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Desktop changes
By Mike | May 28, 2009
I’ve always been unhappy with launching applications in MacOS X. When OS X first came out, I thought that I would love the Dock, great idea but in practice it doesn’t work so well. It looks like the Front Panel that CDE had on Unix that I DID love. XFCE, a linux window manager, has something similar these days which is also full of awesome.
In OS X 10.5 Apple tried to make the Dock more useful using stacks. Problem is, their implementation sucks. Most notably, for me, is that stacks have to be on the right side of the dock (where minimized applications go), and you can’t define an icon for them, without some trickery. And even then, the icons don’t look the way I would like them too. Stacks have some real potential for organizing documents, but when you have a lot of applications to organize they can be cumbersome.
For a long time i used a product called Overflow to handle my application launching. It works really well, and I highly recommend it for people that are looking for a better way to organize and launch their OS X Applications. My only complaint about it is that it isn’t always on the screen. A hot-key combination, or clicking on its icon, brings it up. Works well, just not what I’m looking for.
Enter DragThing. I’ve used Dragthing as a dock replacement in the past. I always gravitate back to the dock though, because it tends to be prettier or offer some features that I want (such as badge updates on mail clients). Last week I set out to try to come up with a Dragthing desktop that was pretty enough to hold my attention AND useful enough to be, well, useful.
These are the results, clicking the images opens larger versions:
Empty Desktop:
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Background is one i put together last week. The Picture of Katherine and I is my favorite of us together, and was taken by my brother in May 2008 at Fort Myers Beach in Florida. The other Picture of Katherine is my favorite of her by herself. The others were shots I grabbed at the Cleveland Air Show in 2008.
I’m using Dragthing to create several drawers along the bottom (lower left hand corner), and to move the Trash icon to the desktop (lower right hand corner).
Geektool is being used to put the Date and Time in the lower right hand corner.
I’m using Mail Unread Menu to put my unread mail count in my menu bar. NNW Unread Menu is handling my NetNewsWire RSS unread count.
From left to right, the icons in my menu bar are: Dragthing, Mail Unread Menu, NNW Unread Menu, Adium X, Dropbox, Time Machine, Battery Life, Wireless, Quick User Switching, TunnelBlick (VPN Software), and Spotlight.
Minimized applications go into the minimized drawer that lowers from the upper left corner of the screen.
Showing Applications Drawer:
I like to have my applications organized by category. Hovering over, or clicking on, the drawers in the lower left corner cause them to pop out. Moving the mouse off them causes them to retract.
Showing Adium Buddy List:
HUD theme for adium which fits well with my background.
Terminal:
I spend a lot of time in my terminal, so I took some time a couple years ago to make it a little nicer to work in (Scripts Documented Here).
The bird is just some ASCII art that I found years ago that I’ve kept using, not attached to it, just haven’t found anything better yet. The line expands and contracts with the window so it is always the width of the window. Username@Current Directory, ~ for home. Other side is current time. The Smiley face changes between a green smiley and the red frown pictured below. Green face means the previous command exited successfully. Red face means there was an error code/state returned from the application.
Terminal after error:
Error state was returned from the previous command.
Topics: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
July 27th, 2009 at 12:27 am
[...] rest is here: Desktop changes Posted in: Window [...]
August 21st, 2009 at 9:49 am
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