Archive.
Thursday, May 29, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
Cable raceway in parking lot. Southeast Calgary.
Wednesday, May 28, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
I made the correct assumption in thinking that it was Safari's implementation of document.styleSheets that was causing the Toggle CSS favelet to fail. This was confirmed on a couple of sites, specifically in an amazingly indepth JavaScript tutorial written by Mark Wilton-Jones. From the tutorial:
Konqueror and Safari [KHTML] incorrectly only populate the document.styleSheets collection with stylesheets that are enabled at any particular instant. The stylesheets cannot be disabled from here, and do not have the title property.
Bummer. However, as is common with many things programmatic, all is not entirely lost. The article goes on to say that even if the document.styleSheets collection is not supported (or improperly supported) it still may be possible to get an equivalent disabling or switching action by referencing the <link> and <style> tags instead. This isn't the W3C recommended way of doing things, but you need to work with what you got. Half way is better than no way, I suppose. The most usable bit of scripting my friend John Charlton and I have been able to jury rig so far will toggle linked stylesheets, but not inline stylesheets - those confined within the <style> tags or using @import.
Toggle Linked CSS
Well, it's a start. And to be completely honest, John hacked it together - I just made it look pretty. What else is new? Additional contributions and tweakage will be gratefully accepted. Now, if you don't mind, I'm off to drop a couple of very specific bug fix request into Dave Hyatt's mailbox.
Tuesday, May 27, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
The available domain name of the week is frozenplastic.com
I've become used to using Tantek Celik's dandy little Toggle CSS favelet during site testing and debugging. An invaluable bit of JavaScript if ever there was one. The only problem is that it doesn't work in Safari and the noodling required to get it working in my new browser of choice is slightly past my limited scripting capabilities. I'm guessing that the problem lies in Safari's handling of the document.styleSheets object, but what the hell do I know anyway? Does anyone know of a version that works in Safari? Any volunteers to make it work? At the very least, you'll gain the immediate (and somewhat unbounded) appreciation of yours truly. For your convenience, the original Favelet code can be found in this link.
Sunday, May 25, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
Vintage cardboard packaging. Calgary.
Thursday, May 22, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
I became quite enamored with Mark Simonson's old bitmap fonts the first time I saw them. Aesthetically pleasing, lovingly hand-crafted, and useful on top of it all. What more could you want? Well, you could hope that they'd work as seamlessly in OS X as they did under OS 9, but you'd be kidding yourself. As it turns out, when Mark called these 'old bitmap fonts', he really meant it. They're so old in fact, that the bitmap data is still stored in FONT resources rather than NFNT resources. To put this in perspective, FONT resources went out of vogue around the same time that Apple realized that there might end up being slightly more than 256 typefaces in the entire world. That would have been around 1990, when Font/DA Mover was still considered an indispensible desktop publishing tool. If you're at all interested in the history of Macintosh font data formats (and really, who isn't?), you're sure to enjoy this Apple developer document entitled A Brief History of Fonts Resources & Font Family IDs. Back to the matter at hand, I spent a goodly part of an hour today converting those vintage FONT resources into OS X-savvy NFNTs - just so I could edit a few bits of Photoshop layered text set in Mark's 9 point Condensed Gothic. I won't mention the part about having to boot into OS 9 to run Fontographer because it wouldn't open or save files under Classic. Suffice it to say, my suitcase of old bitmaps fonts and I are one step closer to staying in X for good.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
Thanks to this slightly dated thread over at Mac OS X Hints and a brief refresher on standard Unix date and time formatting, I now have the day and date alongside the time in my menubar clock. Gosh, I'm feeling positively Now Utilities all over again. Why simple things like this have been left out of OS X, I cannot even begin to fathom.
Since I first mentioned how I was tinkering with various OS X Finder settings to customize the views, I've had a few requests from viewers wanting to know what my windows looked like using 9 point aliased fonts. I'm reasonably happy with how the text labels look on the desktop, but the list and column views are inconsistent at best. I've actually gone back to using 10 point aliased fonts in my Finder windows because I couldn't stand looking at clipped characters and grotesquely malspaced words any longer. Here are a few screen dumps to peruse.
I couldn't have invented a better compound brand name if I tried. Fortunately, there are thousands of people out there doing the inventing for me. Plucked fresh out of today's headlines, the available domain name of the week is treemeat.com. A friendly wave of the apron to Jon for sending this one in to the news desk.
