Cocktail is a useful little application that handles a bunch of routine tasks in one convenient location. It may not bring cool whiz-bang new features to the forefront, but it's got a nice GUI and integrates a number of routine tasks and tweaks into one convenient location.
You can use Cocktail to run the system maintenance scripts that are supposed to run daily, weekly and monthly; enable journaling; set the hard drive spindown time, remove DS_Store files from a volume or folder; delete locked files; remove or view system log files; create symbolic links via drag and drop; set the speed and duplex mode of your Ethernet card; request a new DHCP lease; remove various caches; force empty the trash; recreate the Mac OS 9 desktop alias; tweak the Finder to show invisibles, remove zoom rects, add double scroll arrows; tweak the Dock to add a shadow, use transparent icons for hidden apps, and position/pin the dock. There's also an "auto pilot" feature that can pre-bind files and repair permissions (along with some of the previously mentioned features).
As a I said, no amazing new features, but a nice collection of routine tasks and tweaks in one location. Yes, you could do all of this with other programs or via the GUI or Terminal, but Cocktail puts it all in one convenient location.
It's rated a "7" due to some apparent issues with non-English systems (can anyone confirm?), as well as its use of a non-standard admin password dialog box, which gives me just a bit of uncomfort when entering my admin password. There's also a bit of a delay at startup as Cocktail scans the disk and does a couple of other chores. Overall, though, it's hard to beat the combination of tasks, the nice GUI, and the donationware price.
Konfabulator is hard to explain, but basically, it's a JavaScript engine that lets you run a number of small programs called widgets. A widget can be thought of as a single-purposed utility, designed to provide you with some interesting piece of information. Such widgets could provide information on battery strength, AirPort signal strength, time, weather, headline news, etc. Yes, you can find such programs on your own, and some are included with the OS. But what sets Konfabulator apart from these is the integration (all running widgets are available from a menubar icon), the appearance of the widgets themselves (they support transparency and shadows and unique window shapes), and the extensible nature of Konfabulator (it's relatively easy to write new widgets).
Konfabulator ships with a small assortment of widgets (AirPort signal, analog clock, battery, calendar, digital clock, iTunes remote, a small floating slideshow window, stock ticker, weather, and a basic "to do" list manager). In addition, there are over 260 more widgets available in the Konfabulator section of deskmod.com. The widgets run the gamut from the very very specific (a widget displaying bus arrival times for certain routes in Stockholm, Sweden) to games (Go, Dice, Solitaire) to internet search tools (Google, Amazon, eBay) to headline news grabbers (SlashDot, etc.) to the whimsical (a cow simulator?!). One of the available widgets is XHints, a hint headline grabber for macosxhints.com (I was not directly involved in this widget, other than providing the site logo).
Konfabulator is one of those truly unique pieces of programming that seem to come along every once in a great while. Although released for only a very short time, the presence of hundreds of widgets speaks highly of how easily new widgets can be written. I've been hearing about Konfabulator for a while, but it wasn't until the XHints widget process started that I actually downloaded it and tried it out ... I think I'm hooked and my $25 will be headed their direction very shortly -- if I can stop experimenting with widgets long enough to register!
At its simplest level, PrefEdit is a tool to edit preference files. But that's really understating its abilities. What it really does is let you explore preference files in an easy-to-understand manner. Using a multiple-column view that's quite similar to that of the Finder, PrefEdit scans your Preferences folder when you launch it, and shows all available prefs files in the leftmost column. When you select a prefs file, the second column displays all available keys in that file. Select a key, and the third column shows its value (or another drill-down level if that key has sub-keys). There's even a search engine to find keys across files. Once you've selected a key, you can set a new value for it, or (if you wish) delete the key entirely.
Even if you have the Dev Tools installed, you may find PrefEdit an easier way to navigate and edit preferences files, and it's definitely easier than using TextEdit or BBEdit (at least, in my opinion). As with anything that can modify a preferences file, you have the ability to really mess up the application you're modifying (backup backup backup!), so be careful with it if you're not used to looking at preference files.
Although PrefEdit was last updated in December of 2001, it seems to run just fine on 10.2.4, and provides a unique and useful interface to the somewhat mundane task of editing preference files.
