For a while now, VoiceOver portable preferences has bugged me, because it's so outdated. Today I decided to tackle the problem once and for all.
Aims:
What I wanted was a way to take my preferences with me wherever I go. I have 2 macs, one at my house, and one at the place I volunteer, which sort of doubles as a demo machine. So I wanted to be able to make awesome things happen at home, then have the changes reflected when I went to another mac, without the really serious risk that I'd lose my memory stick.
The plan:
VoiceOver portable preferences wants you to have an external disk attached, ideally a portable hard drive, a memory stick, or some other form of external media. The awesome thing is that OS X doesn't know, or more likely doesn't care, if it's a physical piece of hardware, or a mounted disk image.
The steps:
First thing to do is to make yourself a read/write (RW) image in Disk Utility, which can be found in /Applications/Utilities. I gave mine 1 partition, with a GUID partition table, which I don't think matters, but made me feel like I had something to talk about all the same. It's read / write, and is 40 MB (the smallest that I could set it too). When it's made, simply open it from wherever you stored it.
Now, in VoiceOver Utility's "General" category, click the "Setup" button, and select your mounted volume as the destination.
If you've done this right, you should See something like "Keeping portable preferences up to date on the remote disk VoiceOver Prefs".
Just to be sure, I toggled VoiceOver off and on again, then I ejected the disk, and re-opened it. I got the message about portable preferences, and I clicked the "Always Use" button.
You can now open up the image on another mac, and you should get the same message, thus allowing you to keep your preferences with you. To make sure their synced, simply eject the image, and that should do the trick.
I prepared an example image, including the scripts that I posted a few weeks ago, with my latest versions, and some others I've been working on. It also contains the keyboard prefs, so you can just import them, then you can use that image as your portable preferences.
Remember, what you've got is just a normal disk as far as the operating system cares. You can store any and all files you want in there, so you could leave other stuff (like the scripts) inside, for easy access whenever you use the image.
With the image I made, my scripts and stuff are used without me remapping anything, and I can put the image wherever I like.
If you want to download the image, here's my dropbox link:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4219494/VoiceOver%20Prefs.dmg
I tried using Simlinks to make something more dynamic, but that seemed to fall down pretty hard, so with the disk image I'll stay.
In the few hours I've been using this method, I've not noticed anything strange except for this fresh install seeming to ignore the settings which the second mac is happily using. That was easily worked around though, and now all is working smoothly.
Hope this helps someone.
