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][burnout] 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.

[burnout]: http://burnout.ea.com/

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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][other1] [solutions][other2] 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.[^forget]

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

[other1]: http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/10/open-terminal-here-and-glob-select-in-leopard-finder
[other2]: http://henrik.nyh.se/2007/10/open-in-textmate-from-leopard-finder

Continue reading

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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][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][panda] 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][ard] security stuff).

[leopard]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/
[panda]: http://www.blizzard.com/misc/samwise/panda.html
[ard]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

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Leopard Open Source

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

[apple]: http://www.apple.com/
[leopard]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5/
[macosx]: http://www.apple.com/macosx/
[darwin]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/
[xnu]: http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/10.5/xnu-1228/

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