Find file

It's hard to explain how much I hate the Mac's inability to find simple files. The "find file" feature has been integrated in the Mac OS for a couple decades now, so I have no idea why they decided to screw it up so perfectly a few versions ago (in 10.4).

You used to be able to search for files by name (and other criteria) in a simple window and receive a simple list of results. You can still do this with third-party freeware like "Find Any File," but not the Mac OS. When I search for a file named "All in Kansas," which I know is on my hard drive somewhere, Mac OS X reports "0 items." Why? I have no idea. Find Any File picks it up with no problem, as you can see in the above screenshot.

I have a feeling the reason this happens has something to do with a hidden setting for Spotlight that involves digging through preference panes or mucking about in the terminal, which is why I'm not bothering with it. (Apple's hilariously outdated support page certainly won't help. Check out those pinstripes!)

Firefox profile manager

So I finally upgraded from Firefox 3 to Firefox 8. I would have upgraded a while ago, I think, but I must be the only person in the world using the Profile Manager to run multiple versions of Firefox (i.e. one with my bookmarks, passwords, links, and plug-ins, and another for my "test" identity for trying out new stuff). I had been able to access the profile manager in version 3 with this completely non-intuitive Terminal command I had to discover by digging around on the Mozilla website:

/Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -profilemanager

Yeah, really easy to remember, right? So anyway, when Mozilla brought out Firefox 4, this command no longer worked, and they never (not even to this day) bothered to update the website to explain how to use Profile Manager. Go see for yourself.

I stuck with Version 3 all this time (not using Chrome because I like having bookmarks and pages in a sidebar, thank you very much). Then I discovered on some random Mozilla forum that there's a whole new command to launch the Profile Manager. Here it is:

arch -i386 /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -ProfileManager

Happy as I am now to use Firefox 8 with both my old profiles, I have to wonder why Mozilla hasn't bothered updating their own help section after five versions of their software?