I tried this hint and, in spite of others’ success with this solution, I’m having decidedly mixed results. I’m seriously considering going back to the default mode and fewer spaces (for the few cases where app partitioning actually works for me, like VMware and Xcode).

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Random tinkering

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.
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Still Clueless

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.

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The Final Orientation

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.

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Merry Christmasish!

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.

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ThisSpace

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

{: lang=applescript }

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

{: lang=applescript }

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. :)

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iTerm/TextMate Here

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. 

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More Little Things

  • The Dock is way too fucking dark. The glass shelf doesn’t thrill me either, but at least it’s a subtle eyesore.
  • Holy crap Spotlight is faster. I used to use Google Desktop based solely on its speed — now it actually has to compete on features.
  • Did I mention that the Dock is too fucking dark?
  • I like the Downloads stack idea — even though I still sometimes reach for the Show Desktop Exposé key to find a download.
  • I’m not crazy about stacks being displayed so literally in the Dock.
  • I don’t really like having to open the stack in Finder to group-delete items either.
  • Do you think it takes the fill color from one of the edge PNGs? That’d make it a lot easier to fix without resorting to ClearDock (when it’s updated for Leopard).
  • The ever-present window drop shadow takes a nap when entering or leaving Time Machine. If they’d kept it, the visual effect of stepping into (or out of) the Way Back might actually work.

Update

No, you cannot change the color of the non-glass-shelf Dock with some simple editing of the obvious images inside Dock.app. For the left side the images are left1.png–left5.png, corresponding to the top edge, the top-right corner, the right edge, the bottom-right corner, and the bottom edge — leaving just 95% of the area of the dock to go. Since I find the dark Dock more unpleasant than the glass-shelf one, I just switched it back to the bottom at a very small size and figured I’ll survive until someone figures out where the fill color lives.

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The Little Things

Having played around with Leopard for about a day now, here are some of the little details I’ve noticed:

  • Arrows no longer wrap the selected app in the app switcher; if you wanted to switch to the last app in that list, you used to be able to hit left-arrow twice after command-tab. Now, perhaps you’d like something in a nice command-shift-tab.
  • Exactly twice, I’ve gotten the app switcher to show me about five app icons to choose from, when I had more like twenty running, and not in multiple spaces.
  • I’m sure I’ll get those neural pathways rewired to search for the gears icon when I want System Preferences any month now.
  • The subdued Spotlight icon is totally better. Now maybe they can get to work on not showing the fucking thing at all, and just giving me some UI when I ask for it.
  • In fact, the entire menu bar looks better. Granted, I use a relatively light background image, and that might just naturally look better through the translucent menu bar, but I like it.
  • I didn’t see an obvious use glass even on the sides preference string in the Dock’s binary after about 5 seconds of semi-attentive searching driven by a barely measurable interest in the result, so there must not be one.
  • While we’re talking about widely varying Dock appearances based on its position on screen, stacks don’t fan out from the side of the screen (and the View as submenu disappears).
  • For the longest time, I’ve had this dance of scripts that set the DISPLAY environment variable correctly (for the running X11.app) in my iTerm shells, in the off chance that I didn’t end up with :0. The same application (i.e., /Applications/Utilities/X11.app), now cannot be run without starting an xterm. The reason is that it isn’t the X server or even a wrapper for it. Basically, it sets a DISPLAY value somehow and starts an xterm, and lets (I assume) launchd worry about the messy business of actually having X running for it to talk to.
  • Type in a vnc:// URL for an ordinary VNC server into Finder’s Connect to Server dialog and it’ll launch Screen Sharing for you — albeit with a security warning (because an ordinary VNC server doesn’t support any of the ARD security stuff).
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Leopard Open Source

I hadn’t seen any mention of this yet when I started my Leopard upgrade, but Apple has added the source code for the open-source parts of Leopard on the Darwin source site. And yes, Virginia, that includes the kernel.

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