Archive for category Mac
Changing Three Finger Swipe to Back in Lion
Lion introduces some new gestures which unfortunately breaks some gestures I am used to such as a three finger swipe to move back in Chrome. Easily fixed by opening System Preferences > Trackpad > More Gestures and changing swipe between full screen apps to use four fingers and swipe between pages to use three.
Recovering from ‘the application finder can’t be opened’
Every now and again I get an error when opening finder:
‘the application finder can’t be opened’
Whilst I am sure a restart would fix it, I normally don’t want to restart as I am in the middle of something. The solution is to run the following in terminal:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder &
(don’t forget the &) If this continues to happen I should probably try and find the cause, more likely that I will just map the command to a bash alias though 
.
Macs, Parallels and Keyboard Layouts
I am currently developing on a Mac, running Visual Studio on a Windows 7 VM courtesy of Parallels. There are a number of issues to resolve the first of which is the key mappings.
I am using the Mac bluetooth keyboard and a few keys are mapped incorrectly:
| Pressing this key | Results in this output |
| § | ` |
| ± | ¬ |
| @ | “ |
| “ | @ |
| \ | # |
| | | ~ |
When using OS X alt + 3 produces a # and alt + 2 produces a €. Unfortunately in Windows alt key combinations are normally used to launch menu items.
The answer to this is a free program from Microsoft called Keyboard Layout Creator.
Download and install this (on your Windows VM) then you can use it to create a correct layout. Once you have the layout you can create an installer to install your keyboard layout on however many VMs you like.
You can download the layout I created and open the file in the layout creator to build your own installer. I have also uploaded the installer I created (mostly for my own reference, I make no guarantees it will not fry your system, please use a good virus scanner etc.).
Once you have installed the layout open Keyboards and languages:
Then change the default input language and keyboard:
Any applications that are open need to be restarted, but then you should have all keys working correctly.
I have mapped # to Ctrl + alt + 3 and € to ctrl + alt + 2 which should work as long as the application you are in is not using them as shortcut keys.