Zzot!

I’ve been messing with my site again, so don’t be shocked the next time you go to the actual web page. The color scheme is almost certainly not final — its just some random set of light-on-dark colors produced by fiddling with the color picker in TextMate.

Aside from the obvious throwing stuff around the page willy-nilly and splashing geegaw colors on everything, features include:

• A Tag Cloud. I was getting a lot of threatening phone calls
  from the Web 2.0 police for not having one, and my
  cat just couldn’t stand the stress any longer.
• Breadcrumbs. Sometimes. They don’t work properly in pages yet.
  In fact, they don’t work properly anywhere other than date
  archives and single entries.
• Asides. You wouldn’t know from how things look in the feed,
  but my site presents asides differently from regular posts.
  Oh, and I might start doing them.
• The footer no longer claims I haven’t written anything in two
  years. Then again, maybe I haven’t written anything in
  two years. It’s hard to tell sometimes.
• What little of consequence you could formerly do from my
  archives page you can now do from every page. So don’t
  bother going to the archives page to do it. You don’t
  need it. And it isn’t one to go to.
• Broken Stuff. I don’t know what or where, but I assume there
  is some. And there’s probably twice as much of it for people
  who still use IE, although I doubt any of them read my
  blog.

Site Info | Tagged Asides, Color, TextMate, WordPress | Permalink | No Comments

I still don’t get it. Okay, now that I think of it, there are two things I don’t get. First, I was so sure the “Translucent Menu Bar” checkbox would be under “Appearance” that I thought something was wrong when I didn’t find it there. That being said, I also still don’t get the big deal with the menu bar. Having used Leopard for months, Leopard sans translucency looks even more flat and lifeless than Tiger does. Were people even complaining about the menus themselves? I honestly don’t remember.

In other news, under 10.5.2, I’ve had a sharp increase in the number of times the app switcher pops up with the wrong number of icons in it. Strangely, most of the time the app I’m looking for isn’t one that the system forgot to draw in the app switcher, so it isn’t really that much of an inconvenience — but it’s still odd.

Weblog | Tagged Leopard, Mac OS X | Permalink | No Comments

Maybe if I spent more time obsessing over whatever iPhone Secrets websites I could find and less playing Burnout Paradise I would know this already, but I did notice something new (to me) recently — at least one of the built-in applications recognizes all four orientation values. Open up the Photos application, view a photo, and start rotating. As long as you do it slowly enough that it only has to do 90° turns to keep up, it will even follow along correctly — if you make it flip straight from left-side to right-side it will do it through right-side-up, regardless of whether that’s what you actually did.

Weblog | Tagged iPhone | Permalink | No Comments

We finally had our big family gift exchange last night — this is actually a major win for Mom. Sure, she failed in her quest to get it into December this year, but we still had it before the first full week in January.

A little while after my sister had arrived, her children had made enough of a ruckus that I thought to ask if she was looking forward to the calm, relaxing, stress-free environment of graduate school when her semester starts next week — she was, and she’d been thinking that very thing all day.

Anyway, I had a couple of jokes lined up for my “big gift”, but the much bigger story was one of my nephews. The middle one, who is a very strong contender for the coveted International Lost iPod Association Poster Boy position immediately protested me getting an iPhone. Ignoring how unlikely it is that my sister would have a 14-year old carrying a cell phone around, she later said (you know, when the poster boy comment had occurred to me and I tried it on her privately) that he would never have one; I simply added that even if he did get one, he wouldn’t have it for long.

Life | Tagged iPhone | Permalink | No Comments

One of the first things that happened to me in Spaces that irked me was its auto-switching to another space when I didn’t want it to. Sure, that’s probably what I’d want it to do a lot of the time, but if I’m trying to open a new window for an app that already has windows in other spaces, I have to select that app, create a new window, grab its title bar, and move back to the space I was in when I selected the app.

I was wondering what would happen if you could create a new window without activating the app, so I typed this into Script Editor:

tell application "iTerm"
	set term to (make new terminal)
	tell term
		launch session "default session"
		activate
	end tell
end tell

The result is a brand new iTerm window in my current space, without regard to whether there might already be such a window in another space. Switching spaces from a script is pretty easy too — as long as you aren’t holding down any modifiers when the script runs (say, by having used command-r in Script Editor):

tell application "System Events"
	delay 1 -- so I can let go of command
	keystroke "2" using control down
	delay 1 -- so you can see one switch happen and then the other
	key code 125 using control down
end tell

The one missing piece is moving a window — I don’t think it’s possible to drag an object via GUI scripting, so you can’t grab the title bar of a window, switch spaces, and then release it. At least it might be possible to create a fairly complex setup from a login script…if you had a lot of time on your hands. :)

AppleScript | Tagged Leopard, Mac OS X | Permalink | 2 Comments

Yes, again. Inspired by other solutions to the same problems, here are updated versions of these scripts. The primary difference is that they’re based on Apple’s droplet sample, so you can either click on them (for the current directory) or drop stuff on them and it’ll work either way. So, why don’t I just use his scripts, like I do his icons? Beats me — I updated these a week or two ago, and I’ve long since forgotten.¹

Continue reading…

1. While I’m at it, I’ve also forgotten what the other thing was I wanted to do to them before posting this. [↩]

AppleScript | Tagged iTerm, Leopard, Mac OS X, TextMate | Permalink | No Comments