Alea jacta Ouest

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the product. I’m just a satisfied user. I just heard about it when it was in public beta, tried it and immediately liked it, but as with anything, your mileage may vary.

Spanning Tools for Mac is a set of utilities that have been created by the authors of Spanning Sync.

The tremendous potentials of Sync Services are obvious to all. Being able to share data between applications, between computers or with additional devices (iPhone anybody??) is wonderful, but for a lot of us, it sometimes turns in a living hell: Data corruption, duplications (endless duplications), loss, syncing stops altogether or a process related to syncing systematically crashes in the background.

Syncing is “less than stellar” for many. While third party applications could be buggy, most now agree that Sync Services have issues and are prone to corruption and we are all desperately waiting for a fix from Apple.

There are several options out there to help you deal with SyncServices issues. I strongly recommend reading the article about SyncServices Troubleshooting on the Entourage Help Website.

The Spanning Sync folks have a lot of experience with Sync Services and quickly identified several sources of corruptions and syncing problems. Then created a set of tools that will analyze your address book and calendar, looking for corruptions or potential sources of troubles and offer you to fix them. This suite offers three applications:

A calendar and contact cleaner, each targeting the corresponding databases on your Mac, and Sync Tune-Up, for more generalized and drastic solutions (more about that later)

The two “Cleaner” applications follow more or less the same approaches. You can chose what to check in the preferences and then let the applications do their magic.

For instance, if I take the Calendar Cleaner, I have the choice between nine potential sources of problems:

Once the scan is done, the application lists all problematic items, with a detailed description of the problems.

You can then decide how you want it fixed, and let the application do the rest.

The Contact Cleaner is similar and scans for a dozen of possible sources of problems.

The third application, Sync Tune-Up, takes a more generalized approach. A first panel lets you unregister an application from Sync Services, and a second one offers you to 1) disable SyncServices 2) force a fresh sync and 3) go nuclear and trash all Sync Service data from your Mac to force all applications to repopulate it all from scratch. Not something you should consider lightly, but when you’re desperate…

This set of utilities is shareware: $19.99, with $5 off for Spanning Sync customers.
Some might argue it’s a bit on the pricey side, but it has literally saved my bacon multiple times and corrected nasty issues I was having both with Entourage and MobileMe more than once. For me it was priceless. Read the rest of this entry »

My post on Archiving your e-mails with EagleFiler is out on The Entourage Help Blog

–

Mon billet sur « Sauvegarder ses e-mails avec EagleFiler » est disponible (en anglais) sur « The Entourage Help Blog »

(L’application n’est pas localisée à ma connaissance, aussi je ne poste pas ce billet en français – mais je vais contacter l’auteur pour lui faire la suggestion )

Now I usually don‘t post here too often about applications that are not in direct relationship with Office, but I thought I could make an exception
I spend a lot of time at work crunching numbers in Excel or other applications (Prism is my friend).
Very often, I just want to run a quick calculation. I used to be a heavy HP48 user, but my calculator dies a while ago and I learnt to live without it.
I recently got an iPod Touch I started looking for a decent scientific calculator that would also support the RPN notation.

Well the search is over, I found it!
I first tried the lite version (free) then quickly migrated to the full, paid version of PCalc.
PCalc is developped by TLA Systems (they also make the famous DragThing) offers all the functions I’ve been looking for (and was updated today with even more goodness)

• Scientific calculator
• RPN mode with two lines of text (I’d love to be able to squeeze even more, bt I understand that it might not be really practical on the iPhone/iPod Touch screen).
  Conversions, tons of conversions
• paper-tape mode (do all your calculations and have the app summarize the all thing as if you had been using a paper-tape printing calculator – very useful to summarize a long set or inter-related calculations)
• Themes (I like themes)
• octal, hexadecimal, etc calculations (I don’t use this, but many people do)
• etc…

If you are like me and think that the built-in calculator is far too limited for your taste and are on the market for something like that, I encourage you to try the lite version first. Be careful, you might get hooked like me and get the full one ($9.99 — but well-worth it in my opinion).

In addition, the author seems extremely active, responds quickly to suggestions (and Tweets)

Now there is also a regular MacOS X version, but I can’t comment on it since I haven’t tried it (I use the iPod Touch all the times for these quick calculations)

A couple of days ago, Microsoft posted on their site an announcement about the availability of a new beta for Entourage.
This new version allows Exchange 2007 users to access their e-mails through Exchange Web Services (EWS for short). This has serious advantages over the previous method (using WebDAV).

