osx geekiness
Oct. 1st, 2003 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashA follow-up to this morning's entry on my Dock: stuff that makes my Mac my Mac. Again, probably totally boring if you don't run OSX.
I'm not going to provide URLs for any of these. You can just find 'em all via the search box in VersionTracker.
Big obvious art stuff:
Illustrator, Photoshop (mostly just for scanning), Painter now and then. Expression if I ever have the funds together to buy a copy because it works with my head much better than Painter, because I'm just a slut for rescalable, infinitely editable vectors.
I have Flash and Director on my machine, but I only run them when I absolutely have to. Same with Final Cut Pro. They're only for when I take work home under extreme duress.
Tweaky things:
Metallifizer, which I have set to demetallifize any and all apps. I hate brushed metal.
FruitMenu, which I could honestly get rid of and not miss. Makes the Apple menu work like the Classic one.
I used to run WindowShade, which let you minimize windows to the title bar, but it kept bugging me for money, so I gave up and got used to the iconize-to-dock behavior of X. It doesn't annoy me like it did at first.
(Unsanity, the maker of the above three little things, has a few other 'bring back OS9 behavior' tools.)
Tinker Tool - a control panel that accesses hidden prefs in the system. This is how I have my Dock pinned to the lower right corner of the screen, for instance.
LiteSwitch X - a very nice-looking application switcher; when I hit apple-tab, a giant bar with all the icons of the running programs pops across the middle of the screen. Tons more legible than squinting at the Dock. Especially when it's tiny and out of the way in the corner.
Displays:
Spy - a CPU load/network activity monitor that lives in the menu bar. Simple, graphically pleasant, doesn't take space from anything else.
MoonDock - it's the moon, and it's in your dock. What phase is it now?
PTHClock - I hate having to click on the time to find out what day of the month it is; this lets you put whatever set of time info you want up there. And it drops down a little month calendar when you click on it.
Program launcher:
The big one, really. A large part of what defines the Way you Work With the Computer.
I have a dupe of my old Classic Apple menu via FruitMenu, but I never touch it.
Mostly I use LaunchBar. It's configured to use apple-escape instead of its default of apple-space, because apple-space is the drag hand in most art programs. It's really clever; it scans your system and lets you type obvious abbreviations for stuff to launch it. You can also assign specific abbreviations to specific stuff manually, for instance, if I do apple-esc, my, return, it opens up the "my stuff" folder where all my working art files live. If you keep a lot of your stuff outside of /Applications, you need to tell it to look wherever when you first install it; other than that it's very much a "It just WORKS!!!1!!!" kind of tool. It takes up absolutely no screen real estate; it appears when you summon it and vanishes afterwards.
I almost never launch a program by double-clicking on it in the Finder any more. Launchbar.
There's a few others I've tried, but LB really works so seamlessly that Apple should just license the damn thing, IMHO. I really ought to send the guy his money sometime soon.
Web browser: Camino.
Mail: Eudora.
Music playing: Audion.
Livejournal: iJournal. Occasionally Phoenix when I need to edit an older entry; LJ's web editor limits the length of the music/mood fields more than LJ actually does, and it's such a tiny little text box.
Mucking: Savitar.
IM: Fire.
Text editing: BBEdit or TextEdit.
Image/movie viewing: Goldberg. (This replaces Quicktime Player and Preview, both of which have annoyingly complex interfaces; Goldberg just shows the damn content.)
FTP: Captain FTP.
P2P: I don't.
If you're noticing a "avoid Apple's apps" theme here, you're not hallucinating. It's not intentional, it just happens. Also, of course, Microsoft proves time and time again that monoculture = bad.
Other geeky stuff:
Brickhouse - firewall management, somewhat more sophisticated than the prefs panel, and when I installed it, Apple hadn't gotten around to making a firewall prefs panel anyway. Among other things, it's set up to keep certain programs from phoning home...
Pacifist - pulls stuff out of system installer packages. Handy on the rare occasions you need it, if you're geeky enough to know what you're looking for.
MacJanitor - lets you make the machine do UNIX maintenance stuff on command, that probably never happens because it's off or asleep when it's scheduled.
Snapperhead - when I turn it on, it starts a mini web server and lets people hit it for a fresh screengrab. Kinda resource-hungry; I sometimes think of trying to hack something together involving getting Apache to do some Applescript stuff, but it doesn't bother me enough to actually do this.
I used to manage my fonts with Font Reserve, but now I just throw all the damn things in the fonts directory. I really need to make a font book of some kind one of these days.
I use my Wacom tablet for everything; I don't even always have a mouse plugged in most of the time. This means that Inkwell got turned off in the first five minutes of having Jaguar, because its assumption is that you only ever use the tablet for writing.
That pretty much covers everything I use. Oh, screenblankers, always an important part of the experience!
I use 'RandomExtra', which is an improved randomizer - it lets you tell it to only use a subset of all the ones you have installed, instead of all of them like Apple's random blanker, and set priorities for them, so that, say, that Matrix screenblanker you don't think is super-cool any more but still kinda like only comes up once in a blue moon, while the way sexy Solar Winds blanker comes up a lot. Right now I use most of the ones I pointed to a week or two back, IGS Twisted, and AbstractMotion. If I had a better graphics card I'd have a wider selection enabled; I have a bunch that are quite cool but really chug on the card that shipped with my machine.
I only turn my computer off when I'm doing hardware stuff; most of the time I just put it to sleep when I'm not using it. I've had a document open in AI for a week straight, working on it while I'm home in the evenings. (Yes, I do save it regularly, I'm not crazy.)
I'm not going to provide URLs for any of these. You can just find 'em all via the search box in VersionTracker.
