10.4: Easily use Front Row on a second monitor (TV)

Dec 07, '05 06:36:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

Tiger only hintI use a TV in my living room as my Mac's second monitor. I have been searching for a way to get Front Row to come up on the TV, instead of my monitor. Normally I would open the Displays System Preferences panel and under the Arrangement tab, drag the menu bar to the second monitor, and then activate Front Row. When I was done, I had to drag the menu bar back to the first monitor. Not a very elegant solution.

I found a utility called cscreen which allows you to set a requested display to have the menu bar via the command line. Then I added the appropriate command into an AppleScript that gets called with my Keyspan remote. Result: Front Row in my living room with the push of one button! No more trips to the Display Preferences pane.

Here's the step by step solution:

  1. Download cscreen and place it in /usr/local/bin.

  2. Create the following AppleScript to be called via the remote of your choice:
    tell application "Terminal"
      do script "cscreen -s 2 -p; exit"
      delay 1.0
    end tell
    
    tell application "System Events"
      tell application "Front Row" to activate
      key code 53 using {command down}
      delay 0.5
      key code 53
    end tell
Quite the timesaver!

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