• Much faster
• You can now sync categories, tasks notes, etc,

Now be careful. This update is not for everybody.

• It cannot connect to an exchange server through WebDAV, so if you have an account on Exchange 2003, don’t even think about installing it. If you have more than one Exchange account, one on 2003 and the other on 2007, it’s a no-go there too.
• It requires Exchange 2007 SR1 on both the front-end server (usually OWA) and the mailbox server (back-end). MS also mentions that the minimal requirement would be SR1 with rollup 4 (the latest update as of today is rollup 6). Apparently these updates corrected a lot of WebServices-related issues. You can usually figure out what’s installed on your server by connecting through OWA: On the top right part of your Page click on Options. On the Option page, select About (bottom of the left-side panel). The presulting page usually lists the version installed on OWA and the mailbox server. Figuring out which rollup you have is not always easy. Mine says 8.1.336.0, which means:
  8: Exchange 2007
  1: SR1
  336.0: that’s the build number and this one corresponds to Rollup 5.
  At this point, I’m not sure what version corresponds to Rollup 4…

How to get it:
Go to the blog post I indicated, read everything then click on the link on the bottom of the page.
This leads to Connect, Microsoft beta-testing reporting platform. You can create an account there and apply for the beta. It takes them a couple of days to review the applications and give you access to the download link and reporting forms (for the bugs).

With all that in mind, it looks like a great beta to me. I hope people will install it and report tons of bugs that MS will be able to fix quickly for a nice and stable release.

Just out on the MacTopia blog:
A beta of Messenger with A/V support should be out in 2009.
It doesn’t say when in 2009, but at least it’s coming
A demo should be up and running at MacWorld.

Thanks to Nadyne for pointing this out to me,

Tout frais (en anglais) sur le blog de MacTopia :
une version béta de Messenger avec supprot A/V devrait être disponible en 2009.
Ça ne dit pas quand en 2009, maius au moins ça vient
Une démo devrait être offerte à MacWorld

Tous mes remerciements à Nadyne pour me l’avoir fait remarquer,

(in French since the application is mostly directed at people who at least understand French)

Antidote RX vient d’être mis à jour en version 8.
J’avais parlé précédemment de cette excellente application permettant de corriger le français en s’intégrant dans de nombreuses applications (dont Office).
Au menu, de nombreuses nouvelles locutions, des corrections de bogues divers et une intégration améliorée à de nombreuses applications.
Les notes de la mise à jour sont ici.

Even though Office 2008 doesn’t support VBA at this time (which should change in the next version of Office), you can still receive infected Word, Excel or PPT documents. They won’t infect your Mac, but you can still pass them along to collaborators and friends who might be on a Windows machine.
Regardless, it’s good practice to use and Antivirus.
Symantec has been on the market for virtually ever and also provides Internet security (read firewall, etc) software. Ages ago, they had a fairly active MacFixIt-based forum. When they decided to move away from this solution, the forums (and support) got more or less diluted in the general Symantec resources.
Up to recently, support for the Mac software was in the “Other software” section of the Symantec forums, lost amongst other questions for less popular software.
Well this is over now, Tony Weiss at Symantec just pointed out to me that there is a new Mac section in the Symantec forums
This means a few things to me:
1) Mac question will be easier to pick for the Symantec folks (Mike Romo, who was ruling over the MFI forums is still there actually)
2) Finding previously posted questions will be significantly easier
3) Well, could it be a sign of the consistently increasing Mac marketshare?? More Mac, means more customers, which means more attention from companies like Symantec. More sweethearts might also mean more customers who already have the “antivirus reflex” and might already know Symantec.

In any case, as far as I am concerned, it’s all good for us.

Now the next step would be localized groups :->
Since at this point the groups are in English only, I won’t even bother to translate this post :-\

The PocketMac folks just gave me access to their latest app: PocketMac iCalScreenSaver.
I must admit that I like it
It’s a MacOS X Screen saver that will display your calendar for the day, then the week, then the month. You can select which calendar to display, and they offer a few themes.

