Ask TUAW: Locking the Dock, Hiding, Photo Stitching, and More

Wednesday means Ask TUAW, our weekly questions and answers column! This week we'll be tackling questions from last week about locking the Dock, hiding applications, Boot Camp, stitching photos into panoramas, and deleting files immediately from a flash drive. As always, please leave your own comments, and ask more questions for next week either in the comments to this post or using the tip form. Now let's get to it.

xioztzu asks

Question, how can you lock the dock so icons cannot be added or removed? I have a older relative that has trouble clicking and often drags when he clicks. The end result is he is always calling me to ask where application X went.

Okay, fortunately, this one is not too hard. First, you need to make sure his account is not an administrator account. (If it is already and administrator account just go into the Accounts pane of the System Preferences and create another account as admin, then log into that account and demote his to managed). Next you'll need to go into "Parental Controls" for the "Finder & System" for his account.

Here you'll need to make sure that "Modify the Dock" is unchecked. Now when he logs in under this account he won't be able to change the Dock. Since it sounds like he may also have some other difficulties using his Mac, it is probably a good idea for him not to run as an administrator, and you may want to turn on some of the other controls as well.

Jethro asks

(I am in the process of switching to a Mac) Would you please explain to me what hiding does, why it is there, and why I would want to hide something instead of minimizing it (like I would in Windows)?

My colleague Michael Rose notes that "in Windows, if you minimize an application, you've minimized the entire environment for that app... On Mac OS X, when you minimize a window, you might still have 20 windows for that application nestled in between your other items." Basically, hiding affects all the windows of an application, whereas minimizing only affects a single window. Furthermore, there is some anecdotal evidence that hiding an application brings some performance advantages that merely minimizing its windows does not (by freeing up some system resources). Here is Apple's document on hiding applications.

Alex asks

Do you know whether it will be necessary to reinstall (ie lose) my Windows Boot Camp partition when upgrading to 10.5 Leopard, or can I just run the new and improved Boot Camp installer?

Commenting on unreleased software (particularly unreleased software I've never used) is generally inadvisable, but I'm pretty sure that is that the answer is no. When you install Leopard you will do so in your existing OS X partition. This should leave your Boot Camp partition, with its Windows install, untouched. The new Boot Camp may bring some new drivers, etc., but these should not require a complete re-install of Windows.

Terry asks

I have a simple question that I hope you can answer for me. I have looked high and low and can't find a good photo stitching application for my MAC. I have the Canon application but it is horrible... I have also tried an application called Doubletake and that seems to fall short as well. Have you run across one in your many web/mac travels?

Well of course one can do this manually with older versions of Photoshop, but the forthcoming PS3 has some new features that make stitching much easier (and remember you can get the PS3 beta if you have a CS2 serial). So a few quick searches turned up a couple of commercial products that incorporate Autostich from the University of British Columbia. These are Autopano (€99) and a couple of different tools from Dekus Digital. I have not used either of the programs, but the Autostitch algorithm seems to be very well regarded.

Nick asks

Is there some way to empty the trash for only one volume? Failing that is there an easy way to remove files without them going to the trash? The problem is this... I often use usb flash drives to move things around. Generally I need to delete something from them every time I use them so I can fit something else on there. That means I have to empty my trash every time I use a flash drive... or use 'rm' from the terminal. In my Win32 days I would use SHIFT-DEL and I can't find a good OSX replacement.

Well there several possible solutions for you. I'll present them all, and you can decide what will work best for you. Mac Geekery has a post addressing exactly your situation. You can force OS X to immediately delete files from a flash drive by creating a bogus .Trashes file on it. Another possible solution is the Super Empty Trash AppleScript applet which allows you to do selective volume trash emptying. Finally, you can add a little application like Graveyard to your Finder toolbar, such than whenever you drag and drop a file onto the icon, that file will be immediately deleted.

Although it is probably overkill, you could start using the Finder replacement Path Finder which has a built-in secure delete function, among many others. I use it regularly on my main machine.

Okay, that'll do it for now. See you next week, and keep those questions coming!

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