The Entourage User's WebLog

A request on the newsgroups prompted me to write a script I have been meaning to write for a long time. You see, the Corporate Identity rules at my place of work require that I have a lengthy signature appended to each email I send out. However, if i am replying to a mail from someone, they don't need to see the same 10 lines every time. Now some mail clients (like Outlook) allow you to set a different signature for original mails and for replies, but Entourage does not. this script will fix that. It will, if you set up a repeating schedule to run the script once per minute, check for a reply being written and change the signature accordingly. Full details on setting up this schedule are included in the script's readMe file.

The script is called "Set Sig for Reply" and is available from my script's page.
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Some users of Intel macs have been reporting that their notifications had not been showing up - you know, those nice little semi-transparent blue windoids that show up in the corner of your screen when Entourage is in the background:

This flurry of reports prompted some questions that highlight some of the issues in tracking bugs: The reports started appearing shortly after the release of the 11.3 update - was it linked, or was it coincidental? Did the disappearance hit everyone at the same time, or did a first report just trigger a "hey, I'm not seeing those windows either" response from a lot more people? Most reports came from people running Intel macs - was it only that platform that was affected?

Well, MacBU saw the reports in the public newsgroups (and probably other places as well) and started investigating. Eventually they came up with a 'repro case' (a series of steps that could reliably reproduce the problem). So, it's a real issue. Who's affected? Simple answer is anyone running an Intel mac, Office 2004 and Messenger 6.x. However, that in itself is not enough to trigger the problem - things have to happen in a particular order. This highlights another problem in bug-hunting - it's not enough to find out what combination of products is responsible, you have to find out in what order they interact. What happens in this case? Well, here's the detail...

Both Office 2004 and Messenger 6.x use a similar scheme to provide that notifications window. They are actually controlled by a little background app called the 'Alerts Daemon'. However, there is a complication - Messenger is a Universal Binary application, Office is not. Therefore they can't be distributed with the same version of daemon. Messenger can use Office's daemon (running under Rosetta on an Intel Mac), but Office can't use Messenger's version if it's running natively on Intel. So, if the messenger daemon starts before the office daemon, then office can't use it, and is too confused to launch its own daemon, so your notifications don't show up. However, if the Office daemon starts up before Messenger daemon, then messenger is able to use it (in Rosetta) as well as office and all is well.

Now we know what is happening, the solution is obvious. Just force the Office daemon to launch first! The easy way to ensure this happens is to add the daemon to your 'start up' items when you log in. In the system preferences, select the 'System:Accounts' pane. Select your user, then the 'login items' tab. Click the '+' button below the list of login items and navigate to /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Office/ and select the 'Alerts Daemon.app' that is in that folder. This ensures the office daemon is started up first. You can leave Messenger in the start up items list (if it is already in there), since it won't try to launch its version of the Alerts Daemon until it receives a 'toast' notification. This won't happen during the login sequence as you won't be logged into messenger yet, so it is quite certain the office daemon will start first.

That should (after you have logged out and back in again) ensure that your notifications will work OK in future - if there are any problems, please report back.

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Please feel free to leave a comment using the links below - comments on this article or requests for future articles are always welcome and will be responded to where appropriate.