Need to turn off Recent items and auto Save for all users

[wemeck]

It seems having recent items and auto save turned on in AppleWorks preferences.

What would be the easiest way for me to change the preferences for all users in a 10.4.2 server and client environment?

[Anonymous]

[QUOTE BY= wemeck] It seems having recent items and auto save turned on in AppleWorks preferences.

What would be the easiest way for me to change the preferences for all users in a 10.4.2 server and client environment?[/QUOTE]

AppleWorks uses a plist file, but it doesn’t store recent items or auto save items there. It’s very much a Mac OS 9 program that’s been ported to Mac OS X. Instead, you’ll find an AppleWorks Preferences folder inside the user’s ~/Library/Preferences folder. This folder is where AppleWorks saves the ‘turn of recent items and auto save’ preferences. Not being a system admin I’m not sure how you’d lock down these files so they can’t be changed.

You should also be aware that both recent items and autosaved files are stored as files in the Recent Items and AutoSave folders found here <~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/>. Recent items are really alias files stored at this location, and Auto Save files are time saved versions of files saved with a long alphanumeric name that have no resemblance to the ‘real’ folder.

Why am I telling you this? Because AppleWorks has a bug that causes it to continue saving aliases to the <~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Recent Items> folder even when the Recent Items preference is disabled. The effect of this is that eventually this folder fills with large numbers of aliases and AppleWorks stalls when carrying out everyday actions like typing. That is, the busy cursor (beachball cursor) is displayed for seconds or minutues at a time. My long winded point is that you’ll probably want to lock the <~/Documents/AppleWorks User Data/Recent Items> folder to stop aliases accumulating and your users having a negative experience.

For non-networked users I’ve went as far as writing an application to manage recent item aliases, as well as providing shortcuts to common AppleWorks tasks.

Dale
dmg software

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