Grab Bag: Your Lion Questions, My Lion Answers

A lot of people come to the Boyce Blog via Google, and I get a report of what exactly they were looking for. Lately, I've had a lot of visits from Google searches for "Lion won't work with Microsoft Word", but that's hardly the only one. I thought I'd wade through the last few days of reports and give the people what they're looking for. If I don't answer YOUR question send me an email. The ones I'm answering here are the ones that have been "Googled" multiple times. Funny they seem to all be about Lion.

Google search: "How to run Palm desktop on OS Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: You don't. Very sorry. Palm Desktop is a PowerPC application, and like every other PowerPC application, will not run under Mac OS Lion. The most recent system that can run PowerPC applications is Mac OS X 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard). There is no way around it: Palm Desktop will NOT run if your Mac is on Lion. Don't expect Palm to put out a new version-- they won't.

If you are using Palm Desktop and contemplating a move to Lion, export your Palm Desktop data before you install Lion. Export your Contacts as vCards, then import into Apple's Address Book. Export your Calendar as vCal, then import into iCal. If you have already made your move to Lion contact me privately and we can talk about your next step.

Google search: "Lion won't open Microsoft Word" (very popular search)
Boyce Blog answer: It will if you are using Office 2008 or Office 2011. Microsoft says that they will support both versions with priority being given to the 2011 version. You will not be able to use any part of Office 2004, or, Office X because they are PowerPC applications, and as you now now, PowerPC applications will not run in Mac OS Lion. If you are already on Lion, get Office 2011. Here's a link to Microsoft Office 2011 on Amazon, where you will save at least $20 over the suggested retail price.

UPDATE: you can download Microsoft Office 2011 (Home and Student Family Pack-- 3 Installs, or Home and Business-- 2 installs) from the Amazon Mac App Store via this link. Sorry, they don't have the single-installation versions available for download but if you need it now, you need it now.

Google search: "Can't open FileMaker with Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: Once again, probably a case of a PowerPC application. FileMaker 10 and 11 will work, but only version 11 will be upgraded to be fully compatible. At this writing, 11.0v3 is the latest version and it has a couple of small issues. A free upgrade from any version of FileMaker 11 to 11.0v4 will come in August, according to FileMaker. If you have FileMaker 9 or 10, upgrade to 11 via this link. If you have 8.5 or older (or no FileMaker at all) you will have to buy the full version. Here's the link for that. You'll save $20-$30 off FileMaker's price.

Note: FileMaker documents have not changed formats since version 7. So, your old FileMaker documents (databases) will open up just fine with FileMaker 11. It's the older program that is the problem. Your data is just fine.

Google search: "Are there any programs that will not work on Lion"
Boyce Blog answer: Maybe one or two... Actually, many. One more time: PowerPC applications will not run in Lion, period. They won't even start up. Other apps will start, but not quite work right. There's a pretty good list of what does and does not work at www.roaringapps.com.

You can find out rather quickly which of your applications are guaranteed to NOT work by following these steps:

1. Apple Menu/About This Mac
2. Click "More Info..." and wait for System Profiler to launch
3. Scroll down to "Applications" and click on it
4. Make the window wider, then click on "Kind" to sort by Kind. Anything that says "PowerPC" in the Kind column will not work. (Anything that says "Classic" in the Kind column won't work either-- they didn't work in 10.6 or 10.5 either)

Here's a picture, with the important stuff in yellow. "Intel" is OK. PowerPC is not OK. Do this before you install Lion please.

Google search: "big slowdown after installing lion"
Boyce Blog answer: There's a BIG slowdown after installing Lion, but it's temporary. The slowdown is caused by Lion's Spotlight feature as it has to re-index your entire hard drive. This can take some hours (mine took overnight) and your Mac's fans will run full-blast during this process as it is very CPU-intensive (and therefore very heat-inducing). Just let it happen. It's normal, it's expected, and it's temporary. (When you're done, take advantage of Spotlight's great searching powers-- top right corner of the screen.)

That takes care of our top five searches from the past couple of days. Remember, if you have a question and you can't find an answer, send me an email and I'll see what I can do. Do a little Google-ing first though. Who knows, the answer might turn out to be another page of this site!

Tip of the Day, July 30th, 2008

See that row of keys across the top of your keyboard? The row you never use? How about making those keys do something useful, like opening your mail program, or Safari, or (yuck) Microsoft Word? Here’s how you do it using a FREE program called “Spark.”

