Apr

20

50 Random Observations on Mac OS 10.4 Tiger

Filed Under OS X | Leave a Comment

Looks like Tiger information is slowly making its way onto the net, so I figured I’d post some of my own observations.

    * When copying Google searches to the system-wide search-clipboard-thing, Safari now only copies the first word in the query. Makes it much easier to Google your way to a page, then G your way to the first instance of whatever it is you were looking for. Before, Safari would copy your whole query, which wasn’t as useful. If you surround the query or first few words with quote marks, it’ll copy the entire quoted string, sans actual quote marks. If you use a special search operator (like site:assortedgeekery.com), it will ignore the operator and only copy the actual query onto the clipboard. EDIT: Also available in Safari 1.3.
    * The Special Characters palette is now a standard item in Edit menus.
    * Finder doesn’t soil itself when trying to preview a 700-MB movie for which it doesn’t have a codec.
    * Every goddamn time I try to empty the Trash, I click “Open” instead.
    * R refreshes Dashboard widgets with a neat effect.
    * I’ve already managed to break Spotlight’s ability to index emails. Bloody hell.
    * Finder utility windows (for long copy operations and such) use a pure white background for no apparent reason.
    * “Save as Plugin” in Automator is pretty sweet. Makes a contextual menu item for the Finder.
    * Safari’s RSS button will dutifully forward the RSS URL to your default newsreader. NetNewsWire automatically makes a new subscription. I don’t think I could possibly be happier about this.
    * Battery menu extra offers once-click access to energy saver presets.
    * Google Maps is broken in Safari 2.0, unless you identify yourself as MSIE 6.0, in which case it works fine. Interesting. (All the other spoofs in the debug menu have version numbers that are too low, so I couldn’t test those.) Google Maps works just fine in Safari 2.0.
    * I can find printer supplies on my own, thanks. The operating system need not provide a link.
    * I have 16,529 files on my computer that contain the word “the.” 16,530 now that I’ve saved this document. Spotlight results are updated instantly.
    * There’s a strange, jittery visual glitch when renaming files in Finder.
    * Browsing dictionaries in Script Editor (now version 2.1) is much improved—you can browse by suites (like before), containment, or inheritance. Uses a column-view interface by default. Makes finding what you’re looking for much, much easier.
    * Preview can save as GIF (not just PNG).
    * Mail uses a custom drop-down menu to choose the account for a new message, for pretty much no reason at all.
    * When you click “Edit Menu” in the new PDF button-menu thing in the print sheet, the header in the table view that pops up has a colon. It’s also difficult to tell that it’s a header at all. Probably would’ve been a better idea to put “Printing Workflows” as just regular text above the table.
    * Image dimensions in the Finder. Thank God. EDIT: Yes, they were available in 10.3 via the Show Item Info option, but Tiger makes them much more accessible. They’re shown in column view and the Get Info window.
    * “Smart Folders” are saved searches, literally. Just a plist with info about the search. They’re not cached, so they really don’t exist until you open them. At least they save the state of the window.
    * iChat 3.0 gets rudimentary support for AIM profiles.
    * Stickies gets a useful Window menu.
    * Grapher pretty-prints math equations as you type.
    * AppleScript dialogs and icons have been updated to be more OS X-ish. icon 1 is now the icon of the calling application.
    * Full screen is still a “pro” feature in QuickTime.
    * There’s now an “automatic” font smoothing style that claims to choose the best settings for your main display.
    * Male, female, and novelty voices are now separate in the “Speech” prefpane. Good call.
    * iChat still doesn’t refresh status messages often enough.
    * Finder instantly becomes aware of changes made at the command-line level. Seems to give the changed files a generic icon based on the extension first, then uses type/creator info to figure out the proper icon. (Save a document with no extension to the desktop, then cp it to see what I mean.)
    * A new “poof” cursor shows when dragging a running application off the dock, but letting go snaps it right back. The application will disappear when quit. Does anyone remember one of the keynotes where Steve dragged a running app off the Dock, and when it snapped back, it bounced a little? I want that. I think I’d probably spend about three hours a day doing that.
    * Contextual menus on images in Safari now have an “Add Image to iPhoto Library” item.
    * The Safari address bar is now a real, live NSToolbar, or at least a good impersonation of one.
