Ask TUAW: Quicksilver worries, remote iTunes control, cross-platform sharing keyboard and mouse, and more

This time in Ask TUAW we'll be considering the future of Quicksilver, cross-platform keyboard and mouse sharing, controlling iTunes on a remote Mac, fixing messed up Album metadata in iTunes, cross-platform password storage and more.

As always, your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X, as certain answers will vary between different Macs and Tiger vs. Leopard, etc. (we'll assume you're running Leopard if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

jason asks

I've used Quicksilver forever, but according to the developer it's reached it's end of life. I'm sort of expecting it to up and die after some patch or another from Apple in the next year or so, and so I want to have a backup plan for the office in place. Our first thought of course is spotlight, but there are two things it doesn't appear to be able to do. Do you know of ways to do the following in Spotlight? - Trigger a new email from address book - Open folders on remote servers. Currently I have aliases of servers in my "favorites" folder, and I have instructed Quicksilver to scan them

Actually, that's not quite right. The developer has made Quicksilver open source and it is being slowly developed at its Google Code site. There are a lot of folks out there (myself included) who are Quicksilver fans, and I seriously doubt that it will disappear altogether. There's even been some suggestion that Alcor, the original developer, "is working on a complete re-write of the frameworks of Quicksilver and should hopefully release it soon."

All of that said, if you want to move I think you'd probably be best moving to one of the Quicksilver alternatives rather than trying to use Spotlight. So you should check out LaunchBar ($19.95 Home / $39 business) and Butler (donationware at the moment, but the next version 5 will be shareware).

jespes asks

I have an iPhone 3g. The company I work for doesnt support using iPhone for corporate email, so I'd like to set up a thing where I forward my corporate email to another account (say gmail or yahoo or another), which i can then read using the iPhone mail app. That's easy enough. But here's the big question: Is there a way to set up a "reply to" address in the iPhone so emails sent from the iPhone appear to be coming from my work email address? Gmail offers this in its regular interface but not in its mobile interface. Nor does this Gmail feature work in the iPhone mail app. And the mail app itself doesn't allow for the setting of a different "reply to" address, near as I can tell.

No, it appears that the iPhone mail application does not have a separate "reply to" setting. However, if you have access to a regular IMAP server based mail account you can use whatever email address you want in the standard iPhone mail setup. In other words, just set your email address in the iPhone settings as your business address, but set your username as appropriate for that server. Then any email you send from the iPhone will simply have your business email address in the from field.

Edge asks

I currently have a MBP running 10.5.4. I have a pretty large iTunes library that slows down my computer to a crawl when it is open (it is a couple hundred GBs). If I store my iTunes library on an external hard drive and have it open, it still slows it down a bit. Is there a way I can get a mac mini and use it only for my itunes library, but still control my library through the MBP? Basically I want to use the mac mini for its processor.

Yes, it's certainly possible to do this. The classic application for controlling iTunes on anther Mac was netTunes from Shirt Pocket. Unfortunately, however, it does not seem to work with Leopard. I did run across another similar application called TuneConnect 2 which does claim Leopard compatibility.

Your other option, however, is to use a web based control scheme (i.e. you control the remote iTunes with a web-browser). The easiest way to do this is probably with Remote Buddy (€19.99), but there are others out there as well.

Mark asks

I have a mac and a pc on my desk each with their own screen. I'd like to share a wireless mac keyboard and mouse between the two. What is the best way to do this and end up with only one keyboard/mouse on the desk?

There are two ways to do this: 1) in hardware with a KVM switch (just don't use the Monitor part), which will be challenging with a wireless setup or 2) in software with Synergy. I would recommend the second way as long as one machine will always be on anytime you're at your desk. Basically, Synergy is composed of two parts: a server and client. You need to physically connect the keyboard and mouse to the server machine (whichever one you can guarantee is going to be on) and run the client software on the other machine. For the Mac you should probably use the GUI version called SynergyKM. I don't really know that much about the PC side, but you can find the software at the main Synergy site.

ddebor asks

I was looking at my iTunes library earlier and I noticed that I have a bunch of songs from a CD that are listed as multiple albums in Cover Flow because different artists sing them. Is there a way that I can compile them into one album so that when I use Cover Flow there is only one album artwork for them all?

Generally this is caused by various the various tracks having different album names for some reason. All you have to do is select all the tracks and Get Info. Then just change all of them to one album name and iTunes should group them properly. Just be sure that the checkbox for Album is checked.

Update: Somehow I missed your remark about multiple artists. To correct this, make sure the Album name is exactly the same on all the tracks, as above, and then also make sure that you check the "Part of a compilation" checkbox at the bottom of the Info pane.

If they do have the correct album name, one of our commenters notes that you can also check off the 'This is a Compilation' box for the album in question, which will unify the tracks into one album in Cover Flow.

Foltz asks

Is there a 'good' single solution for password storage for OS X and Windows? I currently use PasswordSafe which has a OS X friendly Java version, but it hasnt been updated since 2006. I dont need any sort of syncing, but being able to manually merge password files would be nice.

I haven't really used it myself but KeePassX seems to be generally well received. It features versions for OS X, Windows, and Linux.