Step One: go to versiontracker.com and download Spark. Here’s the link.
Step Two: double-click the download from Step One, and if things go right you’ll see something called Spark on your desktop. It will look like this:



Open that, revealing this. That’s the Spark application. Drag it to your Applications folder.
Step Three: open up the Applications folder and open up Spark. You’ll see something like this (without the shortcuts yet):


Step Four: click the little gear at top left, hold it down, and slide down to “Application.” Now you get another box:

All you need to do is fill in the box. Click where it says “click to edit” and then press the “trigger” key. Click where it says “Choose...” and choose a program to open. “Calculator” is a nice one-- why not make Calculator be F5? Try it-- there’s really nothing like getting your hands a little dirty.

From that point on, your key will work-- forever, for free. Pretty neat.

If you have trouble, click the link at the bottom of the page and send me an email.

iTunes University

Pretty good motto.

Apple's iTunes university offers more than 250,000 free lectures, videos, films, and other materials-- from universities, museums and art institutions, and libraries all over the world. You'll find courses from Stanford, Michigan, and Cal (and from roughly 300 others-- click this link for a current list); lectures about past and current exhibits from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art), and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (and many, many more); and discussions and insights from The New York Public Library, The Royal Opera House in London, and the Carnegie Institution for Science among many, many others. And it's free. Unbelievable.
Did I mention that it's all free?

Some of the offerings on iTunes U are audio, some of them have video too. I'm currently watching a set of lectures on iPhone programming, recordings of classes given at Stanford University. It's just like being there, except that I don't have to do it at Stanford and I don't have to do it at any particular time. And, if I feel like taking a coffee break I can simply pause the lecture, and if I fall asleep in class I can rewind the lecture and watch it "again."

You want this. Trust me. Start up iTunes, click on "iTunes Store" at the left, and then "iTunes U" at the right. The rest is pure exploration.

Here are some screen shots to get you in the mood.

iTunes U categories

The class I'm "taking" at Stanford

Still from a Stanford lecture

Interesting-looking class-- I should take this one

Still frame from "Introduction to Drawing" class-- I should take this one too

Offerings from UC Davis

Interesting mini-series from UC Davis

From the University of Michigan

Whatever he's teaching, I'm going to watch

Find something interesting, give it a double-click, and watch it right there on your Mac. Or, download these things onto your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and watch them on the go. Either way, it's all free free free, so get in there and start clicking. I guarantee you'll find something interesting.

I still can't believe it's free.

Tip of the Day, July 29th, 2008

Supposing you wanted to put your Mac to sleep. Or to shut it down. Or maybe restart it. Do it the way the cool kids do: press the Eject button (top row of keys, a triangle with a line under it) while also holding pressing Control (either one of the Control keys). You get a box asking “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?”

If that’s what you want, hit Enter on your keyboard, and voila, the computer shuts down. If you want to put it to sleep, you can click the Sleep button... or just type “s.” Want to restart instead? Type “r.”



If you change your mind about shutting down/sleeping/restarting you can click the Cancel button... or, better yet, press the “Esc” key. Pretty darned neat. Once you get the hang of it, you can do Control-Eject and then Enter lickety split, faster than anyone can choose “Shut Down” with the mouse.

I “discovered” this tip accidentally. I was trying to eject a CD, and when I pressed Eject I got the “Are you sure you want to shut down your computer now?” box. I was surprised to see that box, so I cancelled and tried again-- with the same result! I kept pressing Eject and I kept getting the box asking me whether I really wanted to shut down. I was mystified. Mystified, that is, until I realized that Charlie the Cat, who I thought was sitting beside the keyboard, was really sitting on it-- more precisely, on the Control key, way off at the bottom left corner of the keyboard. When Charlie moved, the Eject key did what it used to do (Eject things). And that’s when I figured it out.

Anyhow, Charlie the Cat gets credit for this one. She’s not much of a typist so this is really a team effort.

Groovy new search engine

There’s a new search engine-- www.cuil.com. It’s really cool. In fact, that’s how you pronounce it. Give it a whirl.

