blueharvest plays well with windows server

Yes! Clean ‘em up!

I’ve been trying out BlueHarvest, a little preferences panel app that allows you to keep mac junk off a windows server. Today I discovered that I can clean up a volume where I left a bunch of ._DS_Store and ._filenamegoeshere clutter before I got BlueHarvest. (Very easy: right click the volume, choose clean it  up with BlueHarvest and that’s it.) The really satisfying part is when I opened the log and watched BlueHarvest deleting them all… and there was a lot.

As long as I’m working from one place on a Mac, saving files to a Windows server, and then accessing the server with a Windows machine somewhere else, I’ll be quite happy to have BlueHarvest keeping those pesky resource forks out of the way. Well worth the $US 12.95.

open winmail.dat files on your mac

Do you have friends who send you emails announcing the next big party, but you can’t see the invitation because there’s only a winmail.dat thingie? And on your mac you can click it, but then you get a message about how you and all your mac programs can’t open it?

No need to miss the party! There’s a handy little freebie called TNEF’s Enough that will dig into that weird winmail.dat attachment and let you save whatever your Windows-challenged friends send you. I just discovered a .doc file hiding in my latest winmail.dat, and a lovely invitation to an upcoming party. This time around I get to go too.

Thanks so much to Twister Mc for the great tip.

Update…

If you read the comments to this post, you’ll see that I got another tip for solving this problem: OMiC, a plug-in for the Mail application itself.

OMiC is shareware, so you can use it “for free”. But hey, pay the $29.95. After all, you get a big jump in convenience over TNEF’s Enough. Because OMiC works right in Mail, you don’t have to open up any other program to see into those mysterious winmail.dat files. Automagically, you just see the original file that your friend sent using Windows and Outlook: In the body of the Mail message, I saw a link to the .doc file, clicked it, and Word launched to open it. Very nice.

And OMiC’s developer appears to be pretty active.

lists of open source stuff for mac and windows

http://www.opensourcemac.org/
http://www.opensourcewindows.org/

windows command line ref

windows commands for those of us more used to other systems