December 29, 2005

Emulating <Windows Key>+L to Lock Your Workstation

On Windows NT based computers, it's common to press <Windows Key>+L to "lock" a computer as you walk away from it. The assumption is that only yourself, or an administrator can unlock the computer to use it.
On a Mac with QuickSilver and a password protected screen saver this can be emulated.

First, "Enable Advanced Features" in the QuickSilver preferences pane and, if necessary, restart QuickSilver.
From the new "Triggers" pane in the bottom left of the QuickSilver preferences, click the + sign in the bottom left to add a new action.
Choose "ScreenSaverEngine" for the item and "Open" for the action; click "OK".
Click on the new item in the list under "Trigger", you should receive a text field. Press ⌥+L to create a trigger in roughly the same keyboard location as <Windows Key>+L.
Close the preferences window and try it out.

Posted by spiffed at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)

November 3, 2005

OS X 10.4.3 and Quartz 2D Extreme

The 10.4.3 update to Tiger disables Quartz 2D Extreme on account of supposed video redraw issues. Owning a new iBook G4 with a Radeon doesn't-completely-suck™ GPU, I was rather fond of Quartz 2D Extreme. Turns out re-enabling it isn't quite so hard.

The only video glitch encountered so far is a strange white box over the left half of the hard-disk icon. Selecting the icon makes it disapear. On the DP1.0GHz G4 tower (Radeon 9600 Pro) and 1.67GHz PowerBook at work, no video issues have been experienced.

So, as always, your milage may vary.

Posted by spiffed at 1:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2005

xCode Java Packages

An integral part of the java language is the package. Unfortunetly, xCode doesn't make creating packages very intuitive.

The trick it turns out, is to create the regular directory structure for the package on disk in the project's directory. Then, in xCode, mimic the structure using groups (crtl+click on the project name (root of the tree) in the "Files and Groups" pane and choose new->group.). Finally, in the group that corresponds to your folder on the disk, drag the files into xCode.

You'll need to change the manifest file to point to the correct main class aswell.

Posted by spiffed at 4:53 PM | Comments (0)

August 30, 2005

Classic scrolling support

I recently (yesterday) received one of the new iBook G4s with Apple's new scrolling track-pad. While the scrolling feature works wonderfully in 10.4, it does nothing by default in Classic (9.2).
Enabling scrolling support in many Classic applications is as easy as downloading Microsoft's Intellimouse driver from their website and installing them. When the driver prompts you to restart, restart classic, and you're away.

Posted by spiffed at 4:08 PM | Comments (0)