Best Safari 5 Extensions

Safari 5 introduced a new feature to Apple's web browser, namely Extensions. Extensions allow programmers to "extend" Safari's abilities beyond what comes standard. Here's a link to Apple's official Safari Extensions Gallery page, with many many many Extensions to read about and download. Four extensions that I've found handy are AdBlock, ClickToFlash, AutoPagerize, and Page One. UPDATE: there's one more extension that I like. Maybe it's because I wrote it. It's the ESPN Time Shifter, which changes espn.com's listed game times to display in the time zone of your choice. No more subtracting 3 hours from Eastern Time for us Californians.

AdBlock does what you'd expect: it blocks ads. Check out these before-and-after shots. First the regular page, then the same page with AdBlock installed and active.


Much better. Go get it. Here's the link. Note: it's donation-ware. Try it for free, then donate whatever you think is right.

ClickToFlash prevents Flash animations from loading until (or unless) you click on them. Fantastic. You get a nice, peaceful web-browsing experience but you can still click the Flash videos that you want to see-- which will turn out to be "not very many." Here's a before-and-after (the circled ad rotates through seven different deals on the FoodSaver-- very distracting):

With ClickToFlash installed and active, the same page looks like this:

You can still see the space where the ad would be, and if you click it once it will show you the ad and all of its seven-image animation. AdBlocker would have hidden the ad completely, and that's not so bad either. You can use both AdBlock and ClickToFlash simultaneously and that is what I do. Use this link to get ClickToFlash. It's free.

AutoPagerize (donation-ware) and Page One (free) both attempt to make multi-page web articles (the ones that make you click to go to page 2, and then 3, and then 4, etc.) easier to read by putting all of the pieces together, all on one page. Both are terrific though AutoPagerize works on more sites, while Page One does it a little more neatly. Either way, you won't see much of this sort of thing anymore:



BONUS: you can often use Safari's built-in Reader to turn a multi-page story into a single-page one that is cleaner and nicer to read. You don't need an extension-- it's part of Safari. All you do is click the "Reader" button (circled in red here) in Safari's address bar (not that it is always there-- it only shows up when Safari thinks it knows what the main story on a page is). One click takes you from this (a four-page story):

to this:

It's hard to see, but in the top right corner it says "Page 1 of 4." What that means is you get the whole story in one scrolling window, with no ads and no other distractions. Pretty nice.

UPDATE: I put in the "after" picture so you can see how AdBlock works. Oopsy.

And Another Thing

Speaking of making big improvements to the iPhone via some VERY simple changes: wouldn’t it be cool if you could scroll past the last page of your iPhone apps, and have it wrap around to the beginning? Currently, going from page 1 to page 7 takes six swipes to the left, and from page 7 to page 1 take six swipes to the right. If you could “wrap around” you’d be able to do either in ONE swipe.

Probably too late to get a patent on the “wrap around” idea but when you see it on your iPhone just remember you heard it here first.

If I Were King

Why can’t I be in charge for just a few minutes? I know everything would be better for everyone. Here’s what I’d do to improve the iPhone (and I’ll bet it could be done in a day):

1. Provide the OPTION to sort applications by name. Or by date downloaded. A to Z, or Z to A, newest in front, or newest in back. User’s choice.

2. Provide an EASIER way to access the settings. On my iPhone, the settings are on page 1. So, if I’m using a program on page 7, as I was last night, and while I’m using that program I decide to adjust the brightness of the screen, the process goes like this:

1. Press the Home button
2. Swipe right (moving one page closer to the front)
3. Swipe right again (another page closer)
4. Swipe right again (another page closer)
5. Swipe right again (another page closer)
6. Swipe right again (another page closer)
7. Swipe right again (another page closer)
8. Tap Settings
9. Tap Brightness
10. Slide to adjust the brightness
11. Press the Home button
12. Swipe LEFT (trying to get back to where I was)
13. Swipe left (getting closer)
14. Swipe left (getting closer)
15. Swipe left (getting closer)
16. Swipe left (getting closer)
17. Swipe left (getting closer)
18. Tap the program I was using

XVIII steps! That’s about XV too many. By the time I’ve done all that, I’ve forgotten what I was doing. At least I got the brightness adjusted. You can bet I don’t do it very often.

3. Provide a QUICK way to get back to recently-used programs. That would help with the problem in #2 above. Scrolling through multiple pages, back and forth, gets old the first day.

4. Provide a QUICK way to move a program from page 7 to page 1. When everything was on one screen, as it was when the iPhone first came out, dragging an icon to place was easy. When you have to jump past six or seven pages to get where you’re going, it’s not easy at all. I end up doing the old “15 puzzle” trick, where you stash something down in the bottom of the screen and then pick it up later from another page.

