Codedrop™ Weblog » Mac OSX

Safari 4 Hidden Preferences

admin — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:40:05 +0000

I recently started using Safari 4 and found in incredibly disorienting having new tabs appear at the very top of the window frame. To my suprise there’s a hidden setting that can change the location of the tab bar to something you might be more familiar with. Check out this blog for a complete listing of hidden preferences.

Tweet This Post

Keyboard Shortcuts For MacOSX (screen capture)

admin — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:31:53 +0000

Here’s a neat shortcut for doing selectable screen captures on a Mac:

⌘⇧4 (Command – Shift – 4) – will change your cursor and allow you to select a region on the screen to capture. After highlighting the region release the mouse button and voila!.. a new image file will be saved to your desktop of the selected region.
⌘⇧3 (Command – Shift – 3) – will take a screen capture of your entire desktop.

Tweet This Post

How to install a specific software version using Mac Ports

admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 03:22:17 +0000

MacPorts is the preferred way of installing, managing, and upgrading ports of some the software I have on my Mac. Unfortunately mac ports does not let you specify a version. To mediate this you can create a local repository that is checked out to a specific version and install from there.

This example is how to install ruby version 1.8.5-p12.

1) Find out the svn revision number of the Portfile by looking in:

http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/macports/log/trunk/dports/lang/ruby/Portfile

In my case it is 21127.

2) Set up a local port repository. In the file /opt/local/etc/macports/sources.conf, add this line before the rsync line:

file:///Users/Shared/dports and create that directory.

3) Install the port into your local repository.

cd /Users/Shared/dports && svn co –revision 21127
http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/trunk/dports/lang/ruby/
lang/ruby/

4) Run portindex so that ports now finds your new (old) version of ruby.

portindex /Users/Shared/dports

5) Now you should be able to see ruby @1.8.5-p12 in addition to @1.8.6 by running:

port list

6) Install Ruby

sudo port install ruby @1.8.5-p12

You should be up and running now, so to check, run:

ruby -v

You will see something like this:

ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) [i686-darwin8.10.1]

Tweet This Post

Mac OSX Script To Toggle Hidden Files

admin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 20:20:01 +0000

Working in a Mac environment I often find myself needing access to the system directories that are typically hidden by Finder. I recently stumbled across the following script that I find quite useful for toggling back / forth between standard and full views.

Open ScriptEditor and save the following script:

try
set dotVisible to do shell script “defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles”

on error errorMessage number errorNumber
set dotVisible to 0
end try

if dotVisible = “0″ then
do shell script “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 1″
else
do shell script “defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles 0″
end if

tell application “Finder” to quit
delay 1

tell application “Finder” to activate
if dotVisible = “0″ then
say “VISIBLE”
else
say “HIDDEN”
end if

Tweet This Post