Have you installed any third party utilities or bookmark managers that you are aware of?

At what point in time did you realize your bookmarks broke? Do you remember what it was you were doing, or perhaps you did a restore, update to an newer operating system, or something along those lines?

I am afraid that your bookmarks are broken. The fact they end in .url, tells me a little, in that OS X does not make bookmarks that end in .url. They end in .webloc usually. .url is more a Windows format, or a more universal and open/generic bookmark format. Seeing the word “Favorites” in the url string, sort of leads me to believe these were imported from a windows machine, and done so incorrectly.

If you could drag one of the .url bookmarks to your desktop, and open it in a text editor, you may find that the real url is inside the file. You could then copy the url, paste it into Safari, and make a new bookmark from that. Depending on how many you have, that may be a lot of work. I would probably try to find a way to write a script to do it.

But first, lets get to the root of the problem. How did those bookmarks get there, and do new bookmarks exhibit the same problem?

I imagine you are seeing a grey set of buttons, which are still functional; so in Mac parlance, they are not grayed out, but just a color you are not used to or dislike.

Are these the grey version of the “minimize”, “maximize”, and “close” buttons that you see?

If that is the case, I would bet you want those three buttons to be in color.

The color of the buttons is controlled by a system preference in the System Preferences. While I personally like the grey better, to change it, go to the Apple Menu in the upper left corner of your screen, and select “System Preferences…”. Once that window opens, choose “Appearance”. Change it from “Graphite” to “Blue”.

The setting to change your Mac OS X System Appearance colors should look something like the picture in the link above.

I hope that helps, if not, please feel free to come back and we will see what we can do to help you out.

I also notice that as I get older, and my eyes are no longer in such great shape, the black I see is no longer as pure black as it used to be.

This is weird, but if you make a fist where you have a small hole to look through your hand, and view the black on grey contrast, looking through your hand as if it were a telescope, staring right at the edge where it is blurry, all of a sudden, the contrast ratio looks fine, and the blacks darken up.

There is a name for this effect, and it is the principle on which pinhole glasses work. I forget the name.

This tells me, it is not so much the fault of the computer, as it is my eyesight. Black is as dark as it is going to get. You can try names with all caps in them, or putting in blank bookmarks of items to add more space between them, which helps some.

Until Apple moves the OS to “resolution independence”, there is not much we can do. Resolution independence will allow you to enlarge the fonts in all applications without affecting the layout.

I share your problems and sentiments, and have not found a solid solution in Safari. FireFox has themes that you can chose from that may help, but I like Safari enough to live with it..

If you are on a laptop, the angle at which you have the display at plays a hug role in this, so try adjust that forward and backward until you hit the sweet spot.

Sorry I could not be of more help. For what it is worth, you can dig into the images that make Safari up, and alter them, but it is not for the beginner user, and every Safari update will break your hard work.

I can tell you one thing, stay as far away as you can from Geek Squad, whether it be in store, or remote. Just look at their prices for basic repair, and also their “optimized” machines.

There is a lot of data on some of their nefarious acts:
http://consumerist.com/2010/01/consumerist-investigation-best-buy-optimization-is-a-big-stupid-annoying-waste-of-money.html

I take it you have iChat on your machine? Are you routed or plugged directly? I can use ARD to connect to any machine without the trouble of port forwarding or DMZ if they are plugged in direct. Otherwise, iChat acts as a nice proxy service to do the port translation.

If you are around this weekend, maybe I can take a poke at your machine. I would not charge, I am genuinely curious as to what is going on. Drop me an email to hexley@osxhelp.com if you want to start a dialog outside of these comments.

If you do, then you have proof positive that the “fresh install” you paid for, was in fact an “upgrade and install”, and you may want to bring that up with them.

For example, if you see “org.perian.Perian.plist” but do not currently have Perian installed, then you know that this was not a clean install, and a bit of a messy repair.

I do not know too many honest Mac Shops, when you find one, stick with them, they are rare, and worth the 75 to 100 an hour they charge, and they are that much faster, and always save you a second trip.

Not saying they are all bad, far form the truth, but finding the good ones that are not too busy is always a challenge.

I have been considering a paid for remote control based Mac repair service through this website. What would your thoughts be on that? I could work at anyones machine that has iChat installed. The only trouble comes with when they need a clean re-install, and it is just just software mess related.

Any suggestions on what this should be billed out as? Right now I do a lot of support in these comments, perhaps I should just move to using forums, and work on promoting those, and getting the site back up to regular posts. I suspect that, with some advertising, could be just enough to keep the site from costing me money.