The iPhone interface is only a year old but it’s creaking already. It worked at first, but in the new “App Store” world it needs some changes. If you happen to talk with Steve Jobs, mention this post. Thank you.

Tip of the Day, July 26th, 2008

I would imagine that you have a few icons on your desktop. Maybe more than a few. Maybe a lot. Turns out that “a lot” is bad. The problem is that the Finder (which displays the icons) is not very good at dealing with a large number of icons at once. The effect is your machine slows down, just a little, for every icon on the desktop. Incredible, but true. So, if you want your machine to be fast again, reduce the number of items on your desktop. It’s OK to put a couple of folders onto your desktop, and to toss zillions of items into those folders, because when the Finder looks at the desktop it will only “see” the folders (not what’s inside).

iPhone 3G vs. iPhone 3GS

In the market for an iPhone? Tempted by the 3G at $99? Wondering whether the 3GS is worth an extra $100? Wonder no more. The answer is yes, it’s worth it. Here’s what you miss by not getting the 3GS.

• Better camera for still pictures (3 megapixels vs. the 3G’s 2 megapixels, autofocus, exposure control)
• Video recording and editing (and built-in sending to YouTube and/or email and/or MobileMe)
• Voice control (for dialing, for playing songs)
• Faster web browsing (and faster network performance in general)
• Compass (for knowing which way the map should be oriented)

The compass bears a little extra explanation. Most people think that the built-in compass is a toy, something for Boy Scouts maybe. Certainly not something useful to a city-dweller. As it turns out, the compass is something that turns out to be VERY useful. You might not use it directly, but some of the neatest apps on the iPhone rely on it. Here are a couple worth checking out, for those with a 3GS already:

Map (built-in app). When you show a map, and tap the location button, it shows where you are. Tap it again and it spins the map around so it’s oriented the way you’re facing. Can’t do that without a compass.

New York Nearest Subway (pending approval from the Apple Store). You see a map of the subway system at first... then you tilt the iPhone up as if you were going to take a picture. You see the picture-- and you also see, overlayed, the subway stations that are in that direction. You also get the distance to them. This makes it very easy to find a subway station.

Click here to see a video of New York Nearest Subway in action.


Pretty neat. And it is only for the iPhone 3GS, because it relies on the compass to know which way you’re aiming.

It’s easy to imagine a whole bunch of compass-using apps, such as one that would show gas stations or ATMs or bathrooms in the direction you’re facing, or another that would tell you the name of the mountain you’re looking at. These apps don’t exist today but I am sure they will soon (even if I have to write them myself).

My advice to anyone choosing between the 3G and the 3GS is “get the 3GS.” The extra $100 will hurt the moment you spend it but you’ll be glad you did it every day after that, multiple times a day.

It's "iPhone 3GS," not "iPhone 3G S"

I don’t know if it’s official or not but it appears that the new iPhone-- previously known as the “iPhone 3G S”-- is now known as the “iPhone 3GS.” The space between the “G” and the “S” has disappeared. Not sure when this happened but I’m glad of it, as it was awkward to type the other way. I point this out as a public service announcement.

Rumor has it that Steve Jobs didn’t like the space, and that all references to “iPhone 3G (space) S” on the Apple website were changed to “iPhone 3GS” within a day of his return to full-time work. I can’t tell you whether it’s true or not but it’s a nice story anyhow.

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Advice and Info

Apple released Mountain Lion today, also known as OS X 10.8. This comes less than a month after the MobileMe-to-iCloud transition deadline, which means less than a month after a whole lot of people converted to OS X 10.7 (Lion). My advice, based on over 21 years of full-time Mac consulting, is wait. Mountain Lion looks like a real improvement to Lion, with new apps and new refinements, but who knows for sure that the things you need to do can still be done with 10.8? Will Quicken work? How about Microsoft Office, and Adobe's Creative Suite? How about your printer and your scanner? How about your Apple Fax Modem? (Actually, scratch that last one: the Apple Fax Modem quit working in 10.7.)

Apple no doubt is hard at work on a 10.8.1 update, and probably has been for weeks. This may come as a shock but Apple's software-- like everyone else's-- is released with known bugs and imperfections, for the simple reason that if you wait until your software's perfect you'll never ship anything. You have to draw a line and say "This is good enough, let's ship it, and let's get going on an update." "Point One" updates, then, generally address bugs that Apple identifies prior to shipping "Point Zero." While they're working on the Point One update, early adopters-- those using the initial release-- are finding new bugs and incompatibilities, stuff that isn't on Apple's list yet. Those issues generally have to wait for the "Point Two" update. And that's what you should do, if you can stand it.