One limitations though: The application only works with iCal. If you manage your calendar in Entourage, you will have to enable SyncServices in the Preferences to let Entourage sync your calendar to iCal and make it accessible to iCalScreenSaver.

iCalScreenSaver is a $9.95 shareware (and now my default screen saver)

Les développeurs de PocketMacviennent de me mettre à disposition une copie de leur dernier logiciel : PocketMac iCalScreenSaver.
Je dois admettre que je le trouve pas mal du tout
C’est un économiseur d’écran pour MacOS X Screen qui affiche votre calendrier pour le jour, la semaine puis le moi. Il offre également quelques thèmes différents.
Un seul point noir : L’application ne fonctionne qu’avec iCal. SI vous utilisez Entourage pour gérer votre calendrier, vous devrez activer la synchronisation avec les SyncServices dans les préférences d’Entourage pour qu’il se synchronise avec iCal et que les données soient donc accessibles à iCalScreenSaver.

iCalScreenSaver est shareware a $9.95 (et maintenant mon économiseur d’écran par défaut).

Once in a while, I am send a Word or Excel document with a bunch of pictures in it. Sometimes, I need to get these pictures (usually to modify them, or reduce the file size, etc). There is no really easy way to do this in Office. Of course, you can copy and paste the image from Office to whatever image editor application you want to use, but you never know what format the image was in, etc… It’s usually not a lot of fun.

I was messing around with one of these files today and figured out two ways to do it.
1) Use FileJuicer. This great application can also extract media files from a lot more file formats (and from applications).
2) For Office 2007/8 files, duplicate the file to work on a copy, select the copy in the Finder, press Cmd-I to get the information on it, remove the .docx or .pptx extension and replace it with .zip (Office 2008 files are nothing more than an XML file, with additional folders for embedded data, compressed as .zip and with a specific extension). When you close the Information panel, the Finder will ask you whether you are really really sure, and you can say Yes.You can then double-click it to reveal it’s inner structure… and all the embedded media files in a “media” subfolder

De temps à autres, on m’envoie un document Word ou PowerPoint contenant tout un tas d’images. J’ai parfois besoin de récupérer ces images, de les modifier, les réduire, etc… Il n’existe pas de moyen réellement simple de récupérer ces fichiers depuis les documents en question. Bien sûr, je peux copier et coller dans l’éditeur de mon choix, mais on ne sait jamais dans quel format les fichiers étaient, on a donc tout un tas de difficultés.

Je travaillais à la question aujourd’hui et j’ai trouvé deux solutions
1) Utiliser FileJuicer. Cette excellente application peut extraire tout fichier incorporé dans les documents Word ou PowerPoint (et bien d’autres encore).
2) Pour les fichiers Office 2007/8, faites une copie du fichier, sélectionnez-là dans le Finder, utilisez le raccourcis Cmde-I pour afficher les informations dans dans ce panneau remplacez l’extension .dox ou .pptx en .zip (Les fichiers Office 2008 ne sont rien de plus qu’un fichier XML, avec des dossiers liés pour les données associées, le tout compacté en .zip et avec une extension spécifique). Refermez le panneau des informations et le Finder vous demandera si vous êtes vraiment vraiment certain de vouloir faire ça. Une fois fait, vous pouvez double-cliquer le .zip dans le Finder pour le décompresser. Vous obtenez un dossier avec, dans un des sous dossiers, un dossier « media » contenant tous les fichiers associés dans leur format natif

Thomson Reuters just announced the release of EndNote X2 for Mac OS X.
EndNote is a bibliography manager that integrates in Word (usually used for complex scientific manuscripts where you have to cite dozens of references in a specific format).

The new version has an improved UI (still far from Papers IMHO), supports smart groups, and downloads PDFs automatically for your references.

It’s an improvement for sure…

Thomson Reuters vient d’annoncer EndNote X2 pour Mac OS X.
EndNote est un gestionnaire de bibliographie qui s’intègre à Word (utilisé en général pour gérer des bibliographies complexes pour la rédaction d’articles scientifiques où vous trouvez des dizaines de citations qui doivent apparaître dans un format prédéterminé).

La nouvelle version a une interface utilisateur amélioré et supporte par exemple les groupes intelligents (toujours pas au niveau de Papers IMHA). Elle peut également télécharger pour vous les PDF correspondants à vos références.

