Seapegasus Blog

Thursday October 25, 2007

Hi I've Got This Great Idea For Mac OS Leopard

Somebody pointed out to me this Mac rumors thread -- how to get rid of the glassy look of the dock in the new Mac OS X (10.5) Leopard in case you want to. Glassy dock? When we were young, we had no glassy docks! Of course I immediately went to have a look at Leopard to see what this was all about.

• Nice file browser (I always wanted to browse through my .txt meeting notes in 3D, muhahaha.)

• Virtual screens (Spaces). This is a bit last millennium, but a dearly missed feature.

• Cute, you can write email to yourself. Not because you're desperate, but as a note to yourself. It is saved in your inbox and accessible everywhere you can check mail.

• Data Detection - click into an email that says something like "this Friday at 14:00h" and a plugin creates an iCal event at the (hopefully) right day and time. Does it also work in localized systems? "What do you mean, Zischtig is not a date?!"

• Scary iChat Theater: Exchange screen contents with an unsuspecting chatter and take over his mouse! (Dang, the other party has to agree to it... :-p Bummer.)
  iChat video conference with built-in Quicktime and Keynote-presentation viewer ("Hi boss, sorry, no time, I'm uh ... working on your preso! ... You want to see it? ... Now? ....").
  It even tries to chromakey your background out and replaces it with whatever you like ("Hi this is Seapegasus reporting live from a Yosemite park video loop! Oh no wait it's the Fishmaster clip actually, hold on a sec" *browsing media*).

• And cool automatic file versioning and backup (Time Machine) too. That reminds me, recently, for the first time ever, honest, I had, well how should I put this?, a small typo in a certain terminal command, you know what I mean? Without going into detail, let's just say for the knowing, it involved rm -rf, a directory path ending in an asterisk, an an spare blank space. Before the asterisk. Anyway.
  Although the Finder is localized to display the Desktop as 'Schreibtisch', luckily the Terminal isn't: To the Terminal, the Desktop was still at the top of the alphabet where it belongs. To make a long story short, the Desktop folder heroically threw itself in the way of the hungry rm -rf and gave me the second needed to cancel the command before it reached the next directory in the alphabet -- Documents.
  This day I learned two things: a) In cases of emergency, my brain reverts back to using MacOS 7 keyboard shortcuts (such as Apple-dot to cancel) and b) A nice Apple engineer has mapped the Apple-dot shortcut to the appropriate control-C for the Terminal. Phew.
  The Desktop folder contained a couple of unsaved notes (did I mention that my backup scripts runs Sunday nights, and it was Sunday morning?), but up to now, I haven't missed anything... BTW, you can easily recreate an empty Desktop folder and MacOS will accept it back into the family (just don't forget to restart the Finder).

Where was I? Oh yeah, the Mac OS Leopard preso. Seems the new dock has a 3D look. And I mean really 3D. The surface reflects stuff. Wow! *Moves nose close to screen* No. Wait. It only reflects open windows on your desktop and stuff. It doesn't really reflect.

Oh come on. I mean, every Mac that can run 10.5 also has an iSight, right? So here's my cool idea: Record the user (with the iSight) and have her reflection in the icons! ... :-D ... No? :-( But hey if this feature shows up in MacOS 10.6, then you know where they got in from.

PS: No Java 6 on Mac OS Leopard?!