hints.macworld.comMac OS X Hints - A community-built collection of OS X hints

-- Powered by the Parse.ly Publisher Platform (P3). More Mac Sites: Macworld MacUser iPhone Central Pick of the Week - Nov 10 [ Show all picks ] Path Finder 5 - A feature-laden Finder replacement -- Submit Hint • Search • The Forums • Links • Stats • Polls • Headlines • RSS 14,000 hints and counting! -- -- Notice: Mac OS X Hints is now a read-only site Nov 13, '14 10:56:00AM • Contributed by: bcappel We respect its storied history, and value the contributions of its many readers, but we can no longer support it at the level it deserves. There’s a wealth of great information here that many will find useful, so we've elected to maintain it in a read-only form. Thanks for your many years of attention and everything you've done to make the site such a valuable resource. • Currently 2.00 / 5 You rated: 2 / 5 (3 votes cast) [72 views] -- Getting Java client apps to run the way you want Sep 16, '14 07:00:00AM • Contributed by: pglock I sometimes find the Java setup on my various Apple devices to be a mystery. Recently, I was trying to get a Java applet to run in the same way on 2 iMacs and my MacBook Air. The applet is a simple vpn client from Juniper that lets me access a Citrix Desktop from any Mac that I can install the Citrix receiver client on so I can work on 'Company stuff' from a large screen iMac when I'm sat at home or from my MacBook when I'm on the road (it works fine over 3/4G). The first thing is that you have to do some configuring of both Java and Safari to get the applet to run at all. Once that was all done, I could log in from all my Macs, fire up the applet and establish a secure connection. On two of the Macs, as soon as I fired up the Citrix app, the Java vpn window would show 'error'. The console showed a Java crash. But on the third Mac, everything worked fine. I made sure that the Safari and Java preferences were set the same on each machine but still no joy. Then I remembered that I had done some Java development in the past and installed various jdks from Oracle so I ran: java -version in Terminal on each machine. I keep everything up to date via the Java control panel (currently 1.7xx soon to be 1.8) so was surprised to see this: java version "1.6.0_65" That was on the working Mac. Then I remembered the difference between 'System' Java, Java plugins, and Java development kits. Simply put, you can have multiple versions of Java in different places. What was happening on the not-working Macs was that the jdk versions were being used, and the Juniper vpn client won't work with them. To fix things for the moment I simply removed the jdk folders. sudo rm -fr /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/* And then checked that the reported version of Java was 1.6 on each Mac. Web applets still use the up to date, secure version 1.7 plugin. [ crarko adds: I believe Oracle has said that eventually Java will no longer support applets at all, on any platform.] Post a comment • Comments (8) Currently 1.86 / 5 You rated: 4 / 5 (7 votes cast) [9,419 views] -- Siri: workaround Content Not Available error Sep 11, '14 07:00:00AM • Contributed by: robleach A few weeks ago, a number of people started reporting having trouble with Siri. Phrases like 'Call my wife' or 'Tell my dad' stopped working. Siri knew who those people were but proclaimed 'Uh oh, I don't have a phone number for Jane Isa Doe." and beneath, there's a message: "Content Not Available." I debugged this for over an hour and on a hunch, found a workaround that seems to work for nearly everyone who has tried it. All you have to do is delete the middle name of the person in *your* contact card where it is stored as a relationship. I'm not sure why that works; it shouldn't, but it does. That's why I call it a workaround instead of a fix. I figure Apple is mucking around with Siri and perhaps caused a bug or some sort of corruption. I'd be curious to know from MacOSXHints users whether they are experiencing this problem in the first place and if the workaround works for you, too. I'd also like to understand why this works and why the problem even exists. I had tried a ton of suggested fixes for the issue before stumbling upon this work around. You can read more about it in my blog entry . In it, I link to the Apple discussion forums at the bottom, where people have been saying that this workaround fixes the issue for them. [ crarko adds: I find I already don't have middle names in any of my Contacts, so I've not seen this. I wonder if something is going on at Apple's end, where the Siri processing gets done. Perhaps in preparation for iOS 8.] Post a comment • Comments (7) Currently 2.67 / 5 You rated: 1 / 5 (9 votes cast) [9,396 views] -- Older browser behavior changes in Google search Sep 04, '14 07:00:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous As of August 29, 2014, Google has decided to intentionally break old browsers. They say it's not a bug, it's by design here , even though Google's support page says it accepts Safari 4 as a fully supported browser. If you want Google searches to go back to the modern style, you need to change your User-Agent string. For Safari, enable the Develop Window and use an option in there that works. Internet Explorer 9 (Windows) works, for example. [ crarko adds: I don't have an older system active at the moment to try this. It's inevitable that older software becomes obsolete, the same way older hardware does. I think the actual hint here is a reminder that if a site misbehaves, changing the user agent can be an effective troubleshooting tool.] Post a comment • Comments (2) Currently 2.25 / 5 You rated: 5 / 5 (8 votes cast) [11,284 views] -- 10.8: Open a specific browser based on the URL Aug 27, '14 07:00:00AM • Contributed by: tom_sep Usually I want to open Gmail in Chrome and URLs pointing to my development server in Firefox. For everything else I use Safari. There is this nifty free app called LinCastor that enables you to register your own handler for an URL. Although it had beed designed to register your own non-standard URL schemes, it can intercept standard http and https as well. In LinCastor (which you need to double-click twice to fully open for editing): Add a new URL scheme Choose AppleScript handler Paste the following code in, (replacing the stub code at the bottom): on handle_url(args) if (|URL| of args starts with "https://mail.google.") then tell application "Google Chrome" open location |URL| of args end tell else if (|URL| of args starts with "http://") then tell application "Firefox" open location |URL| of args end tell else tell application "Safari" open location |URL| of args end tell end return 1 end Obviously you should customize the code to suite your own specific needs. You can validate the script right in LinCastor before saving/activating it. I use the same mechanism to launch 'site specific browsers apps' created by Fluid . For example I have a JIRA app wrapper which looks for anything staring with http://issues. [ crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. LinCastor requires OS X 10.8 or later. I tried it in 10.10 beta 2, and it also worked there. There's not much documentation for it, so tinker around a bit to get the result you want.] Post a comment • Comments (9) Currently 1.04 / 5 You rated: 2 / 5 (231 votes cast) [11,531 views] -- Setting Up an iOS 7 On-Demand VPN Aug 20, '14 07:00:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous I'm writing a detailed set of instructions for getting VPN 'on-demand' working with iOS 7. See Setting Up an iOS 7 On-Demand VPN for the details (it's way too much stuff to post via MacOSXHints, as much as I've been a fan of this site for many years). The complete set of instructions include: setting up an IPSec VPN with iOS setting up an OpenVPN with iOS setting up a managed iOS device with VPN 'on demand' capabilities (for both IPSec and OpenVPN). A few comments about this work: One of the primary objectives was to document a setup where the VPN-connected iOS device routes all the device's traffic through our netw...