C’est tout de même une amélioration…

(en français plus bas)

I’ve been rather silent lately. It’s a bit sad since there was a lot of things to talk about. It’s just that I’ve been really overwhelmed and I just could not find the time to sit down and post here everything that was going on…

• One of the most important news is that VBA is coming back in the next version of Office. That means that everybody who relies on VBA (and I know quite a few) will benefit from a rewritten VBA implementation as of Office… 20xx?
• The Office for Mac team blog also announced that the Solver would be back for Office 2008 (free of charge) in mid-September.
• The Office 12.1.1 update came out. This update fixes the creator type code issue that prevented people from opening their files through a simple double-click is gone.
  The problem was related to downloaded files getting (through the application downloading them) outdated creator codes. For some undisclosed reason related to security, Office was refusing to open them. You had to use the Open command in Office. Well this is history now (and so are the scripts I wrote to fix the issue by correcting the creator code of affected files).
  The update brings along the latest Auto-Updater update. This means that if you install Office 208 today, all you need is the 12.1.0 update, then the 12.1.1. You can skip the auto-update update if you have already downloaded these two.
  With the new version I’m not experiencing as many SyncServices issues as I used to. Not perfect, but better…
• Office 11.5.0 is also out. A combo updater (so you can go straight from 10.0 to 10.5) bringing support for Office 2008 XML-based files if you also install the converters.
• Messenger 7.0.1 is out. Not much to say about it.
• Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 final is also out. The new version brings additional bug fixes and also a few improvements over the last beta.
• The EndNote folks released their Word 2008 add-on. A major re-write with serious improvements (seems a lot faster on my Mac). Only for EndNote X1… The installer works well if both Office and EndNote are in /Applications and if the Word startup folder hasn’t been customized. It wasn’t the case for me so I had to perform the installation manually. Not hard, but it’s a bit of a pain.

That’s it for now

J’ai été assez silencieux dernièrement. Ce n’est pas que je n’avais rien à dire, mais j’ai été atrocement débordé et je n’ai simplement pas eu le temps de venir par ici pour poster des nouvelles.

• Une des nouvelles les plus importantes est sans doute que le VBA sera de retour dans la prochaine version d’Office. Une excellent e nouvelle pour tous ceux qui se reposent sur ce language de macro commandes pour Office (et j’en connais un certain nombre). Cette version sera réécrite et on peut donc espérer des améliorations de performances du VBA dans Office …20XX ?
• Le blog officiel des développeurs d’Office a également annoncé que le solveur sera de retour pour Office 2008 gratuitement à la mi-septembre.
• La mise à jour Office 12.1.1 est disponible. Cette mise à jour fixe notamment le soucis lié aux codes créateurs qui empêchait l’ouverture par un simple double-clic de fichiers téléchargés par certaines applications. Ces applications ajoutaient un code créateur obsolète et pour des raisons liés à la sécurité (que Microsoft n’a pas expliquées) Office refusait de les ouvrir ainsi. Vous deviez passer par le menu Ouvrir dans Office.
  Tout ça est de l’histoire ancienne (tout comme le sont les scripts que j’avais écrits pour corriger le code créateur sur ces fichiers).
  Cette mise à jour apporte également la dernière version du module de mise à jour automatique. Cela sous-entend que pour mettre une version 12.0 à jour vous n’avez besoin que de la mise à jour 12.1.0 puis de la 12.1.1. Vous pouvez ignorer la mise à jour de l’auto-mise à jour si vous avez déjà téléchargé ces deux dernières
  Avec cette nouvelle version j’ai beaucoup moins de soucis avec les SyncServices. Pas parfait, mais mieux…
• Office 11.5.0 est également disponible. Une mise à jour combinée qui permet au demeurant de passer directement de 10.0 à 10.5.0 et apporte le support pour les fichiers Office 2008 basées sur le XML pour peu que vous installiez les convertisseurs.
• Messenger 7.0.1 est disponible. Pas grand chose à jouter.
• Remote Desktop Connection 2.0 final est disponible. Quelque corrections de bogues et quelques améliorations par rapport à la dernière version béta.
• Les développeurs d’EndNote on mis en ligne leur module externe pour Word 2008. Une ré-écriture massive du module d’intégration (qui semble bien plus rapide sur mon Mac). Uniquement pour EndNote X1. L’Installateur fonctionne correctement si Office et EndNote sont dans /Applications et si vous n’avez pas personnalisé le dossier d’ouverture au démarrage de Word. Ça n’était pas mon cas, et j’ai donc du faire l’installation à la main. Pas atroce, mais fastidieux. Grâce à cette mise à jour, nombre de chercheurs par ici ont pu abandonner Office 2004 et passer sous 2008.