Very short and simple review for this week's PotW. If you like to use the function keys to launch applications and documents, get One Key now. Implemented as a very simple preference panel, you can assign each function key to open any application or document you wish. After configuring, you use One Key as expected ... on my desktop machine, you just hit the function key and off you go; on the laptop, press down the 'fn' button first and then hit the function key (as this keeps the brightness/sound keys working).
That's all it does, and it does it well. The only reason it scored a "9" and not a "10" is that you have to manually install the pref pane, which can be a bit of a minor chore (especially if you've never done it before). If you were addicted to function keys in OS 9, you owe One Key a look. Even if you weren't a function key addict in OS 9, you may find the $5 shareware fee (you're limited to five launches per session until you register) a small price to pay for one-button access to 12 of your most-used applications and documents.
After having spent this weekend working on something in excess of 250 files in three different varieties of Geeklog (the old 1.1 site, the development site, and the new release site), I became re-addicted to Apple's FileMerge tool ... even though I never used it for its full intended purpose!
FileMerge (which has been mentioned here before) is part of the Developer Tools (a 200mb download from the Developer site, once you register as a free online-only developer), and its mission is to compare two files and then merge the differences into one. However, I never trust tools that do such things, so I simply used its amazing file comparison features to make sure I was doing the right things to the right files. When you launch FileMerge, you're prompted for the locations of two files which then open in one window with a vertical divider down the middle.
FileMerge highlights the sections that differ in each file, and uses an arrow in the center area to show whether the higlighted item needs to be added to the right or left file in order to make them identical. I used FileMerge to open the stock versions of the Geeklog templates and compare them to the modified ones on my development server. I would then copy and paste and make the actual edits in BBEdit or vi. The visual cues provided by FileMerge were invaluable in helping me understand what I'd done to the code over the last few months ... and without its help, I probably would have been much more frustrated this weekend!
I'm sure there are other tools out there that do the same thing (and perhaps even better, and I could trust the merge function), including UNIX's diff command. But FileMerge was there, the smooth-scrolling auto-lineup feature has to be seen to be understood (it's very cool), and it was free ... so it's this week's PotW!
Last week, I wrote a brief blurb about using AppleScript to manage Safari's open windows in a "tab like" manner. In the comments to that article, someone pointed out Pith. Pith is a small floating window that contains a list of all of your open Safari windows, and lets you switch to any of them with a simple mouse click.
After spending some time with Pith this last week, I felt it deserved some attention as the PotW, even though it's got a few issues -- the concept is quite good, and seems to be a nearly perfect potential solution to Safari's lack of tab support.
Pith has a few preferences that allow you to change the sort order for displayed windows (by name, by age, or by window order), auto-hide other Safari windows when switching, whether windows use the same "frame" (screen location), a couple of minor visibility settings, and a slider for how often Pith updates its information. I have enabled both the "same frame" and "auto-hide" options, which basically allows me to forget that Safari is running all of the open pages in separate windows. When I click a page in Pith, it appears in the same spot every time, and the others are smoothly hidden.
Why only a 7 out of 10? Pith has some issues with CPU usage, auto-hide can cause oddities, and sometimes the wrong window is activated when you close the open window and you're using auto-hide. In addition to these known glitches (all listed on the Pith website), the biggest 'bug' I have with it is actually a feature request. Currently, the Pith window hides unless Pith or Safari is the active application. I'd like to tuck Pith into an open corner of the screen and have it available from any application -- ie an "always visible" preference setting (not always on top, just always visible). With that, I'd probably use Pith even more than I do now!
If you use fink to install and use various UNIX packages (as I do), but find the command line management tools somewhat complicated (as I do; I'm forever forgetting the right syntax for the various tools, and I find the ASCII-based package manager quite confusing), then you need FinkCommander.
FinkCommander wraps the package management system in a nice Cocoa front end, displaying all available packages and their current status in your Fink installation. At a glance, you can see each package's installed version, current binary version, current stable version, current unstable version (if enabled), as well as the package's category and description. A status columns indicates if the version you have installed is current, outdated, or archived, and any column can be used as the sort key just by clicking on its header.
The bottom half of the window is reserved for output messages, exactly as you would see if running the various Fink commands directly in the Terminal. The split position can be resized just by dragging a horizontal divider up and down to give more space to either the list or output areas.