Big obvious art stuff:
Illustrator, Photoshop (mostly just for scanning), Painter now and then. Expression if I ever have the funds together to buy a copy because it works with my head much better than Painter, because I'm just a slut for rescalable, infinitely editable vectors.
I have Flash and Director on my machine, but I only run them when I absolutely have to. Same with Final Cut Pro. They're only for when I take work home under extreme duress.
Tweaky things:
Metallifizer, which I have set to demetallifize any and all apps. I hate brushed metal.
FruitMenu, which I could honestly get rid of and not miss. Makes the Apple menu work like the Classic one.
I used to run WindowShade, which let you minimize windows to the title bar, but it kept bugging me for money, so I gave up and got used to the iconize-to-dock behavior of X. It doesn't annoy me like it did at first.
(Unsanity, the maker of the above three little things, has a few other 'bring back OS9 behavior' tools.)
Tinker Tool - a control panel that accesses hidden prefs in the system. This is how I have my Dock pinned to the lower right corner of the screen, for instance.
LiteSwitch X - a very nice-looking application switcher; when I hit apple-tab, a giant bar with all the icons of the running programs pops across the middle of the screen. Tons more legible than squinting at the Dock. Especially when it's tiny and out of the way in the corner.
Displays:
Spy - a CPU load/network activity monitor that lives in the menu bar. Simple, graphically pleasant, doesn't take space from anything else.
MoonDock - it's the moon, and it's in your dock. What phase is it now?
PTHClock - I hate having to click on the time to find out what day of the month it is; this lets you put whatever set of time info you want up there. And it drops down a little month calendar when you click on it.
Program launcher:
The big one, really. A large part of what defines the Way you Work With the Computer.
I have a dupe of my old Classic Apple menu via FruitMenu, but I never touch it.
Mostly I use LaunchBar. It's configured to use apple-escape instead of its default of apple-space, because apple-space is the drag hand in most art programs. It's really clever; it scans your system and lets you type obvious abbreviations for stuff to launch it. You can also assign specific abbreviations to specific stuff manually, for instance, if I do apple-esc, my, return, it opens up the "my stuff" folder where all my working art files live. If you keep a lot of your stuff outside of /Applications, you need to tell it to look wherever when you first install it; other than that it's very much a "It just WORKS!!!1!!!" kind of tool. It takes up absolutely no screen real estate; it appears when you summon it and vanishes afterwards.
I almost never launch a program by double-clicking on it in the Finder any more. Launchbar.
There's a few others I've tried, but LB really works so seamlessly that Apple should just license the damn thing, IMHO. I really ought to send the guy his money sometime soon.
Web browser: Camino.
Mail: Eudora.
Music playing: Audion.
Livejournal: iJournal. Occasionally Phoenix when I need to edit an older entry; LJ's web editor limits the length of the music/mood fields more than LJ actually does, and it's such a tiny little text box.
Mucking: Savitar.
IM: Fire.
Text editing: BBEdit or TextEdit.
Image/movie viewing: Goldberg. (This replaces Quicktime Player and Preview, both of which have annoyingly complex interfaces; Goldberg just shows the damn content.)
FTP: Captain FTP.
P2P: I don't.
If you're noticing a "avoid Apple's apps" theme here, you're not hallucinating. It's not intentional, it just happens. Also, of course, Microsoft proves time and time again that monoculture = bad.
Other geeky stuff:
Brickhouse - firewall management, somewhat more sophisticated than the prefs panel, and when I installed it, Apple hadn't gotten around to making a firewall prefs panel anyway. Among other things, it's set up to keep certain programs from phoning home...
Pacifist - pulls stuff out of system installer packages. Handy on the rare occasions you need it, if you're geeky enough to know what you're looking for.
MacJanitor - lets you make the machine do UNIX maintenance stuff on command, that probably never happens because it's off or asleep when it's scheduled.
Snapperhead - when I turn it on, it starts a mini web server and lets people hit it for a fresh screengrab. Kinda resource-hungry; I sometimes think of trying to hack something together involving getting Apache to do some Applescript stuff, but it doesn't bother me enough to actually do this.
I used to manage my fonts with Font Reserve, but now I just throw all the damn things in the fonts directory. I really need to make a font book of some kind one of these days.
I use my Wacom tablet for everything; I don't even always have a mouse plugged in most of the time. This means that Inkwell got turned off in the first five minutes of having Jaguar, because its assumption is that you only ever use the tablet for writing.
That pretty much covers everything I use. Oh, screenblankers, always an important part of the experience!
I use 'RandomExtra', which is an improved randomizer - it lets you tell it to only use a subset of all the ones you have installed, instead of all of them like Apple's random blanker, and set priorities for them, so that, say, that Matrix screenblanker you don't think is super-cool any more but still kinda like only comes up once in a blue moon, while the way sexy Solar Winds blanker comes up a lot. Right now I use most of the ones I pointed to a week or two back, IGS Twisted, and AbstractMotion. If I had a better graphics card I'd have a wider selection enabled; I have a bunch that are quite cool but really chug on the card that shipped with my machine.
I only turn my computer off when I'm doing hardware stuff; most of the time I just put it to sleep when I'm not using it. I've had a document open in AI for a week straight, working on it while I'm home in the evenings. (Yes, I do save it regularly, I'm not crazy.)
no subject
Date: 2003-10-01 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-01 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-01 10:40 pm (UTC)Also, I don't use recreational chemistry or listen to much rock and roll.
One-button hippie? Moi?
no subject
Date: 2003-10-01 10:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-01 11:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-10-02 07:11 am (UTC)I have a dupe of my old Classic Apple menu via FruitMenu, but I never touch it.
Y'know, so do I. Emulated through Basilisk II. Mac SE, system 6.0.7 - there's Classic, and then there's Classic Antique.