What mouse are you using? Did it come with it’s own mouse control software? If not, what are you using to control the speed and click operations of your mouse?

If this is not driver related, either mouse, printer, or some other deeper rooted type of installed software, I am at a loss. It would bother me enough to do a clean install, and start over just to make it go away.

http://reumann.blogspot.com/2010/01/organization-and-some-minor-general-mac.html

I attached the system info to the Pastie on 1/18 at 10:00AM ET. Trying to paste the whole file repeatedly crashed Safari, so I only included the beginning through Software.

Tried the Internet Plug-in removal solution to no avail.

Can’t think of any 3rd party SW. Also, Firefox works correctly.

WTF???

Kevin

Mac OS X Help bginnner readers, you can probably safely ignore this rather long post, I do not think there is a lot for you to gain from it. We are working on setting up forums so that the comments can stop being used as my own personal little blog/sopabox

@Rick,

Actually I agree with a lot of your points. I also use xmarks and think it’s awesome (also tinkered around with just relying on googleboomarks but decided back on xmarks – formerly foxmarks.)

Xmarks is really nice software. I have been pestering them to fix the issue it has with always asking me to unlock my keychain every time it syncs, which is a hassle. Most people never run into this as they allow their keychain to share the same login and password as their user account, however, for security, I do not run my system that way. It is far too simple for someone to use a boot disk to reset my login password, and at the same time, reset my keychain password, which gives them access to all my stored logins and passwords.

I plan on adding a tutorial that covers this in the near future, however, it is a little advanced in concept, and will make the number of times you are authenticating your computer increase by enough to be annoying.

Could not agree with you more that google bookmarks and any of the online bookmarking solutions fall short. They either make it too painful to bookmark, saving you no time, or are too hard to learn to use, which means there is too much resistance for me to consider it something as a day to day use application.

Really too bad that Apple insists on charging for Mobile Me. Most of their sync features are darn near mandatory for anyone using more than one computer, but sync services and their API’s while somewhat open, are not open enough that developers can come out and compete with Mobile Me and have feature parity.

Someday perhaps. In all reality, I should be able to build out my own Mobile Me clone service on Mac OS X Server. While it is close to allowing me to do so, it is not 100% there yet.

I definitely agree that people bookmark too much and with the power of google you can often find things just as fast. However, I still like to bookmark more things than the average user.

Agreed as well. You present some compelling arguments below. But at the same time, you are also a developer of some form, and I think need to take that into account. Your needs are well above that of the beginner user. If you look at Apple’s bookmark implementation as a beginner user would be using it, I think it makes a lot of sense. It is easy to use, does not offer too many options which would confuse the new user, and does enough to perform it’s core task, which is to mark a space on the internet so you can get back to it at a later time.

In my industry, software development, I have to have examples using a lot of different technologies (java stuff, ruby, js frameworks, flex, bla bla.)

Ok, so you are in the same boat as me. I share the same industry as you, as a freelance developer. I probably have many of the same bookmarks that you have. One of the best things I did for myself was to set up my own internal wiki on my home network. I put almost everything in there. It is a little more work, and a little more time to get the data into it, but the long term benefits are paying off nicely.

I no longer have random code snippets laying around all over the place, and I am no longer trying to mush bookmarks to do something they are not entirely intended to do. It is like adding tags to bookmarks, adding that meta data can be useful, but it too will fall short, where you need a bookmark a tag, and perhaps some form of comment or note.

Now if notes were to be added to bookmarks, I would call that meta data overload, which is where my wiki comes into play so nicely.

Often times I have to spend a LOT of time googling for something that doesn’t just pop up as a first hit. Once I find that web post I definitely bookmark because I’ll often need it again or will want to share it with members of my team as they’ll often run into the same issue. I obviously need an organized structure of where to find things and have it place in the right technology folder.

God do I ever know; that lonely mailing list post that takes you hours to finally find, because the search terms you are using are so vague and apply to so many different techniques, that it is near impossible to figure out where to even get an answer.

My solution goes back somewhat to the core of the tutorial post. If you think about it, you could spend some time setting up a directory structure in your bookmarks in advance. I may have “Programming/Development” and in that directory, I will have a single directory that contains “Docs”, “Resources”, “Mailing Lists”, “Misc”. Those are fake examples, but you get the idea. That directory is called “Template”. I then copy that directory, and will rename it “php”, then copy the template again, and rename it “JavaScript”, or “Jquery”, or “Ruby”, “Python”, “Regex”, you get the idea.

