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We're at Macworld Expo 2009 in San Francisco with the latest news about the show. Check back often this week for updates!
- Phil Schiller Delivers Lackluster Keynote
- iPhoto '09 Adds Faces and Places
- iMovie '09 Seems to Fix Everything from iMovie '08
- GarageBand '09 Adds Music Lessons
- iWork Turns '09
- Apple Moves to Unprotected Music, Tiered Prices
- Apple Pioneers New Battery Tech with 17-inch MacBook Pro
- Jobs Clears the Air on Health Issue
- Welcome to Macintosh Movie to Screen at Macworld Expo
- MacHEADS Movie to Premiere at Macworld Expo
- TidBITS Events at Macworld SF 2009
Edit iCal Event Titles Directly
In the Leopard version of iCal, double-clicking an event shows a summary of the event, and to edit the name (or anything else), you must click the Edit button in the summary pop-up. To bypass the summary and edit pop-ups entirely, Option-double-click the event name. That selects the text for editing, and you can make any changes you want. Click outside the event to save your changes.
Written by Adam C. Engst
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Unwanted App Launch Problem Solved, No Thanks to Apple
by Matt Neuburg 
Recently, I discovered that a file of whose existence I previously had no clue was responsible for a mysterious phenomenon on my computer. The phenomenon was simple enough: an application I don't use and don't want to use (RetroRunSL, a part of Retrospect) was launching every time I logged in to my Mac. What I couldn't figure out was why.
The problem was particularly annoying because I thought I knew quite a bit about how things get launched under Mac OS X. I've read the Apple Tech Note and article on the topic, and back when I was secretly helping out with MacFixIt, I even wrote an article on this very subject. Yet I had checked all the places I knew about - my Accounts preference pane's Login Items, the LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons folders in my Library and the top-level Library, and even the deprecated StartupItems folder in the top-level Library - but nothing in any of them afforded any explanation.
Finally, with some help from good old EasyFind (trust Spotlight to be useless here), I discovered the answer. There can be a file in your top-level Library's Preferences folder called com.apple.SystemLoginItems.plist. This mechanism is used by a very few specialized applications that launch on a per-user basis and want access to the Window Server, but need to launch before the user actually logs in. (Timbuktu is an example of such an application.) It is deprecated in Leopard, where you're supposed to use a LaunchAgent instead; but some older programs still use it.
What really ticks me off about this whole affair is that it's so typical. Mac OS X has been around for 7 years now, and yet we're still living in this world of secret files that do secret things, with no user interface and no documentation. The former (lack of user interface) is something we've mostly become numbed to, though, like Joe Kissell (see "SmartSleep Solves Safe Sleep Situation", 2008-03-15), where there are important settings that can be managed, I really don't see why Apple doesn't give the user a way to manage them. But the lack of documentation is unforgivable.
Fetch Softworks: Fetch 5.3 has WebView, the easy wayto view files in a browser and copy Web addresses from Fetch.
Also a new look for Leopard, droplet shortcuts, and more.
Download your free trial version! <http://fetchsoftworks.com/>