want (even if you are the only user of your Mac), so we’d suggest dragging the plugin file to the /Library/Spotlight file off the system’s root folder. That will make it useable by all users on your system, plus we think it’s probably better to keep all your Spotlight plugins together in the same directory.

Note that you will need to restart your system, or at least logout and then log back in, before the plugin will become active - and after that it will take some time for Spotlight to index all your zip files. We do wish that maybe there was a way that it could take a bit more time and index the contents of those files (after all, since it’s doing it as a background task, it’s not like it’s under a time constraint) but we’ll take what we can get, and having the ability to find filenames within zip files can be downright handy at times.

There are many other available plugins that can extend the capabilities of your Mac. For example, there is a whole page of plugins that will extend the capabilities of QuickLook, which are installed in a very similar manner (they go into a different directory than the Spotlight plugins, but install just as easily). As you become more familiar with your Mac, you’ll almost certainly want to install more of these little helpers that make OS X work smarter!

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One of the things that you probably look at a lot more often than you realize is the time display in the top menu bar. If you came from a Windows environment, you may have tweaked out that display to show you the date and/or the day of the week. Apple seems to think it’s sufficient to let you see the time, and if you can figure out how, the (abbreviated) day of the week. We just happen to like having a bit more information available at a glance:

Above you see our top menubar time display, along with the dropdown menu you get if you right-click on that display. As you see, we show the day of the week (non-abbreviated), the full date (again non-abbreviated), the time complete with seconds, and an AM/PM indication (by the way, it’s only highlighted blue like that because we have the dropdown activated - usually it’s the normal black text on the semi-transparent background). As you may have guessed, we have a wide screen display - were it a regular display we might try to conserve a bit more space, but as it is we have enough screen real estate that we can afford to have the display the way we want it. But, you may be wondering how we did it - if so, that’s the purpose of this article.

To begin with, click on “Open Date & Time” in the dropdown shown above. That will open this preference panel (you might have to click on the “Clock” tab at the top):

In this panel, check the options shown above and any others you want EXCEPT for “Show the day of the week” - if you check that, you’ll get an ABBREVIATED day (e.g. Mon Tue Wed etc.). We are too OCD around here to want to stare at an abbreviation, we like seeing the word spelled out! While you’re in this panel, click on the “Date & Time” tab and the display will change to this - make sure you have selected a server and that you have checked the box to set date & time automatically.

We would just point out that if you have another machine acting as a timeserver on your local network, or you prefer to use a non-Apple timeserver, you are perfectly free to enter the address into the text field (this example shows using another machine on your local net as a time reference):

Anyway, see the button at the bottom of that panel labeled “Open International”? You need to click on that now, which will bring up the International preference pane. Select the “Formats” tab and you will see this display:

First note that the Region is set to “Custom” - we don’t remember doing that, and think that it probably changes automatically once you start customizing formats, but just keep in mind that it probably does need to be set to “Custom” for this to work. Now, note the two “Customize” buttons in the Dates and Times sections. We’ll show you the Times section first, so click on the LOWER “Customize” button, so we can show you how we constructed our date and time string. On the panel that appears, be sure to select “Medium” in the “Show” dropdown, because this is the format the menubar display uses (and just about nothing else uses it, as far as we can see):

Unfortunately our string is a bit longer than the display allows, so in order to let you see it all, here’s the same display but with the cursor moved all the way to the right:

When you first enter this panel, it will show you the current time format, except that if you checked the box to show the (abbreviated) day of the week, that will not appear here. What you want to do is insert the elements you want to use to build your date and time string, as we have done. You can drag any of the elements in the bubbles from the list shown, and you can insert normal punctuation such as commas, colons and spaces. But as you may have noticed, we have “bubble” elements that don’t appear in the panel! Where did we get those? Well, if you back out of this panel to the previous one (”international” panel, “Formats” tab), then click on the FIRST “Customize” button (in the Dates section), and then select “Full” from the dropdown, you should see this panel:

Now, here’s the trick. TEMPORARILY drag the date elements you will need into the text field - you don’t have to remove the ones that are already there, just drop these after the existing string. Then use the mouse, or the shift+arrow keys, to highlight just the elements that you temporarily dragged into the field. Press Command-X to “cut” (copy and delete) those elements, leaving only the original format string (if you make a mistake at any point in this process, pressing Command-Z should undo the last thing you did). Now back out of this panel and click the “Customize” button for the Times section again - once again make sure this dropdown shows “Medium”, then use Command-V to paste the copied date elements into the time string! If they aren’t in the correct order you can highlight each individual item and drag it around until you get it right. Insert any desired punctuation (commas and spaces) and you should be good to go.

It is a little tricky to position the cursor properly during this process (between the “bubbles”), so don’t get too frustrated, just realize that it’s tricky for everyone and you should get it in a few tries, and remember to use Command-Z if you make a mistake.

We do realize that someone will probably want to point out that the latest version of iCal displays the current date on its icon in the dock, but we like to see our date and time information in one place at a glance, not have to search the dock for the iCal icon!

Uber-geek tip: The actual menubar time string format definition is stored in the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MenuBarClock.plist, and if you knew the correct format you should (theoretically) be able to change it in that file only, with changing the “Medium” time format for other applications. But unless you are a true geek (or like to live on the edge) we don’t recommend attempting to manually edit that file, because you could really mess up your menubar clock. If you simply must try to do it that way, at least please back up the file someplace safe before you start messing with it, so you can restore it if your edits really mess things up!

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Have you ever installed a piece of software and wondered exactly what files it is dropping all over your hard drive? Unlike Windows, OS X does not have a central registry file where program preferences can be stored, so if a program needs to store preferences or data between runs, it has to put that information somewhere - sometimes in a preferences file that is easily found (and easily removed if you use one of the programs mentioned in our previous article, “Remove ALL (well, most all) of unwanted programs”), but sometimes in an obscure file that the software author wants to keep hidden for one reason or another (and that usually is not deleted if you uninstall the software).

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a program that could watch your system and show you exactly what files are being installed? Or, perhaps you have a need to just monitor your Mac for a period of time to see what files are being accessed. That is where fseventer may help.

The features of fseventer are listed on their web site as follows:

• Observes filesystem changes using the same underlying API as Spotlight
• Provides a graphical representation of the file activity
• Example use could be to determine what files are changed via software installation, preferences, etc
• Requires admin access & will only work on Mac OS X 10.4+ “Tiger” and “Leopard”

Basically what this does is to show you, in a graphical format, all the file activity on your system during the time you have it enabled (clicking on the button in the upper left hand corner starts and stops tracking). If you don’t like the tree view, you can view the activity in a list format.

fseventer works best if you can quit all programs (other than the ones you are interested in) that may do file creation or modification during the monitoring period. For example, when we were testing it, one of our gabby friends sent us an instant message, and this caused a lot of extra file activity that was totally unrelated to the process we were trying to monitor (you would be amazed at how many temporary files certain programs create and/or access).

Also, in our opinion the tree view format can get totally out of hand (too much information!) if you let it run more than a few minutes (and it will automatically drop events once its internal buffer is full - the limit is set in the preferences). We with there were some way to exclude activity not associated with the processes we are actually interested in, but that would probably be difficult or impossible for the software authors to implement. Even so, this utility provides an interesting view of what’s happening on your Mac, and it is free to download (but the author does accept donations).

This is another tool that some folks will find very useful, while others will see no need for it at all. Those who prefer to use their geek tools from the command line may wish to take note of the “Related Links” at the bottom of the fseventer page.

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