I shouldn't tempt you, but here are a couple of links to educate you about Mountain Lion.
Click here to see Apple's short video touting Mountain Lion's new features. Click here to read John Siracusa's extensive Ars Technica review of Mountain Lion. (The video takes 5 minutes and 30 seconds to play. Siracusa's review, which as usual is the best of the best, took me over two hours to read.) Click here to visit Roaring Apps, home of the best Mountain Lion compatibility table on the web.

Mountain Lion is available for $19.95 and only through the Mac App Store (under the Apple menu, or via this link). When you click the button to buy it you may be turned, away due to the age of your Mac. You won't be charged in that case, so go ahead and experiment.

Apple 10.6.8 Revised Update

Apple put out a "supplemental" 10.6.8 update today (July 25th, 2011). Among other important fixes, it restores network printing functionality that broke with the original 10.6.8. Apple puts it this way: "resolves issues with certain network printers that pause print jobs immediately and fail to complete."

Sounds good to me.

Go to Software Update under your Apple menu and get this fix.

iPhone Stuff I Like

If you have an iPhone, even an old one, you surely know that (as of July 11th) there are gobs of new programs that you can add to an iPhone to make it do cool stuff. Being a “cool stuff” person, and also a “I would rather not pay for something if I don’t have to” person, I have tried just about every FREE iPhone application, and I’m here to tell you what I like. So here we go. Remember, they’re all FREE.

Remote
Lets you drive your iTunes library through the air, using your iPhone. Which means you can change songs, adjust volume, or just plain turn it off, all from your iPhone. You’ll need an Airport network, and it’s most effective when the music is being piped from your computer to a set of speakers far from the computer (otherwise, you’d just adjust things on the computer, right?).

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger)
It has your buddy list and everything, just like iChat. And it doesn’t count against your SMS limit, if you have one. Don’t know what an SMS limit is? Send me an email and I’ll tell you.

Cube Runner
It’s a game, of all things. A game where you fly around through a world of cubes. You try to avoid smashing into the cubes, and you do it by tipping the iPhone this way and that. Amazingly fun.

Movies.app
Specify a zip code and they’ll tell you which movies are playing, and where, and when. You can even buy tickets. Just what you need, assuming you need to go to the movies.

Shazam
Hold your iPhone up to the radio and Shazam tells you the name of the song, and the artist. A couple of taps later you’re buying the song from iTunes. Incredible.

Urbanspoon
Helps you pick a restaurant. Like a slot machine, with one wheel being cities, one wheel being the kind of food, and one wheel being how much money you want to spend. Shake the iPhone to spin the wheels. When the wheels stop you’ll see a restaurant name, and when you tap the name you’ll get reviews and a map. Neat.

Newspapers Around the World

Here’s a website that shows you newspapers from around the world.



Point to a city and see the front page of today’s paper for that city. Click on a city and you’ll see the front page zoomed in. Look around (top right) for links to that newspaper’s website etc. Really fun. Thanks to my friend Gene for showing the site to me.

Breakfast with the Lion

I installed Mac OS X Lion onto my MacBook last night. Once installed, Spotlight began indexing my hard drive, and that's a pretty intensive process that really slows everything down (except for the fans inside the MacBook, which were going full-speed). Considering the "About 10 hours remaining" in the following dialog box...

...I thought it would be better to leave it alone, have dessert, go to bed, and try it again in the morning. With breakfast. Which is what I did. Here's how it went.

Let's Get Started
The first thing I noticed about Lion is how clumsy I am with it, especially with the scroll bars and window resizing. This is going to take some getting used to. I will probably have something to say about the new Finder, and it will probably not be totally positive, because my first impression with Lion's Finder is it's not as good as Snow Leopard's Finder. Quite a disappointment.

Main Course
The Apple apps all seem to work just fine, as you would expect. Mail upgraded my old Mail and it's better than the old mail. iChat works. Safari works. Address Book works but I like the old one better. Spotlight works but needs configuring (somebody, remind me to write about that). Pages and Numbers '09 work (but man is it weird to see Pages say "saving" when I quit without saving! That's Lion for you.)