Friday, May 16, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
I received an email from Jason Sutter regarding my complaint that I couldn't use Safari to post to Blogger. Since Jason works on Bloggerish things over at Google, he probably knows what the heck he's talking about. Proving my assumption, he passed along a little trick that forces Blogger to work with pretty much any web browser you throw at it. Simply adding an anybrowser=true attribute/value pair to your blog URL will bypass the browser sniffing. As can be expected, there are a couple of caveats to this workaround, which I'll let Jason explain in his own words.
You can use the old Blogger with Safari, by adding "&anybrowser=true" to the end of the url.
http://pro2.blogger.com/blog.pyra?blogid=xxxxxx&anybrowser=true
... just stay away from the Post button, and always copy your post to the clipboard before using spellcheck. They both have a nasty habit of crashing the browser.
Hopefully the standard Dano interface will work by the time Safari goes final. There's a few long standing bugs with positioning and getting/setting dimensions with javascript - that currently render the post area useless. The anybrowser trick works on Dano too, if you'd like to check it out.
Hope that helps ease your adjustment to the mighty world of OSX.
Damn straight it does. According to Jason, this particular tip apparently made the rounds before, but I wasn't able to find it referenced anywhere. That's ok, now it is. And yes, this entry was indeed posted using Safari.
Thursday, May 15, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
The grantcam is back after a short timeout during my adventure-packed switch to OS X. Due to other pressing matters, I had yet to get around to installing the latest version of EvoCam and figured I'd wait until I was knee-deep in Jaguar to do it. Well, I did it. I also hadn't bothered to download OS X compatible drivers for my iRez Kritter camera either. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there are no OS X compatible drivers for my iRez Kritter camera - at least not from iRez. At some point last year, the iRez site transformed into a glossy online brochure for the industrial design and development arm of their new parent company GlobalMedia. GlobalMedia hosts the drivers for the iRez products, but nothing even vaguely Jaguarian for USB-based cameras like mine. I remembered that IOXperts was developing a range of comprehensive USB and FireWire peripheral drivers, so I dropped a twenty for a copy of their USB WebCam Driver for Mac OS X. Bingo! Both my camera and EvoCam were supported, getting us back in the broadcast booth with very little pain or effort. And in case you just can't get enough of my ugly mug, the grantcam page now sports a series of previous images thanks to the latest version of EvoCam.
Wednesday, May 14, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
Scaffolding and partially painted wall. Macleod Trail, Calgary.
Say... what if noodle around in the Terminal for a bit?
Last login: Wed May 14 13:59:26 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
[:~] ghutchin% defaults write com.apple.finder ZoomRects false
[:~] ghutchin% defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateWindowZoom -bool false
[:~] ghutchin% defaults write com.apple.finder DesktopViewOptions -dict FontSize -integer 9
[:~] ghutchin% defaults write com.apple.finder StandardViewOptions '{ Nlsv = { ... FontSize = 9; ... }; };'
Ok, that's a bit better. I've got nine point aliased type on the desktop and in my Finder views. Windows are speedier without all the zoomity zoom animation. Still looking for a way to change Lucide Grande to Geneva though. Baby steps, right?
Monday, May 12, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
I dare you to hear the sound of my feet dragging now. This is it. No more excuses, no more "maybe laters". Today officially marked my first full day of using OS X. None of that booting into Jaguar to diddle around a little bit and then jumping back into the comfortable lap of OS 9. No more complaining about what application doesn't feel quite right or what functionally is missing. Ok, maybe a little complaining. To be honest, I was missing way too many cool things by not using OS X all day, every day. NetNewsWire. iTunes music sharing. AppleScript Studio. Safari. NewtSync. DCL. Not that my world is perfect. Not by along shot. But it's a darn sight closer to my standards than it was a few dot revisions ago. What's still driving me nuts? I shall elucidate thusly.
- Even the smallest font the you can specify for Finder views and the Desktop is too massive. I work on a 22-inch Cinema Display and I still can't fit enough file names into a list view window. I want nine point Geneva and I want it aliased, thank you very much. Chunky type is good at small sizes. Really. Please give me this option. Please?
- On a related rant, I hate that in order to make everything shiny and smooth and lickable for Aqua, every single interface widget has gained weight. Too much weight. This water-retentive GUI has bugged me since I first saw Aqua and I haven't got over it yet. Maybe some day I'll resign myself to the fact that the interface details aren't going to change any time soon. But I hope somebody at Apple realizes that there is a lot of room for improving how the space is used on-screen. They used to care about this sort of thing.