C’est tout pour maintenant

(Since this is about a site in French, I’ll post the rest of this post in French too)

Yves Cornil, un des MVP pour Office:Mac vient de lancer un nouveau blog sur Word 2008
Beauoucp d’information sur Word (qui restent pour beaucoup également valables pour les précédentes versions). Vous trouverez notamment des informations pratique sur la façon dont on peut effectuer un nombre important de mises en page.
À visiter donc

Steve found yet another file type affected by the 12.1 update for Office 2008 (“XLS ” for Excel files downloaded through FireFox 2). I therefore added it to the scripts found on this page.

FireFox 3 apparently corrected the problem and no longer assigns obsolete file types to Office files.

Steve a trouvé un type de fichier supplémentaire affecté par la mise à jour 12.1 d’Office 2008 (« XLS  » pour les fichiers Exel téléchargés par FireFox 2). Je l’ai donc ajouté aux scripts que l’on trouve ici.

FireFox 3 semble avour corrigé le tir et n’affecte plus des types obsolètes aux fichiers Office.

CrossOver 7 for Mac OS X came out today. The new version now supports Office 2007 for Windows. With Office 2008 for Mac, I should be all set, but it’s sometimes nice to be able to use the Windows version for a few things not supported on the Mac one (VBA for instance) and CrossOver is a pretty good, light-weight solution to run these applications without requiring to install Windows and run it under a virtualization environment.

CrossOver 7 pour Mac OS X est sorti aujourd’hui. La nouvelle version supporte Office 2007 pour Windows. Avec Office 2008 pour Mac je ne devrais pas en avoir trop besoin, mais c’est parfois pratique de pouvoir faire touner la version Windows (pour utiliser le VBA par exemple…). CrossOver est une solution légère pour aire tourner ces applications sans avoir besoin d’installer Windows ou de le faire tourner dans un environnement de virtualisation.

Virtually every time I use Excel, I use it to play around with data and plot the results. Excel 2008 had a nasty issue: you could not add custom error bars to a chart. The application would display it if it had been created in a previous version of Excel, but the user interface to create a new one was simply not there.

Well it’s fixed in the Service release 1 I can finally trash Excel 2004 and use 2008 instead (I don’t really need VBA in Excel).

À peu près à chaque fois que j’utilise Excel, c’est pour manipuler des données et créer des graphes pour représenter les résultats. Excel 2008 avait un très sérieux problème : iIl était impossible d’ajouter des barre d’erreurs personnalisées. On pouvait afficher des barres d’erreur crées dans des versions précédentes, mais pas en ajouter de nouvelles. Inutilisable pour moi… C’est enfin une chose corrigée avec la Service Release 1 puisque l’interface permettant d’ajouter des barres d’erreur est de retour Je peux enfin poubelliser Excel 2004 (je n’utilise quasi jamais le VBA dans Excel).

Thanks to Steve Maser, I’ve been able to correct additional issues.

I now have two scripts.
The first one works through Drag & Drop. You can drag files or folders on the script and it will scan for the old file types and replace them with the new ones (recursively in the entire folder if you dropped a folder).
At the end of the process, it tells you that the files have been converted. It doesn’t necessarily mean that files were outdated and were converted, just that all files were scanned and the ones with outdated codes – if you had any – were updated. It’s just an indication that the script is done.

After that, you should be able to double-click the files to open them in Office 2008 SR1.

The second script is a Folder Action Script. I created it because I thought it would be useful to people using either FireFox 2 or Eudora for instance. You can activate the script for your attachment download folder for instance. Every time a new file is downloaded in the folder, the script will run in the background and update the file type for you.

To quote John McGhie:

Users may also experience some character transposition. The WDBN format was an eight-bit format, the W8BN format is expected to contain Unicode.

So files that legitimately had these outdated file types (very very old files) might be affected in a negative way.

1) Place the script in ~/Library/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts

2) Make sure Folder Actions are enabled

3) attach the script to the folder

Both scripts are here : http://www.cortig.net/files/FileTypeScripts.zip. Use at your own risks!!! No warranty whatsoever (as always).

You do whatever you want with them (under a Creative Commons licence).

