Run iPulse Without a Password Prompt

The latest version of iPulse runs very nicely in Snow Leopard. Great. Except that every time you start it you have to type in your password! What a pain. So this will tell you how to avoid having to type in your password every time you start iPulse, which is probably every time you login.

Open a Terminal (it's in /Applications / Utilities).
Run the command "sudo visudo".
It will prompt you for your password, so type it in. Oh, you need an Administrator account to be able to do any of this, sorry.
Press G (capital G) to go to the bottom of the file, then press o (little Oh, not a zeo) to open up a new line.
Enter the following line, changing "jkf" for the "short name" of your account:

jkf ALL=NOPASSWD: /Applications/iPulse.app/Contents/MacOS/iPulse

Press "esc" to stop editing. If anything went wrong, type ":q!" and press return to quit without saving. If the line looks okay, type ":wq" and press return to save and exit.

Now your Mac knows you can run iPulse as an administrator without a password.

Because iPulse will be running as the root user, it needs to know what Jacket to load when it starts. So back into the Terminal window.
This time type this command, all on 1 line:

cd ; sudo cp Library/Preferences/com.iconfactory.iPulse.plist /var/root/Library/Preferences

Next stop is the AppleScript Editor (it's in /Applications/Utilities). We're going to create a little application that joins everything together.
Create a new script. Paste the following line into it, noting that it should be pasted in all on 1 line, though the editor will word-wrap it to make it look pretty.

do shell script "SUDO_ASKPASS=/usr/bin/true /usr/bin/sudo -b -n /Applications/iPulse.app/Contents/MacOS/iPulse </dev/null &>/dev/null"


Click on the "Compile" button to make it look nice, it shouldn't produce any errors.
Using File / Save As..., save this as an Application in /Applications with a neat name like "Start iPulse".

If you try to run this new application, you should see iPulse start without asking for a password! Yay!

Nearly there.
Now just go into System Preferences / Accounts / Login Items, click the little "+" button at the bottom of the list of appications to start when you login, and add your new "Start iPulse" application.

Now you are all set. Try logging out, then login again and you should find that iPulse starts up without asking for a password.
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