After copying the app and finding my serial, I discovered it needed to download a conversion engine before it could work, but for some reason it couldn’t or wouldn’t download it, so after a search on Google I discovered I could just copy the engine from my archived Mac — although the website with the instruction eventually worked, I had to use Google’s cached file to start with.

I’m a little concerned the site might be broken or worse the information might disappear altogether so I though I would republish the instruction, which may be of use to other users?

In order to preserve VisualHub (or AudialHub) if you need to switch computers, you need to back up two things:

1. The VisualHub (or AudialHub) app itself
2. The conversion engine

To back up the conversion engine, Copy the folder at: /Library/Application Support/Techspansion (this is the top level Library folder, not the one in your user account).

…for good measure, you can also back up your Preferences file, containing your registration info in case you lose the original purchase e-mail. It’s at:
/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.techspansion.visualhub.plist
…or for AudialHub:
/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.techspansion.audialhub.plist

As far as I can tell, the two programs will continue to work in Snow Leopard, but I obviously can’t predict the future or what Apple will do in it, though.

Basically every file downloaded from the internet is tagged by the OS depending on its file type. If the download is an application or script, the OS will warn you with the above message when you first try and open it. Fine if you are opening one or two files, but not if you are trying to open up 20+ files at a time.

There is some reasoning behind this security feature, but I can’t help think that Apple should have included a way to turn it off or at least configure what file types the user deems ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’.

After Googleing for a solution I discovered two options. The first is by Henrik (Lift the Leopard download quarantine) is a simply Apple Script folder action that you apply to your Downloads folder. Every time a file is downloaded the Apple Script removes the ‘unsafe’ tag from it and thus banishes the warning message. The only problem I can see with the script is that is dose not work its magic on files within sub-folders.

The second is by Lazeez (Changing the system’s default settings for html files (safe)) and is my preferred solution. Basically you need to create a file called com.apple.DownloadAssessment.plist with a list of the file types you consider ‘safe’, you then need to save it to the ~/Library/Preferences folder, log-out or reboot to activate the changes, and no more warning messages!

The file looks like this:-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategorySafe</key>
<dict>
	<key>LSRiskCategoryContentTypes</key>
<array>
	<string>public.html</string>
	<string>public.php-script</string>
</array>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

You can see I have added two strings, public.html and public.php-script this allows me to open both .html and .php files without the warning. A full list of file types can be found on the Apple Developer site: System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers.

To add more, simply add in <string>file.type.here</string> (The file type Identifier)

I hope this helps other Leopard users as much as it has helped me – as any unnecessary clicks can really start to slow a work flow down.

Update: Thanks to bradym for this.
The “System-Declared Uniform Type Identifiers” page has moved to: System-DeclaredUniformTypeIdentifiers.