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After exhausting all available help available on Google about my Dreamweaver crashing, I finally did a complete reinstall today.  I want to emphasize that there was no solution to this problem available anywhere on the internet, including Adobe’s support forums.  I went through and eliminated every possible problem listed on Adobe’s tech support checklist.  There is only one conclusion to make: This is a poorly written piece of software!

Let me go over a few things for my loyal readers:

1. Installation of software really only requires reading from a disk, decompressing files in some cases, and saving them on the hard drive.  There are no magic elves behind the scenes doing anything else!  Installations of software requiring significantly more time than copying the files are broken.  No exceptions.
2. The difference between your computer after installing software, and before installing software, is the presence of files on the hard drive.  The files come off the disk, and are placed on the hard drive. That is it!
3. Why can’t any decent software company produce an accurate progress indicator?  How is it that the installation progress can be at 95% for the majority of the time during installation?  What monkey programs this stuff?

Dreamweaver is the best software available for web design, but that doesn’t mean it is good.  Good software doesn’t have the following problems I discovered while looking for a solution:

• Dreamweaver contains a bug that forces it to crash due to daylight savings time.
• Dreamweaver contains a bug that renders the entire program useless if a file has exactly 8k of data.  The official solution to this problem is actually to edit the file using a different program, and to add or remove a few bytes of data.  I’m not kidding.
• Uninstalling Dreamweaver software doesn’t uninstall anything.  Try it if you don’t believe me!  After you uninstall it, the files are still there!  The settings must get removed when you uninstall, right?  Wrong again!  Adobe has a special adobe clean program that you are supposed to download, and run to make sure everything is ready to reinstall.  This doesn’t remove all the files either!

The whole episode reminded me of the dark ages when I still used Windows.  At least the Adobe tech support checklist didn’t ask me to check if the computer was plugged in.  It did however get to a point in the checklist where it started telling me I had a hardware problem.

I have some advice for Adobe, and any other software developers out there.  If uninstalling and reinstalling software isn’t enough to fix the problem, then your software is broken. Think about that when you are deciding to charge thousands of dollars for upgrades.

When emptying the trash won’t work in OS X, sometimes the reason given is that the files are in use.  It doesn’t take too much digging to figure out that this is often not the case.  Often I make a slideshow from images taken from my digital camera so that I can see them full screen.  Afterward, I move many of them to the trash since I also keep copies on another computer.  Often, this won’t work for all of the files, and they are left in the trash undeleted.

Here is one possible way to get rid of them:

1. Instead move the files to a different directory where you can easily delete them using the terminal.  The OS X terminal program might be in your Utilities folder inside your Applications folder.  I also suggest you put a link to your terminal program in the shortcuts in the finder.  This can be done by highlighting the terminal program and using the Apple-T keystroke.
2. Open your terminal program.
3. Navigate to where you moved the files using the cd command.  This is the change directory command and will move you to the directory you specify.  If you want to go to a directory called aaaa the command would be: cd aaaa
4. Make sure the files you want to delete are the only ones there! The command to see what files are there is ls.  The command I’m going to give will delete all the files in the directory, so make sure you check first.  Everybody makes mistakes, and this is one you can’t easily undo!
5. To delete the files, and I mean all the files in the directory, use the command rm *.*
6. If you only want to delete some of them, for example picture.jpg, use the command rm picture.jpg

I hope this stuff works for you, and doesn’t cause more confusion.  I honestly don’t know why this problem hasn’t been fixed with a system update in the YEARS since I bought this computer, but at least there is a workaround.  There is much more that you can do with the terminal program, so reply if you can think of more helpful hints.

I have had an Apple mighty mouse for around 4 years now. Occasionally the scroll ball stops going in certain directions. Nearly every time this happens I think about buying a new mouse, but I love the squeeze buttons on its sides. Apparently the new mouse from Apple doesn’t have the squeeze buttons. I also don’t want to deal with recharging batteries on a mouse. So, I’m not going to buy a new mouse any time soon.

How to fix the scroll ball on the Apple mighty mouse:

1. Find a square of paper towel.  Use a brand that won’t rip too easily.
2. Fold the towel in half twice so that it is a square 4 layers thick.
3. Pour some warm water in the center of the square.  Pour just enough so that some of the towel is still dry.
4. Flip your Apple Mighty Mouse upside down so that the scroll ball is pointing downward.
5. Slide the Apple Mighty Mouse around in circles on the paper towel so that the scroll ball goes in all directions.
6. You can do this with the computer on, and the Mighty Mouse still connected.  This will let you see when the Mighty Mouse scroll starts working again.
7. This will probably solve your scroll ball problem immediately, but often it helps to repeat the process after a few minutes.

I sincerely hope your Apple Mighty Mouse works forever, or at least until apple incorporates the squeeze buttons idea into their new mice.

On occasion, the Mac OS X empty trash won’t delete some of the files there.  I don’t know why this happens.  The reason given is that the files are in use, but they are not.  Here is a simple step by step that will get rid of the files:

1. Create a new directory in your personal folder.  I use something like “aaaaa” or something easy to remember.
2. Drag the files from the trash bin to your new folder.
3. Open the OS X terminal program.
4. Navigate to your new directory using the command: cd aaaaa
5. Delete the files with the command: rm *.*
6. They should be gone!

If this doesn’t work, try something else.  This is a stupid problem that shouldn’t even exist, so don’t blame me if my stupid solution doesn’t work for you.  It looks like this problem doesn’t appear with OS X 10.5 as far as I can see.  Please leave a comment about your system and I’ll update the post.  I truly do hope this post helps you solve this problem.

I have also found that a similar and more annoying problem occurs when trying to empty the trash when the files came from a removable USB drive.  In this scenario when you try to move the files from the trash bin to another folder, they stay in the trash bin.  Now you need to delete them both!  The only way I found to get rid of them was to remove the USB drive and delete the files on another computer.  Certainly there must be a better way to do this.

If anyone at Apple is paying attention (yeah, right) I’m not going to upgrade my operating system just to fix this problem.  That’s what updates are for.