I customized the toolbar to add the install/delete binary package buttons, and now it's a matter of a couple of double-clicks to install (from binary or source) any package that I wish to use. Since installing FinkCommander, I find I'm doing a much better job of keeping current with my various Fink installations.
Locator is a GUI front-end to the UNIX 'locate' command, which helps you find files on your system. Why would you want to use Locator (or even 'locate') when Apple includes Command-F for find? One reason - speed. The locate command creates a database of everything on your hard drive, meaning that searches are nearly instantaneous. For example, a Locator search on ".mov" in my /Volumes directory (basically all mounted drives) found 800 results in a second or two. Try that same command using Command-F and you'll wait quite a while before getting the results (it was working on it for a couple of minutes while I did other stuff, and only had found a couple hundred before I stopped it).
Locator puts a very easy to use interface on top of the 'locate' command. Instead of having to open a terminal and type "locate" followed by a string of commands to help narrow and sort the search results, just launch Locator. You can drag in volumes, run grep searches, do "contains," "begins with, "ends with," and "is" style searches, search again within the results, and much more. As it's a full-blown Cocoa app, there's even a nice customizable toolbar. About the only thing that command-F has going for it above Locator is the ability to specify selected drives for the search locations; Locator seems to work on all or one, but not selected, volumes (someone please correct me if I'm wrong!).
The only real downside to locate is also the fact that it uses a database. If you create a new file and then use locate immediately, you won't find the new file in the locate results as the database is only updated at certain intervals. But this is another area where Locator shines. When you launch it, it checks how recently the database has been updated and asks if you'd like to update it now (there's also a menu item to update the database whenever you like).
I've been using Locator for a long time, and just had never thought to make it a PotW, until someone submitted a recommendation for it via the hint submittal form ... and then I realized just how often I use it (I almost never use Command-F). Locator is an essential piece of sofwtare on my machines ... the fact that it's freeware is an amazing added bonus.
Last week, I picked shadowClipboard as the PotW due to its ease of use and simple interface. The comments to that article pointed me to PTHPasteboard, another multiple clipboard utility. After using the two side by side quite a bit this past week, I must say that I clearly prefer PTHPasteboard (though that doesn't mean that shadowClipboard is a bad program; PTHPasteboard just matches my work style a bit better).
PTHPasteboard can track 20 objects (or more, if you use the Prefs to up the limit!), and does so with a small (resizable) floating window. When you click on one of the save locations, the data is immediately copied and pasted into the appliation that was active when PTHPasteboard was activated. In addition, you can easily create keyboard shortcuts for the first 10 buffer spots, as well as one with which to activate the buffer window. There are even four different menubar icons to pick from, in case you don't like the default.
After using PTHPasteboard for the last week or so, it's become an invaluable part of my toolkit, and has saved a bunch of time in copying and pasting work on the new site. Definitely worth the high praise it received in last week's comments!
shadowClipboard is another neat little application from stupidFish Programming, who also brought us shadowGoogle. shadowClipboard is similarly single-minded in its role, which is to provide you with up to 10 clipboard save spots. Multiple clipboards, when done right, are a great productivity tool ... and even though it's only beta, shadowClipboard does them right (at least based on my needs).
When I first launched the application, I didn't think anything was happening, as no user interface opened, no splash screen appeared, and it wasn't listed in the dock or the force quit dialog box. Then I glanced up to the menubar and saw the small clipboard icon, and clicked on it to reveal the simple and effective user interface.
shadowClipboard works entirely in the background, and provides 10 empty spots for copied items to temporarily reside. Each time you hit copy, one more empty spot is taken; if all the spots are filled, the newest item knocks the oldest item off the list. You won't actually see any of this happening, though, as shadowClipboard works behind the scenes (which is the way I like it).
When you want to use one of the items in the 10 spots, or just see what all you have in your collection, just click on the menubar icon, and a graphical display of all 10 clipboard spots drops down from the menubar. Click the one you want, and it's copied to the clipboard, ready for use.
As I cut and paste a lot of stuff between the development and production sites, and back and forth between browsers, shadowClipboard fills a definite need for me. It's not the most powerful clipboard manager out there (for that, I'd recommend Script Software's CopyPaste, which has a ton of amazingly useful clipboard features). But if you just want a simple, basic, multiple-clipboard manager, you might want to give shadowClipboard a test drive. Although it's beta, I've had no issues with it on two machines.