Now I have structure, and I may have to go in and update it from time to time, but for the most part, once I set it up, I am good to go. The times I need to make a new folder are few, and I can easily do so with a few keyboard commands. You could look at something like Keyboard Maestro to give you the ability to add folders on the fly.

Finally, I have a “Misc” directory, which almost everything will get tossed into at some point in time, if I can not find a more narrow place to put it. I want to bookmark, and move on about my work. The last thing I want to do is change my train of thought. I need to keep on working, and not get out of the frame of mind I am in at that time. So command-D and I am done, come back and deal with it later.

If I could add a new folder, by the time I did, and figured out where it was to go, and wrestled with the “car” and “truck” scenario you describe below, I have already lost too much of my current train of thought. I just reserve 15 minutes a day every day to deal with whatever management of files, folders, notes snippets, wiki entries etc. For me, not breaking my current thought process is critical.

Actually I really liked tags better and was using them die hard for a long time since it made intuitive sense since many times an article would fall under multiple categories and with a folder structure you’d have to bookmark it more than once. (As an example maybe you work on cars and trucks and a great article on fixing toyota cars and trucks – do you bookmark it under the ‘car’ or ‘truck’ folder – probably both.)

Hard to say, but I certainly see your point and sympathize with you. This is why I like using a local wiki for these things. I am not forced into any directory structure at all, it is much more free form. Right now, you are in a dilemma because an age old file/folder paradigm has not been wholly updated. Tags have been shoehorned in to try to make it work better, social bookmarking services have popped up, and on and on.

An entirely new system needs to be developed. I have no idea what it is though. I do know the problem, so hopefully if I ever do develop my own little social bookmarking system, it will come to me as an elegant solution to this problem.

I’m not saying also that I couldn’t get around the safari bookmark issue – it’s not ‘that’ big of a deal but to me it’s more of a principle thing since I KNOW over at Apple they have to be knowing it’s sort of lame and yet refuse to fix it.

This is where I disagree with you. I think there certainly are people who think it is lame and sucks, people within Apple. But when they sit around and discuss how things are going to work, I suspect they are trying to do so from the perspective of who it will benefit most. Look how long it took copy and paste to make it to the iPhone. Apple would rather not have a feature, then implement a half baked one.

I have many a debate with friends about the iPhone copy and paste issue; they all had their simple methods for solving it. Comparing copy and paste on every other mobile out there, and it is very clear, Apple made the right choice, nothing comes close to the ease of use, perfect functionality, and self teaching ability of copy and paste on theie mobile platform.

I look at the bookmarks as the same thing. If they can not solve it in a way that is groundbreaking, revolutionary, they are going to lean on the side of minimal and simplistic, since that is after all, where 99% of most computer users are.

As a developer, I too find I get tunnel vision and need to just step back and look at things from an end users perspective. What is logical and simple to me, is never logical and simple to someone who does not sit in front of a computer 12 hours a day. Just watching people struggle over the concept of where to single click versus double click should be enough to make one realize, adding folders within the process of adding a bookmark may just add more confusion to something that is just barely understood by the new computer user.

OT: EVEN WORSE though, much worse imo, is the fact that apple refuses to have MAXIMIZE really maximize on Safari (and in a few other apps.) I have to use a javascript bookmarklet to do a full maximize. Granted safari will remember the last size you left it so you can drag it to what you want…but if sometimes I want it smaller but then later want to leverage the full browser size when viewing a site? – don’t try maximize – you either drag it large yourself or use a bookmarklet. That is just soooooo dumb that it amazes me. I swear it’s apple being stubborn just like they were with refusing to give in to having a right click on a mouse:) I love OSX better than any other OS I’ve used since it gives me the best of everything, but man come on Apple.

My girlfriend and I joke around with a term that we have for full screen mode. I probably should not say it here. Screens are huge these days, a browser in my humble opinion has no business being full screen. It breaks the entire way sites are designed. I do not need to see 500px of background on the left and right. Very few apps benefit from full screen from my perspective.

Maximize, minimize, etc is certainly inconsistent and broken, we will agree there. I just want it to be consistent, so I can learn how it works. It is all over the board. I tend to just not use those three little round buttons to the left of every window. Command-W will close for me, command-M will shove it to the dock, but I rarely use that, and use command-H to hide.

