mac geekery
Oct. 19th, 2005 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
egypturnashSo I've been busy evaluating my old software environment, as I configure this new machine and re-assess all my customizations for OSX 10.4 "Tiger".
And I find myself looking at the "Deactivate Dashboard" checkbox in TinkerTool. I've randomly browsed the widgets available for Dashboard, and none of them feel like anything I need to run. It's just sitting there empty because I turned off all the default widgets, and the other ones that ship with OSX all seem just as useless to me. Most of them seem to be little interfaces to webpages, pretty single-site themed RSS headline viewers, or iTunes controllers. Does anyone actually have one that they swear by? One that's worked its way into your life and is just incredibly useful to have a quick press of f12 away?
I mean, I have little apps in place that give me some of the same functionality that the more useful widgets do, but they're hidden away in the corners of my normal screen so I can glance at them any time I like, not on a separate view that I only remember when I accidentally grey out the screen by hitting the Dashboard key...
Spotlight's not doing much for me either. I keep on wondering if it's wasting tons of space somewhere trying to index the contents of my AI source files. It doesn't have a hotkey any more because the default one kept interfering with my use of Illustrator, and I didn't feel like picking one.
And I find myself looking at the "Deactivate Dashboard" checkbox in TinkerTool. I've randomly browsed the widgets available for Dashboard, and none of them feel like anything I need to run. It's just sitting there empty because I turned off all the default widgets, and the other ones that ship with OSX all seem just as useless to me. Most of them seem to be little interfaces to webpages, pretty single-site themed RSS headline viewers, or iTunes controllers. Does anyone actually have one that they swear by? One that's worked its way into your life and is just incredibly useful to have a quick press of f12 away?
I mean, I have little apps in place that give me some of the same functionality that the more useful widgets do, but they're hidden away in the corners of my normal screen so I can glance at them any time I like, not on a separate view that I only remember when I accidentally grey out the screen by hitting the Dashboard key...
Spotlight's not doing much for me either. I keep on wondering if it's wasting tons of space somewhere trying to index the contents of my AI source files. It doesn't have a hotkey any more because the default one kept interfering with my use of Illustrator, and I didn't feel like picking one.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-19 08:28 pm (UTC)And heee.. I used to have it auto-launch Adium, my MUCK client (Trebuchet) and IRC client (Mice iRC) but then I decided when I was doing some work writing StartupItem services and needed to debug/test/fix it all that I probably didn't want to be constantly hopping on and off networks and sometimes maybe I don't want a flood of IMs when I first start up a machine. Normally I try to keep the Mac on all the time, so it's not much of an issue to click a few dock icons after boot.
Reminds me, I should probably get around to writing a big long guide on how to completely re-impliment that single mouseclick for InternetSharing in SysPrefs as a StartupItem service to launch all the daemons and apps instead -- that you can actually change parameters on, since non-OS X Server can't really change much of anything from the GUI such as port forwarding. I was exceptionally bored when I did this.