Mac "Open With" clutter

by semperone Mar 17, 2007 11:40PM PDT

Using Apple's Migration program and a Firewire connection proved to be an almost pain-free method of transferring just about everything between my old iBook and a newly purchased, albeit used, Mac Powerbook. Only one minor app didn't make the "crossing," and it was easily reinstalled.

I have one question pertaining to this, however.

I do quite a bit of imaging work using various incarnations of Adobe's Photoshop.
I often have to Ctrl-click on an image to bring up Tiger/Mac's "Open With" dialog box, then arrow over and down to pick the App I want to work with. For some reason, this "Open With" contains all kinds of items that are not Applications and make it a chore to wade through. These items--all of which, I have noted, have the Windows extension .exe appended--seem to pertain to various parts of Adobe PS, and are holdovers from the previous owner of this Powerbook. How they got there I have no idea.

In any case, I would like to "clean" the "Open With" dialog box and have it only display necessary Applications. Is there a simple way to delete/remove these annoying and useless bits and pieces from the "Open With" dialog box?

[Mac PowerBookG4, OS X 10.4.

Discussion is locked

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Open with dialog.

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Mar 18, 2007 1:12AM PDT

I could be wrong, but I believe that the Open WIth dialog will only show apps that are actually on your machine.
For instance, if I was trying to open an Appleworks document using the Open With dialog, I would not expect Excel to appear in the list if I did not have Excel installed.

Somewhere on that HD, all those .exe files exist and will continue to show up in the list until they are removed.
I did some research on this problem this morning and I cannot see where the list is editable.

Question: Did you create your own account on that new machine or did you use the previous owners account?
I'm surprised that the previous owner did not wipe the drive and reinstall the OS before you got it. This is the safest way to protect your personal information and allows you to install all of your programs directly from the CD's. As you have noticed, not all apps travel well.

P

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Open with clutter

by semperone Mar 18, 2007 2:34AM PDT

Thanks for the hint: it worked.

Doing a search via "Find" came up with the .exe file that were cluttering the "Open With" dialog box. From there it was a simple matter to move 'em to the trash and then dump the latter. Bingo: no more clutter.
Curiously, all the dumped files were somewhat obscure sub-commands from Adobe PS (CS). How they got into the "Open With" dialog box is still a mystery.

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After more research

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Mar 18, 2007 4:31AM PDT

I found that they are installed from the Adobe CD and are little "droplets" that do little things.

Should you ever find yourself stuck as to how to make a JPEG(quality 60) you could use one of the Image Ready droplets.

It is safe to trash those files, if you ever need them again, they are on the install disk

Glad it worked for you

P

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another queston

by lovebug6133 Apr 20, 2007 7:27AM PDT

I would like to just delete these droplets, but I no longer have the install cds. Is there anyway to remove these from the "open with" without deleteling them from the adobe subfolders?

Also, can you access these feature from within CS2 if you delete the droplets, or are the droplets only there in the "open with" for quick use?

Thanks!

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I wouldn't recommend deleting the .exe "droplets"

by boya84 Apr 20, 2007 8:21AM PDT

as they may allow for certain functionality when the application is launched. I would also not delete them - since you do not have the install CDs, you *could* find yourself needing them and no way to get them.

Two suggestions:
1) Rename them so the ".exe" is removed. The application might try to call them their name has changed so you could get an error message. If that is the case, then you merely rename them back to what they were. Suggest leaving everything in the filename intact - but instead of ".exe" extension, it is just ".e". that way, they can be easily identified.

2) Pack them into a StuffIt file. That way, the extention is inside the ".sit" file, and the .exe takes up less space.

Of course, if you need to get them back to ".exe", that does not resolve the "Open with" issue... but these two options should mask the .exe extension from the "Open with" routine.

In either case, it would be easiest to keep the renamed or .sit files in the same directory as the .exe was so that recovering them back to their original location can be easily done.

... there may be other ways, but these seemed easiest - in my opinion...

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Open with hassles in the Finder

by squirri Apr 21, 2007 2:49AM PDT

The free Onyx program can be used to reset the links between files types -it's on the Maintenance tab / Reset.

This is a great tool(my personal favourite, although these are others) btw for keeping your Mac generally tuned up - it allows you to delete log files etc.

Check it out at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

One of the neat things it does is to let you set a message in the login window. Mine says 'If you love Windows, tough'....

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Delete Annoying Photoshop Options On Open With...

by walexm311 Dec 4, 2008 4:05PM PST

I tried all of the suggested ways to get rid of the unwanted ?Open With..? files, however they never cleared the Adobe droplets. I could never figure out how to get them off until i searched for one of the droplet files locations:

/Applications/Adobe Illustrator/Samples/Droplets

There are two folders contained within this folder (ImageReadyDroplets and PhotoshopDroplets)

I then compressed both of these folders and deleted the original folders off of my computer.

It may not at first seem like it worked, but give it a few minutes and browse through the Finder and it will eventually clear them. (or restart the finder)

All I have now is to remove Parallels items (Paint, WordPad, etc.) I have already gotten rid of anything Parallels on my computer, yet they still exist. Any help?

Mac "Open With" clutter

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