Drinkable Chicken

Today I finally decided to upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard. I know, I'm late to the party as usual, but in this case I wanted to wait until most of the wrinkles were ironed out.

My first impressions are... mixed.

I like the fact that I could upgrade from Tiger without much hassle. Everything still seems to work, including QuickSilver, Adium, Chicken, and Postgres. Most of my settings (like e.g. for Terminal) are preserved as well.

There were, however, a few changes that immediately stood out, and that I didn't like at all.

The new look of the dock is one of them. Fortunately, I knew this beforehand, and it's easily fixed.

I don't like the translucent menu bar either, but again, nothing a bit of poking around can't fix. :-)

X11 still doesn't work (I normally would not use this at all, except that there's a C64 emulator that depends on it). There are some articles that deal with this problem, I will have to look into that.

Something I haven't found a fix for (so far), and which bugs the hell out of me, is the new behavior of the little "view" icons in Finder windows. There are four of them now, and you can change a window's setting to use icon view, list view, columns, or Cover Flow. Great, except changing a view for one window means changing it *for all windows*.

In other words, let's say my default view is icons. I go to folder A, which has a lot of documents, so I want to change it to list view. I click on the icon, then open folder B. Surprise! It's in list view now too, and so are all other windows on your system.

Now, it's not completely impossible to change this and set views on a per-window basis, but it's so clumsy that you might as well forget it. In order to use icon view as the default, but use list view for folder A, I have to do the following:

1. Open folder A.
2. Press ⌘J to open the "Show View Options" dialog.
3. In the window for folder A, click the "list view" icon.
4. In the "Show View Options" dialog, now check the "Always open in list view" option. (Notice that this will initially show whichever view is the default, so it starts out as "Always open in icon view".)
5. Open folder B (this can be any folder that does not have custom settings associated with it). You'll notice it's in list view too now.
6. In the window for folder B, click the "icon view" icon.

This is pretty lame, IMHO... unless I'm misunderstanding things, it was *much* easier to do this in Tiger and its precursors. So far, from what I've read online, this indeed seems to be the new behavior: "Leopard also has new logic for views. Unless you've ticked the option to open in icon view, all windows will show whatever view you have just selected in whatever window. Like it or not, that's the way it is." [link]

(Strangely enough, other options like colored backgrounds, seem to be automatically on a per-window basis.)

More impressions will follow as I continue to work with the system. I haven't checked out the shiny new features yet (Time Machine, Spaces, etc). More about that later...

As it happens, I have a few (*cough*) manga scanlations laying around on CD-ROMs. These are usually in the form of a directory with a bunch of JPG files in it.  In order to read these volumes comfortably, an image viewer with certain capabilities is necessary.  On Windows, I used ACDSee, which allows me to view images full-screen, then press PgUp or PgDn to go to the previous/next image.

For the Mac, I have now finally found a program that has most of the features I need. It's called ViewIt (and it's shareware).  Some of the features I find very useful are:

• Drag a folder to the ViewIt window to make the program "aware" of the folder; it will display the first image found.
• Use ⌘1 to display the image at its original size (100%).  This is important because fitting the image to the screen width often renders the smaller text unreadable.
• Use ⌘F to display the image full-screen (rather than in a window).  I've found that quite a few image viewers don't support this feature and the previous one *at the same time*. That is, you can view the image at 100% in a window, or cropped full-size.  Fortunately, ViewIt supports both.
• The above means that most images will be larger than the screen, so the ability to scroll (especially up and down) is crucial.  In ViewIt, this is done with Ctrl+cursor.
• Cursor left and right goes to the next/previous image.

All these features sound simple, but they're almost mandatory for reading scanlations in a pleasant manner, yet rarely do image viewer support all of them. At least, that is my experience. A while ago, I tested quite a few, and found all of them lacking in one way or another. :-(

(Of course, if you happen to know about another image viewer for OS X that does all the above, I'd like to hear about it. ^_^)

It appears my Windows box has given up the ghost. Now all I have to work with is three Mac machines:

• key lime iBook clamshell, G3, 366 MHz, 576 Mb memory (~2001)
• indigo iMac desktop, G3, 400 (?) MHz, 384 Mb memory (~2001)
• MacBook, Intel Dual Core 2.0 GHz, 2 Gb memory (2007)

Funny, how things change.

(Well. I also have a small park of older computers, like my SGI O2, Commodore 64, Commodore Plus/4, etc... but those don't count. (Although the idea of running Spiffy on the C64 and then talking to it using Firefox on the O2 sounds... wicked. :-)))

I've been experiencing this bug every once in a while with my MacBook (running Tiger). Basically, when you use fast user switching, there's a chance that the color profile changes to "Generic RGB", which makes colors look bright and washed-out. (Changing the color profile back in the usual way has no effect.) This puzzled me greatly at first, but now I know that I'm not crazy. :-)

While a reboot resets the original color scheme, there's an easier way: run the DMProxy script and everything returns back to normal. (More details in the link above.)

For work, I often have to connect to servers using ssh, using separate Terminal windows for each session. It's sometimes hard to tell the windows apart though, as they all look the same at first glance, opening the door to mistakes like recreating the test database on the production server. :-) (No, I haven't actually done that yet. *knocks on wood*)

I often found myself wishing for a more obvious cue as to which windows are "local" and which ones are ssh connections. Maybe by using a different background color?

Luckily, I found a tool that does just that: TerminalDecorator. (A serendipitous find -- I was actually looking for a Scheme language module for TextWrangler, which can be downloaded on the same page.)

It's fairly easy to set up:

1. Copy the TerminalDecorator script to e.g. ~/Library/Scripts
2. In your .profile, alias ssh to /Users/name/Library/Scripts/TerminalDecorator
3. Edit TerminalDecorator (it's a Python script) and associate domain names with colors in the scheme_map dictionary

And voila, now my ssh sessions have different colors, hopefully putting an extra barrier between me and catastrophic failure. ;-) OK, so it's not spectacular, but I find it *very* useful.