    * The printer utility-thing (not “Printer Utility.app,” but whatever appears when you try to print) keeps a history of successful print jobs.
    * BOMArchiveHelper now handles tarred and gzipped files. Fucking sweet.
    * Use /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/ Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ ScreenSaverEngine -background (all one line) to add the RSS screensaver to your desktop. Whoa.
    * Use Quartz Composer to make your own RSS screensaver. Whoa, again.
    * Safari 2.0 supports Undo in textareas.
    * You can FUS without signing off iChat.
    * Safari warns before automatically mounting a disk image that contains an application.
    * Drag a Finder window under the Dock, and let go. It’s now completely covered, and you can’t get at it anymore! Neat trick. (Side note: Cocoa windows usually bounce back automatically, and Carbon windows usually don’t allow you to drag them under the Dock in the first place. Where Finder fits into this, I have no idea. Anyone want to try it in Panther and comment?)
    * Highlighting 2Ʋ in a text box and running the “Get Result of AppleScript” service does nothing. This upsets me. Doing the same with say "hello" still works.
    * Safari now supports inline PDF viewing. This is mentioned on the New Features page, but you’ll have to uninstall the Shubert-It plugin before you can see it in action.
    * Safari now copies tables correctly, sort of. Oddly, it copies them correctly into TextWrangler, but not into Pages or TextEdit in rich text mode. My guess is that it puts the correct data into the plain text components of the clipboard, but reverts to the old ways for the styled text components. (I think my terminology is a little off, but put a table on the clipboard and try get the clipboard as record in Script Editor to see what I mean.) So if an application asks the clipboard for plain text, it gets the correct data, but if it asks for styled text, it gets the crap data. Of course, you can always scrub the clipboard before pasting, and it’ll work properly in a rich text environment.
    * The FUS menu extra allows you to choose between an icon, the user’s full name, and the user’s short name.
    * The “Look Up in Dictionary” contextual menu item is a nifty new feature; choosing “Open Dictionary panel” in Dictionary.app’s preferences makes it even niftier, giving you a little popup right under the word you’ve chosen to look up. Unfortunately, you can’t copy from the Dictionary panel, but you can drag from it. Seems to work in just about every Cocoa text view. (Curiously, TextWrangler didn’t automatically get support for it, but it automatically got support for the “Spotlight” contextual menu item.)
    * Paste and Match Style in iChat pastes, but it doesn’t match the style. My font is Georgia 10, and it pasted some styled text from Pages (which was in Times 12) as Helvetica. WTF?
    * Lots of new goodies in StandardAdditions and System Events, for you AppleScript fans out there. Even the venerable “display dialog” has some new tricks.
    * Dragging a picture file onto the “Tile Game” Dashboard widget makes a new game with that picture. This is stated clearly on Apple’s Tiger preview page, but it’s cool enough to deserve mention here. (Start a drag operation, invoke Dashboard with a hot key or hot corner, and drop it on the widget.)
    * Help Viewer now searches Apple’s online support articles in real time.
    * TextEdit can export to valid HTML or XHTML, with embedded, inline, or no CSS. Really. And what’s even more interesting is that the generator is Cocoa HTML Writer, not TextEdit—is this a “for free” Cocoa feature?

Some Additional Observations

    * On a fresh install, the default short user name is your Apple ID.
    * Default computer name is based on your model—mine was “Christopher Biagini’s PowerBook G4 15"”
    * The Apple image picker now lets you zoom beyond 100%. This is a mixed bag. If you’re using it to select a buddy icon for iChat, then you can’t really be sure how it’ll look on your friends’ Windows machines. (It looks fine at any size on a Mac because OS X resizes images beautifully.)
    * iChat 3.0 now gives you one-click access to being a complete tool.
    * If an application crashes, the Send Report dialog now gives you the option to reopen the application. If the application crashes immediately after opening, the dialog offers a “Try Again” option which temporarily restores the application’s default preferences.

Oct

10

View Source in SubEthaEdit

Filed Under AppleScript | Leave a Comment

Safari’s source-view window is about as basic as it gets. Naturally, solutions to jazz it up a bit have popped up, but most I’ve seen are designed to work with BBEdit.

I tried SubEthaFari, but that seemed to be a little overkill, and besides, it leaves behind all the temp files it creates. Yucky.

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