Well Steve Maser asked me to come up with a version that would work recursively on all files inside a folder you would drag to the script.
He also suggested that I added the W6BN type (for Word 6/95 files).
So I based the script on one of the examples provided by Apple, and here is the result:

-- This droplet processes files dropped onto the applet
on open these_items
   repeat with i from 1 to the count of these_items
      set this_item to item i of these_items
      set the item_info to info for this_item
      if folder of the item_info is true then
         process_folder(this_item)
      else
         tell application "Finder"
            
            -- get the file type
            set TheFileType to file type of this_item
            set UpdatedFileType to TheFileType
            
            -- detect old file types for Office files chose the correct one instead
            if TheFileType = "WDBN" then set UpdatedFileType to "W8BN"
            if TheFileType = "W6BN" then set UpdatedFileType to "W8BN"
            if TheFileType = "XLS4" then set UpdatedFileType to "XLS8"
            --   if TheFileType = "SLD8" then set UpdatedFileType to "SLD8"
            
            -- set the new file type
            set file type of this_item to UpdatedFileType
         end tell
      end if
   end repeat
end open
-- Just in case people try to open the script through a double-click in the Finder.
on run
   display dialog "Drop your files or folders to be converted on this icon"
end run

The compiled script is here and again, please make tests only on a copy of your files.
Feedbacks are much welcome.

In the Service release 1 for Office 2008, Microsoft decided to prevent files with old file types to open through a double-click or a drag and drop (and don’t know why and that’s not the point here).
There is a workaround to open these files. MS recommends that you use the Open dialog from within Office applications.
If you have hundreds of old files affected with this problem, that’s hardly a decent solution.

You can batch-wipe out the creator code of your files as well. If you do so, the Finder will then exclusively rely on the extension of the file (eg: .doc, .xls…). That works well… unless you are missing extensions on some of your files.

I’ve been considering a much better approach: correct the file types according to what they are now actually supposed to be.
I wrote a simple AppleScript for that, but I need feeback:

• I know what outdated file types are now blocked by Office for Word and Excel, but not for PowerPoint.
• I need people to test the script and report back in case there is a problem (test on a copy of your files of course!).

Here is the script:

on open TheFiles
     repeat with OneFile in TheFiles
          tell application "Finder"
               
               -- get the file type
               set TheFileType to file type of OneFile
               
               -- detect old file types for Office files chose the correct one instead
               if TheFileType = "WDBN" then set UpdatedFileType to "W8BN"
               if TheFileType = "XLS4" then set UpdatedFileType to "XLS8"
               --     if TheFileType = "SLD8" then set UpdatedFileType to "SLD8"
               
               -- set the new file type
               set file type of OneFile to UpdatedFileType
          end tell
     end repeat
end open
-- warning in case the application is not use as drag and drop
on run
     display dialog "Drop your files to be converted on this icon"
end run


You need to compile it as an application and drag your files on its icon.
You can download the compiled (yet editable) version here.

Grâce à l’aide de Steve Maser, nous sommes parvenus à trouver une solution plus automatisable pour réparer les fichiers qui refusent de s’ouvrir dans Office 2008 SR1 d’un simple double-clic dans le Finder.

Le problème semble être lié aux codes Type et Créateur de ces fichiers.
Leur suppression permet de pouvoir à nouveau ouvrir ces ficheirs d’un double-clic.

Il existe de nombreux utilitaires pouvant vous assister dans cette tâche. Celui qui me vient en premier à l’esprit est bien sûr File Buddy. Il est un peu honéreux pour n’effectuer que cette simple tâche malheureusement ($39.95).
FileXaminer peut faire la même chose pour beaucoup moins cher ($6). L’application peut également fonctionner en mode démo pendant 14 jours.

Thanks to the help of with Steve Maser, we found a solution that should allow to batch process files that refuse to open through a Double-click with the Service Pack 1 for Office 2008.

The problem appears to be related to the file Type and Creator.
Wiping out the file and creator for these files fixes the issue and allows you to open them through a regular double-click again,

There are several utilities that allow you to batch process files to wipe out the file Type and Creator. The first one that immediately comes to my mind is File Buddy. It’s a little bit on the pricey side for performing just this task unfortunately ($39.95).
FileXaminer can do the same thing and is a lot cheaper ($6). It can also run in demo mode for 14 days.