2718.us blog » mac os x http://2718.us/blog Miscellaneous Technological Geekery Tue, 18 May 2010 02:42:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 MacWJ: It’s like Windows Journal for Tablet Macs http://2718.us/blog/2010/05/07/macwj-its-like-windows-journal-for-tablet-macs/ http://2718.us/blog/2010/05/07/macwj-its-like-windows-journal-for-tablet-macs/#comments Fri, 07 May 2010 09:59:44 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=263 MacWJ… because there are oh-so-many tablet Macs.  There are ModBooks and there are non-Apple tablet machines running Mac OS X.  So, if you have such a device and are looking for something that provides a surface on which to draw, write, etc., with various “pens” and with the ability to save to PDF and PNG, MacWJ may be of use to you. It’s open-source under MIT license.

MacWJ requires OS X 10.5 or newer and some sort of tablet-pen input, whether a tablet-form computer or a Wacom graphics tablet or something else of that sort.  Ready-to-run recent build(s) are available on bitbucket, as well as the full source code.

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A WebView Subclass with Isolated Cookie Storage http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/11/a-webview-subclass-with-isolated-cookie-storage/ http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/11/a-webview-subclass-with-isolated-cookie-storage/#comments Thu, 11 Mar 2010 07:38:14 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=227 Following the advice of Kevin Ballard on StackOverflow, I created IGIsolatedCookieWebView, a subclass of WebView that does not access or affect the system-wide shared cookie storage (shared among all WebKit apps).  Each instance of IGIsolatedCookieWebView has its own cookie storage so that, for example, multiple instances of IGIsolatedCookieWebView within the same application can be logged in to the same web site with different credentials.  IGIsolatedCookieWebView should be usable in place of WebView, except that IGIsolatedCookieWebView uses the resource load delegate, so that can’t be used by the application.  IGIsolatedCookieWebView is published under a 3-clause BSD an MIT license.

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A Drag-Resizable Subclass of NSComboBox http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/10/a-drag-resizable-subclass-of-nscombobox/ http://2718.us/blog/2010/03/10/a-drag-resizable-subclass-of-nscombobox/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:57:02 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=223 IGResizableComboBox is a drag-resizable subclass of NSComboBox—that is, IGResizableComboBox should be usable in place of NSComboBox and it adds a small bar at the bottom of the pop-up list that can be dragged to resize the pop-up list.  IGResizableComboBox is published under a 3-clause BSD an MIT license.

It still has some quirks:

  • behavior is strange when the pop-up is above the combo box (whereas it is usually below) [fixed; when the pop-up is above the combo box, the drag-handle is at the top and the top edge moves while the bottom edge stays fixed at the combo box]
  • the formula for resetting the number of visible items after dragging occurs is not quite right [fixed; dragging now snaps to whole-item positions]
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Fluid: Freeing Web Apps from the Browser on OS X http://2718.us/blog/2009/06/05/fluid-freeing-web-apps-from-the-browser-on-os-x/ http://2718.us/blog/2009/06/05/fluid-freeing-web-apps-from-the-browser-on-os-x/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:27:45 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=150 Discovering Fluid has given me a lot to play with today.  Fluid itself is a program that you use to create other programs.  In Fluid, you enter the web site you want and give it a name and give it an icon and it creates an application.  That application is a Webkit (Safari-like) browser that is more or less dedicated to the site you selected (a “single-site browser” or SSB).  There are a variety of specific settings for different purposes, but that’s the general idea.

I stumbled into Fluid when I was looking for a way to keep my RememberTheMilk task list open on the side somewhere rather than always having a Firefox tab devoted to it (and trying to remember not to just close the Firefox window).  With Fluid, not only do I have an app dedicated to my RTM task list (and, since installing Gears into Safari* makes it available to Fluid SSBs, it should have some ability to function offline, too), but I was able to create a separate menu-extra type app with the gadget interface to RTM so I can also access my task list quickly in the menu bar.

Having done that, it was a short skip over to having a proper Google Calendar app.  Nothing special there yet, save for the same hope that Gears will make it work offline.

More usefully, I found this post about using Fluid and Hahlo along with some scripting to create a pretty good Twitter client that even uses Growl notifications.  That post has all the links you need, including a direct link for the script and a link to a usable icon on Flickr.

Better still, it occurred to me tonight to apply Fluid to Lala.  With Fluid’s option to hide the window when the user closes it, rather than actually closing it, I can “close” the window that has Lala and it keeps playing.  If I go back to my Lala SSB app, the window pops right back up.

Mind you, while all this web-app-turned-mac-app stuff is nice, the biggest benefit is probably the fact that if my web-browsing browser crashes, it doesn’t take my web apps with it and no one of my web apps can crash the others.  Unfortunately, Webkit seems to share one big cookie jar among all its instances, so separate Fluid-created instances won’t allow you to simultaneously log into the same site using different credentials if you couldn’t already do so (the login cookies will clobber each other and/or any such Safari cookies… though Firefox’s cookie jar is separate from Webkit’s…).

*note that, interestingly, the Gears site displays an essentially blank page with no help or guidance whatsoever if you have javascript turned off in Safari (I mast have been testing something or other without javascript and forgotten to turn it back on).

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A New Trick for When the OS X Screensaver Password Window Hangs http://2718.us/blog/2009/05/19/a-new-trick-for-when-the-os-x-screensaver-password-window-hangs/ http://2718.us/blog/2009/05/19/a-new-trick-for-when-the-os-x-screensaver-password-window-hangs/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 03:38:35 +0000 2718.us http://2718.us/blog/?p=148 I have multiple computers, so I can easily ssh into my desktop when the screensaver password is hanging and won’t let me log in.

The not-so-new trick has been to use AppleScript on the command line to not-so-harshly close some applications (run osascript, then tell application "program name" to quit, followed by ctrl-D (EOF).

The new trick is to sudo kill SecurityAgent, sudo run SecurityAgent, put the machine to sleep, then wake it back up (necessary to get SecurityAgent to put up a new password window).

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