- When you switch to the Finder, why the hell don't open Finder windows always come to the front? Maybe it's just me, but the application switching behavior seems inconsistent at best.
- None of the email applications available for OS X handle multiple email accounts or tens of thousands of archived messages as well as my five year old release of Claris Emailer. Luckily, it runs quite nicely in an extension-trimmed version of Classic. One interesting benefit to this set up is that all of my custom Emailer AppleScripts run much faster since they're being executed under OS X.
- What big brain decided that Command-Shift-N is the shortcut for creating a new folder in the Finder? It's been Command-N for what? Nearly twenty years now? Wouldn't it make significantly more sense to assign the unfamiliar keyboard shortcut to the new function, namely creating a new Finder window? This one is so dead simple, I can't believe it hasn't been reverted. And yes, I know I can fix these keystroke malformations using Menu Master, but that's not the point now, is it?
- The current version of Blogger Pro doesn't work in Safari. However, Dano does. Sort of.
So much for day one. I realize that many of these issues have been around for a long time and have been griped about in dozens of other forums. Coming late to the game and seeing that many of the issues that I initially had with OS X still exist makes me wonder. I think the slow migration to OS X is justified for a lot of people, including myself. I feel like I'm having to compromise a lot of things that worked very well under previous iterations of the operating system. I'm not looking back, but I'm not completely satisfied with where I am either. I'll just keep letting you know how I'm adjusting.
Friday, May 09, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
I know iChat is just trying to be helpful in it's own cute way, but I'm getting the distinct feeling that "the best way to IM" is not necessarily the best way to share code snippets. Sure, that vncAppOpen() function surprised the heck out of me that first time I saw it, but I don't recall onButtonClickScript() being quite as silly as shown.
Wednesday, May 07, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
The family of Jim Henson just bought back the Muppets from the same German media conglomerate they sold out to a few years back. And they apparently beat out Disney in the process. As happy as I am that the foam rubber has come back to roost, I'm a bit disturbed by the idea that all that wonderful intellectual property nearly skittered away altogether. Jim is no doubt resting a bit more peacefully now. All that spinning can't be good for the soul.
The Register has a brief interview with ex-Apple Human Interface Group member, Gitta Solomon. The article touches on the HIG, that whole Piles thing, and the way that some common user operations are still completely hidden under a layer of Unix schmeer in OS X. Although it doesn't offer too much new information, it is an entertaining read. I especially enjoyed this bit from the beginning of the article. "Bad human interface design - the sort that really gets in your way - is like a personal DoS attack". This statement certainly supports my powerful hatred for all things Windows in an oddly comforting way. Even when Windows isn't suffering from some virus-fed, security breaching worm eating the operating system from the inside out like a hagfish feeding on some seabed carcass, it feels like it's in the midst of a denial of service attack.
Tuesday, May 06, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
Well, look at that. It appears that Garret Vreeland is gearing up to launch another Behind The Curtain project coinciding with the third anniversary of the original model this coming September. I have to admit that I had a blast doing this back in 2000 and I certainly plan on participating again. I'm convinced that shooting that simple (and rather uneventful) day in my life for Behind The Curtain ultimately led me to begin photographing for myself on a more regular basis. This time around, I have access to a much nicer digital camera and a lot more storage. There'll be no need to ration flash cards or edit shots on the fly in order to cram a couple more images into the camera. For those interested, here's my submission to the first BTC project. Keep an eye on Garret's photo-session.org site for more information as it becomes available. And think about snapping your own two cents worth.
Part of my morning commute passes by a city-run water treatment plant. Many would assume that the odour emanating from such a facility would be reasonably consistent, given that the products (or byproducts, as the case may be) being processed shouldn't change much on a day to day basis. But this isn't the case. Naturally there's a bit of variation in the intensity of the odour due to wind direction and the current ambient temperature, but the smell actually changes quite drastically. Some days is smells like dirty laundry. Other days is honestly give the impression that someone is barbecuing steak by the side of the road. Sometimes it has an almost citrus-like air to it, and still other times it's a heavy, yeasty fresh-baked bread smell. Of course, today it smelled like a water-treatment plant, but you get the idea.
Friday, May 02, 2003 Link
/ Comments (0)
The available domain name of the week is screamingedge.com
Furthermore.
Blog archives
Back
Meta.
Subscribe to posts (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (RSS)
Subscribe to available domain name of the week (Atom)
ISSN 1496-3221
Copyright © 1996-2010 Grant Hutchinson