As for the size of a window, I tend to set it where I want it, and it rarely changes size, so I never bash my head into the maximize button. I have always had a strong aversion to full screen apps. I see it as a problem, as more and more developers hit the Mac platform coming from the PC, and they design their app for full screen size as the target. If there are any split panes and you resize, things get messy really quickly. Screens will keep getting larger, resolutions are going to keep getting higher. Maybe one day we will have resolution independence on all UI elements, until then, seeing Apple Mail in full screen just looks off to me, what did I buy that 24 inches for if I am only going to spread the app out across the entire screen?

Nice chatting with you. I agree with most all your points. One thing I try to stress to myself, is that I am a developer, and what makes sense to me, and what seems logical, almost never is. I have been fortunate enough to create things that had hundreds of thousands of registered users. A ton of feedback would come in at the smallest of UI changes. I was always surprised, and near almost always wrong in most of my assumptions. I try to remember that when I think something is goofy about how the Mac works. The good news is, there is also almost always a 3rd party plug-in, utility, finder replacement, browser replacement etc, that will fir the needs of those more advanced users, or those who are thinking different.

* This is a long reply, I did not re-read or spell check it, sorry about that. Most readers of our site, feel free to ignore this post.

Actually I agree with a lot of your points. I also use xmarks and think it’s awesome (also tinkered around with just relying on googleboomarks but decided back on xmarks – formerly foxmarks.)

I definitely agree that people bookmark too much and with the power of google you can often find things just as fast. However, I still like to bookmark more things than the average user.

In my industry, software development, I have to have examples using a lot of different technologies (java stuff, ruby, js frameworks, flex, bla bla.) Often times I have to spend a LOT of time googling for something that doesn’t just pop up as a first hit. Once I find that web post I definitely bookmark because I’ll often need it again or will want to share it with members of my team as they’ll often run into the same issue. I obviously need an organized structure of where to find things and have it place in the right technology folder. Actually I really liked tags better and was using them die hard for a long time since it made intuitive sense since many times an article would fall under multiple categories and with a folder structure you’d have to bookmark it more than once. (As an example maybe you work on cars and trucks and a great article on fixing toyota cars and trucks – do you bookmark it under the ‘car’ or ‘truck’ folder – probably both.)

I’m not saying also that I couldn’t get around the safari bookmark issue – it’s not ‘that’ big of a deal but to me it’s more of a principle thing since I KNOW over at Apple they have to be knowing it’s sort of lame and yet refuse to fix it.

OT:
EVEN WORSE though, much worse imo, is the fact that apple refuses to have MAXIMIZE really maximize on Safari (and in a few other apps.) I have to use a javascript bookmarklet to do a full maximize. Granted safari will remember the last size you left it so you can drag it to what you want…but if sometimes I want it smaller but then later want to leverage the full browser size when viewing a site? – don’t try maxmize – you either drag it large yourself or use a bookmarklet. That is just soooooo dumb that it amazes me. I swear it’s apple being stubborn just like they were with refusing to give in to having a right click on a mouse:) I love OSX better than any other OS I’ve used since it gives me the best of everything, but man come on Apple.

What is troubling, is that the new test account inherited this problem. There are very few preferences that are above the account level, which is why a new account is such a good way to test things out.

Would you mind going to the Apple Menu, and down to “About this Mac”, click “More Info” in the resulting window, which will open Apple System profiler. Select File -> Save As and change the format to Plain Text. Open the file in Text Edit, find and replace your username with something else, such as “me”, and delete any other private data you may feel you do not want out there.

Copy the whole lot of text, and paste it into the form at this Pastie. This should allow me to get answers to any questions I would have about your setup.

The only thing I would try right off the bat, is to make note of any 3rd party browser tools you may have installed at any point in time, or even non browser ones. Anything that modifies men behavior, open and save dialog box behavior, could all be related.

Finally, one quick test, open the icon of your hard drive on your desktop, open the first folder in that hard drive called “Library” and look for the “Internet PLug-Ins” folder. Go ahead and move everything out of there and then reboot.
See if your problem goes away.

If it does or does not, at least we know what it is related to. You can move back in the files after that test, and report back your findings. Hopefully we can figure this out.

Yes, I agree, bookmarks in Safari could be better. I use FireFox for development, and in turn will use Xmarks to sync my bookmarks across all browsers on all computers.

As a result, I have never made a bookmark in FireFox. I gave it a shot the other day. I have to say, if that black “Heads Up Display” style window is what people are calling a better bookmark manager, I am mystified.

Both offerings are weak in my humble opinion.

Yes, FireFox gives you the ability to make a new folder. In all honesty, I am happy to give that up, as I can easily shove a bookmark where I want it in Safari, without ever having my hands leave the keyboard.

