Zzot!

One of my problems with Leopard has been that the way I use Finder stopped working. I set it to “Always open folders in a new window” and hold down option when I want to close the window I start from. This is actually different from the behavior with that preference off — when you open a new window, it has the saved view settings for that folder. When you navigate to a new folder in an existing window, the view settings from the old folder remain. With Leoopard, holding down option merely reverses the state of that preference. A day or two ago I thought I should try all the modifier combinations to be sure they just didn’t hide it on me, rather than get rid of it…and I quickly found it. Hold down control and option, instead of just option, while hitting command-down or whatever and you get the old (just holding option) behavior.

Weblog | Tagged Finder, Leopard, Mac OS X | 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

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

• 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.

Weblog | Tagged Leopard, Mac OS X | Permalink | 1 Comment

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).

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

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.

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