Recently I noticed that I had many duplicate entries in the Open With context menu on my Mac (Mountain Lion). Then after a clean re-install, I noticed the same behaviour repeating. For example, I had three entries for Even Note. Well, a little googling lead me to this link with this magic command to reset the menu and clean it up.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/\
LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local \
-domain system -domain user

Note:

• This all has to be on one line, but I had to break it up to fit here with the back slash. So to execute, copy it to one line and remove the backslash.
• The location may be different if you are on an older version of OSX per the link above.

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OSX Mountain Lion was released yesterday and it brings with it many new features and add-ons which is a great offer at $20 for the upgrade, but there are a few catches:

• You have to have a relatively recent Mac to get all the features.  For example, AirPlay screen sharing is only available if you have an early 2011 Mac Book Pro or later.
• You lose some features that you may have depended on.  My pet peeve here is Web Sharing which I used all the time.  OSX still have Apache with it, but the web sharing feature which allowed for user based folders is gone.  To bring it back, all you need to do, is find your old user conf file (from a time machine backup) and add it back to /etc/apache2/users/.
• Looks like you can also only enter Time Machine if it is enabled.  I typically turn it off and do manual backups using its menu bar option and I do not recall having issues with Lion in getting into time machine while automatic backup was not enabled.

Had I known this yesterday, I may have held off for a bit, but it is still worth the $20 upgrade. read more

Mountain Lion may be a few months out still, but you can try out the messages app right now. Only question that remains is: will iChat be rolled into Messages? It would make some sense, but I doubt Apple would like to dirty its iOS pool with messages from those other companies. Update: After the install and a reboot, my question was answered. iMessage is a new protocol in the new version of iChat, now called messages. So still no cross posting between iMessage and other protocols, but at least you have the one app to rule them all. Not that iChat is the best multi protocol messaging client…far from it….but it is the only one that does iMessage. read more

Apple’s next version of OSX is around the corner, and it continues to blur the lines between iOS and OSX. You can read more about that on Gizmodo. By why not just allow iOS apps to run on OSX? With all the talks about sandboxing apps and bringing more iOS features to OSX, it just seems like they are trying to take off the band-aid slowly, rather than doing it and getting it over with. OSX already runs the iOS simulator which has amazing performance on OSX….so just make it into a wrapper app that gets kicked off as soon as an iOS app is launched in OSX. It should be relatively easy to determine if the app is intended for iPhone of iPad and size the app accordingly. This would instantly increase the number of customers for any iOS app, not to mention bringing in a ton of new apps to OSX. I don’t see a downside. Do you? read more