The “add bookmark” feature in FireFox is visually confusing. The addition of tags, ugh, can we just let tags go, they did not work out as planned, let’s let that horse die.

I think in this case, I will take stable and simple over convoluted and confusing

It is strange to me how many comments there are surrounding bookmarks. I guess a lot of people use them. I always ask myself, when is the last time I really used any of my bookmarks? I have a top set on the toolbar, and use that hundreds of times a day. Outside of that though, the folders, and then nested folders, everything that I created to add order to my bookmarks, never really gets used, and in reality, added chaos and disorder.

Sure, you bookmarked something, but do you ever remember to go back to it? I bookmark things for the purpose of getting them into the auto complete mechanism of the browser. So I may bookmark favoritesite.example.com but that is not because I am ever going to actually hunt around for that bookmark, it is so I can press command-L and then type “fa” and have the browser fill in the rest automatically.

I think bookmarks are a failed idea, one that seems so logical, and so perfect for the scenario, but that fall apart very fast beyond more than 20 or so bookmarks.

For the most part, google is my bookmark manager. I can search and find what I need faster than I can find it in the browser in most cases.

Case in point, I was working at a clients the other day, general computer cleanup and maintenance. There were several computers, two laptops, two desktops, a lot of crud from over the years, backups of files etc. Very common and normal scenario.

An important aspect of cleaning all this up was consolidation. I was asked to make certain to carry along all the bookmarks from each machine, and from all the older backups. I have to wonder, why are bookmarks so important to people. I see a lot of cases where people are more concerned about their bookmarks than the safety of their email. Happily allowing Entourage corrupt years of email, but damit, my bookmarks better be saved!

There were several hundred bookmarks per machine, and per backup archive. Looking through a few, I got the general impression, most were sites that were seen as “interesting”, but being too busy at the time, the person decided, I will bookmark the site, and come back to it later.

Perhaps that is part of the problem. Bookmarks are abused as this playground for where you want to mark something to come back to later. Bookmarks are not the place for that.

This has me wondering then, beyond the bookmarks toolbar, which would hold a small handful of bookmarks, what good are they really for? I have 15 or so sites I go to daily, a handful of RSS feeds I check into… that is about all I need.

To solve the “I am too busy now” problem, where bookmarks are a hit and run procedure, I had gotten in the habit of dragging the url to a folder in my dock. I can go back and look at those later, at leisure. If it is compelling, I may bookmark the site, but only so I can again, press command-L and type the first few letters of the site.

I actually no longer do the drag and drop of the url, but instead, I wrote a small script that I control via a keyboard shortcut. This will take the current url, and write it to a “title-of-site.url” file. The data in that file is in a open format, that can be read by any browser, on any platform. It would have been much easier to write this script to just save the Safari .webloc file, but those can not be sent to others unless they use Safari, and those also can break when moving them across networks. The .url file is plain text, guaranteed to work now and in the future.

I have those all saving to a folder that is connected to DropBox, which will sync them to every computer I access, including my phone.

Long long story short, I agree with you, bookmarking is weak in Safari, but it is also weak in FireFox, and to add insult to insult, it is more visually confusing to me in FireFox. FireFox went with an entirely new graphical user interface to the add a bookmark feature. This is fine, but if one is going to change a long standing user interface methodology, it generally has to be executed perfectly. This is far from perfect in my opinion.

I personally think the entire bookmark paradigm is a failure. No more than the bookmarks toolbar is really needed. Outside of that, I would look to something like the script I have created, or, a bookmarking service. Delicious, Xmarks, Stumbleupon and a few others are all pretty good.

Judging by the amount of comments here, it may be time for me to put the development hours in my spin on a solution to this. I have been wanting to build out my own web based bookmarking system for several years now. It has a significant twist on it compared to the other services out there, with speed and ease of use being the priority. Maybe I will get around to outlining that and putting in the time to bring it to light.

Thanks for your comments.

I’m just amazed that the ‘add bookmark’ dialog is so horrible on Safari.

Then, open your Applications folder, move Safari to the trash, empty the trash, and install the copy you just downloaded.

You will keep all your prefs, and everything should be fine.

The behavior you are seeing is not normal, but since it followed you to a new test account, we can pretty much rule out any local preference issues.

What exactly happens when you click once on a menu, and then navigate into a sub menu? I take it the mouse just moves on past it and does nothing?

The only conflict I would think it could possibly be would be in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins

Perhaps there is something unusual in there.