Third-party apps, including Microsoft Word 2011, Microsoft Excel 2011, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2011, seem to work fine. I launched them all, made a new document with them all, and printed from them all. Nothing fancy, and of course I can't test every feature in every program so there may be something that does not work. But, at least for the basics, Office 2011 seems to work.

Office 2008 (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) open and print. AutoUpdate DOES work (choose "Check for Updates" from the Help menu of any of those three apps). Microsoft's AutoUpdate used to be PowerPC code, and it is probably hanging around in your Applications folder, a mistake by Microsoft's installer-- it looks like this, and it won't work in Lion:
(when you see it in Lion it will have a circle and a slash through it). The version of AutoUpdate that works looks like this:
and it lives in a totally different place (see below).

You don't need to know where it lives, but you do need to know that it works. So, basically, if you have Office 2008 installed already, you're probably good to go. If you're only up to Office 2004 (which definitely does not work), you should probably buy Office 2011 (amazon link). Note: contrary to what I thought I knew a few days ago, Office 2008 can be installed under Lion. I tested that first-hand here. I had my doubts about the installer but I was able to install Office 2008 on my Lionized MacBook without any trouble.

Outlook 2011 works (part of Office 2011 if you pay for the Business version). Entourage 2008, which you really ought to ditch anyway (Microsoft did-- that's why they ship Office 2011 with Outlook instead), doesn't work very well for me. In fact, it won't do anything other than launch and crash. Your mileage may vary but if I'm having trouble, who's to say you won't too?

FileMaker Pro 11 seems to work, more or less. It isn't as fast as it was in Snow Leopard but that may be due to increased RAM requirements. Look at these screenshots of FileMaker Pro 11's opening screen-- the first, under Snow Leopard, the second, under Lion. Seems to be having some problems.

Wow.

Other issues in FileMaker include an inability to export files in Excel's "xls" format (requires Rosetta, which is not available in Lion). This is not such a big deal because you can export to the "xlsx" format (the newer one) without Rosetta. However, if you have a FileMaker database with scripts that call on the xls export step you are going to have some work to do changing things over.

If you use Evernote, which I do, you will be sorry to hear that as of this writing Evernote's Safari Web Clipping button does not work. They know about it, and they're fixing it.

Fujitsu's ScanSnap scanner works, hallelujah. This is the greatest time-saver and desk-cleaner-upper ever... scans both sides of a sheet of paper in seconds, one-button operation, and if you couple it with Evernote you can search for items by their content! No more worrying about naming things perfectly or filing them perfectly. Very handy, and I'm thrilled that this works fine in Lion.

I Think I Will Have a Second Cup, Thank You
Lion is more or less working here. Apple will probably have an update of their own soon-- my advice would be to wait for that first Apple update, at the very least, before installing. Most likely Apple already had a list of things they wanted to fix but they couldn't wait forever to get Lion out the door. Let them get that first update out before you make your move.

UPDATE: Here is Microsoft's official statement about Office 2008 and 2011 and Lion. According to them, everything more or less works, and updates are on the way-- for Office 2011 first, then for Office 2008. (I like how they say that such and such action "may" result in a crash. I think I would bet on it.)

Blogging His Way to Millions

I’ve been hearing (from everyone) that the guy who runs Mac Rumors has quit his doctoring job and is now supporting himself via his daily blogging. Incredible. The key, of course, is traffic-- you need to have lots of people coming to your site so you can get advertisers interested in paying you to display their ads. The more traffic you get, the more money you get. Pretty simple equation.

We don’t have a lot of traffic. Not yet. But we can dream. Tell a friend to check out the Boyce Blog. Who knows, one day you may be saying “I knew him when.”

In the meantime, our advertising rates are going to be “among the most competive in their class.” Whatever that means.

How to Use Rules in Mail to Process Email Automatically

In the olden days, mail came in an envelope and if you were lucky, a secretary went through the mail for you, prioritizing and filing and sometimes handling things personally so you wouldn't have to. Unfortunately, most of our mail comes electronically, but fortunately, we can create a "virtual secretary" to process your mail, reducing your work and making you feel as if you're in control of your email instead of the other way around. We do it using a feature called "Rules" in Apple's Mail. Here's how it works.

StatCounter.com emails me a report every week with statistics about my website. Those reports are important to my business so I don't want to miss reading them. My idea: I'll colorize the emails from StatCounter.com, turning them purple so they stand out.



