rooSwitch: Multiple Profiles for MacOpera (30 Days to becoming an Opera Lover)

rooSwitch: Multiple Profiles for MacOpera

Originally posted on Wednesday, July 12, 2006

2006/07/13: Note update below since the original version of this article was posted.

Folks who know me well know that my biggest complaint about using MacOpera (compared to WinOpera) is that all of the installations of Opera will share the same preferences.

WinOpera users can install separate versions of Opera and have completely separate preferences, which is a huge boon for beta testing, especially because you can have more than one version of Opera running at the same time.

A MacOpera using friend recently directed my attention to rooSwitch, a $15 utility which basically allows you to have an unlimited number of profiles for the various Mac apps that you use.

This solves part of the problem; namely, it lets me have different profiles. However it does not solve the bigger problem of letting me run two different versions of MacOpera at the same time with different preferences.

But some progress is better than no progress, so I’m testing it out, and so far it’s working OK once you tweak rooSwitch just a little bit.

The basic idea is that rooSwitch will look at the various preference files/folders which an app (such as Opera) uses, and makes a copy of them. Then if you totally bork your installation, you have a safety net to go back to.

rooSwitch told me that these were the folders and files which Opera uses:

~/Library/Application Support/Opera
~/Library/Caches/Opera
~/Library/Preferences/com.operasoftware.Opera.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences

Update:

Note (2006/07/13): this section original article has been edited from its original form as the rest of it it referred to a process of working around a bug which no longer exists as of the 1.0.3 release.

The developer contacted me about the issues I brought up in my original post and has issued a new version 1.0.3 (360) which fixes both of the previous issues mentioned below less than 24 hours after I posted them here. I have confirmed that both of the issues are fixed and that the update process was dead simple (whereas most apps send you to a website to download the latest version, rooSwitch updated itself, unpacked the update, and all I had to do was click and wait (not very long).

Here’s what happened when I updated rooSwitch:

[screenshot rooSwitch updating

[screenshot rooSwitch extracting

[screenshot rooSwitch ready to install
(I clicked on the “Restart rooSwitch” one too quick to get a screenshot of it!)

Ah... Perfection.... Here is what it looks like when you create a new blank profile:

I should point out again (I mentioned this in the comments below) that I didn’t even draw his attention to this issue, although I had meant to — oops! So $15 from my AdSense budget from this site will go towards a rooSwitch license very soon!

And now back to the original article, already in progress....

Final note for the easily annoyed

If you find the confirmation dialog annoying:
[Screenshot rooswitch Confirmation dialog]

Then go to the preferences dialog and turn it off, as shown here.
[Screenshot rooSwitch preferences]

Comments

On July 13, 2006 at 01:53 PM, BrianC wrote:

Hi, I'm the developer of rooSwitch. Nice write up! I'll look into the remove bug.

To make it so that you don't have to edit each new profile you can create a ~/Library/Application Support/rooSwitch/CustomAppMappings.xml file with the following contents:



<ApplicationMappings>

    <application>

        <name>Opera</name>

        <path>~/Library/Application Support/Opera</path>

        <path>~/Library/Caches/Opera</path>

        <path>~/Library/Preferences/com.operasoftware.Opera.plist</path>

        <path>~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences</path>

    </application>

</ApplicationMappings>

After creating this file create a new rooSwitch document by dropping Opera onto rooSwitch again. Now edit the profile and you should see it has the full list of what you want. This custom mappings file is not yet a documented feature, but will be soon.

I'll include this custom mapping in the next version of rooSwitch, 1.0.3, which will be out soon (tonight/tomorrow?). The remove not working is a regression I wasn't aware of until now.

If you have any problems please let me know (feedback@roobasoft.com). I'll also post an update here (so long as that's OK) when 1.0.3 is out and has better support for Opera out of the "box" and the remove bug fixed.

On July 13, 2006 at 02:40 PM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

Hey, very cool! I had meant to send you an email to let you know about this but got distracted and forgot to do so.

It's absolutely OK to post updates here when available. I love supporting responsive Mac Developers!

On July 13, 2006 at 03:51 PM, BrianC wrote:

1.0.3 is up and available. You can update from within rooSwitch via the menu item "rooSwitch > Check for Updates..." or the website has the latest too.

1.0.3 fixes adds support for Opera and fixes the remove bug. Hopefully this is the last 1.0.x release but I'll keep pushing them out so long as people keep finding things.

Thanks again. Oh, and you might want to update the post mentioning that with 1.0.3 the editing of the profile is no longer necessary? Well, first, confirm that that's true :)

Continue to let me know if you find any problems.

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