August 21, 2008

Making Macs Play a Little Nicer in a PC Network

Being one of the full-time Macintosh users in our office, I find that sometimes my co-workers can get a little annoyed with all the useless files my Macintosh spews out into network folders. Wherever I go on the network Instantly a .DS_store file is created, and if I copy any files up to the network a companion resource fork file is also created with the same name just with a ._ in front of it. These ._ files and .DS_store files don't really do much, and the Macintosh users will never even see them, but to a PC user it looks as if you have doubles of every file, and makes for an annoyance when clicking on one to open by mistake. 

I decided I'd try and become a better network citizen in our office, by doing some research into how to remove and prevent these files from being created on our Windows servers. Enter Blue Harvest.

Blue Harvest is simple preference pane that once installed, will stop your mac from producing both .DS_store and ._files. Additionally Blue Harvest will give you the option to automatically remove these files from folders and disks that you navigate to that may have these files on them pre-Blue Harvest. Not sure why they choose the name Blue Harvest for the application, unless it has something to do with the great Starwars Family Guy spoof.

Blue Harvest preference panel icon

Removing DS Store file preferences

Removing resource files preference panel 

Blue Harvest is created by ZeroOneTwenty software and is available as a single user license, ten packs or as a site license.

Posted at 11:18 am by Ivan Mironchuk

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