I'll start by opening Mail's Preferences (Mail/Preferences…). In Preferences, I click Rules. Apple gives us the "News From Apple" Rule by default-- it looks for emails from Apple and sets their backgrounds to a light blue. (You may have seen this in action on your own Mac and wondered how it was done. Now you know.)

Now I click Add Rule. There's a place to name my rule, so I do. In the menu that shows "Any recipient" I change that to "From" and I put in the email address that I'll ask Mail to watch for. BONUS HINT: if you click on an email of the sort you're trying to watch for, before making the new Rule, Mail will fill in the blanks for "From" and "Subject" etc. for you. Very nice.

Reading from top to bottom in the picture below, I've set it up so that messages where the "From" contains "reports@statcounter.com" will have their text changed to purple (I chose my own shade of purple by choosing "Other" in the pop-up menu). The text we're talking about here is the stuff that shows up in the list of emails, not in the body of the email itself. We're not changing the email, we're just changing how it looks in the list.

I'm happy with the Rule so I click OK. This is where things can go terribly wrong, so be careful now.

You would think that the correct answer would be Apply. The problem with this is, clicking Apply applies ALL of the Rules (not just the one we just created) and it applies them to every piece of mail in whichever mailbox we're looking at. Likely that's the Inbox. In this case, there would be no problems, but suppose I already had a Rule to automatically forward every piece of email from a particular customer to someone on my staff. If those emails were still in my Inbox, and if I clicked Apply, that Rule would be applied to those same messages AGAIN, so they'd be forwarded AGAIN, and my staff would get them AGAIN, and there'd be a lot of confusion about why a bunch of old messages were suddenly forwarded as if they were something new. No, the answer here is to click Don't Apply. That doesn't mean the Rule won't be saved-- it will be. It just means you want to be in control of things.

It's important to know that Rules are applied to mail as it comes in. That's it-- just that one time (unless of course you choose Apply when making a new rule, but you wouldn't do that after I warned you not to, would you?). Actually, there is one more time that Rules are applied, and that's when you tell Mail to do it by choosing Apply Rules from the Message menu, as shown below.

The difference between choosing Apply Rules in the menu and clicking the Apply button in the Rules dialog box is, choosing Apply Rules only affects the messages that you've selected, while the Apply button affects every message in the mailbox you're looking at. So, if you want to apply Rules to certain selected messages, just highlight them and choose Apply Rules. That way, even if you've made a mistake somewhere, the impact is small, since you won't select a thousand messages at once (I hope). Think of it this way: you make a Rule to handle future emails (as they arrive). If you want to go back and select some messages and apply your Rules, that's fine. Just know that you are applying ALL of the rules to the selected messages. It would be nice if we could apply one Rule at a time but Mail does not provide this feature.

After selecting my StatCounter emails (I searched for them first), I applied my Rules to those selected messages only, and here's what I got.


Hey, it works! Now I'll go back to the Rule and make it a little better by automatically filing the emails as they arrive. I don't have to make a new Rule-- I can simply modify the one I already have. Once it's open, I click the little "+" at then end of the colorizing step, and it gives me more options. Here I've chose to file the mail into a folder called "2 NEED TO ACT ON."

You get a lot of options. Here they are:

I worked a few more actions into my Rule so that in addition to being colored purple and filed automatically, messages from reports@statcounter.com will trigger a sound and also be forwarded to someone else for review. Here's how that looks.

This is powerful stuff. In real life, I have many, many rules. Messages from Southwest Airlines are forwarded to the TripIt service (they put my travel schedule into my calendar, automatically). Messages from Mom are announced (I made a recording that says "Mom sent you an email" so news from home gets my attention). Messages that tell me about appointments have their backgrounds set to light green. Messages with invoices attached have their text set to dark green. Messages that come from certain senders (spammers) are sent to the Junk folder (because sometimes the Junk mail filters miss things). All in all, Mail Rules do a whole lot of filing and sorting and processing for me, and they can do the same for you. I highly recommend you make use of this incredible, time-saving feature.

(Outlook users: for you it's almost the same. Go to the Tools menu and choose Rules. Just be sure you pick the right kind of Rule: IMAP Rules for IMAP accounts, POP Rules for POP accounts, and so on. It's only a little more trouble.)

Thanks to Managed Service Customer Patty L. for suggesting I blog about Rules.