So, I recently got a Mac Mini (if it wasn't already obvious from me going on about Mac stuff lately). And while Mac OS X is a pretty nifty operating system, it, like every other OS, has a number of annoyances. I've managed to find some neat tweaks for some of them, so I thought it time to start a thread for various tweaks for Mac OS X.
Post things that make the OS less annoying, or are just neat in general!
A couple I've found:
osascript, which can issue AppleScript commands to control apps.Finally, an unsolved problem: I have been completely unable to find an even halfway decent image viewer for Mac OS X. I want something with the basic functionality of ACDSee on Windows, like the automatic browsing through directories of images by just clicking on a single image in the directory. Also, something that is decently fast, and does image decoding in a separate thread so you don't have to wait for each image to load when rushing through a long list of them. There's ACDSee for Mac OS, but it just fails it. I am considering writing my own.
You could always port over some image viewers from free OS land... but frankly they all suck.
Look at this as an opportunity to get familiar with Objective-C. :p
Someone may tell you UFS is faster then HFS+. It may be, but the difference is negliigable and it breaks a lot of shit, including StuffIt Expander.
Come on, somebody must know of a decent image viewer for Mac OS X! How do you deal with saved image board content on it otherwise?
I use Preview, but it sounds like that doesn't meet your standards...
Er, not quite. It tries to, what, load all pictures you open up in it? That's not very useful when browsing directories of hundreds or thousands of pictures.
Nah, it has a thumbnail directory view (in Tiger at least.) It does recurse directories without asking you, though.
No, really, I opened up a couple of hundred images, and the machine fell to its knees. It was barely reacting at all. I'm pretty sure it loaded full-size versions of every single image.
Try not doing a freelance gig in front of your computer at the same time. : P
Try FFview. It's even OpenGL accelerated.
I tried it, and I hated it. It forces you to add files manually to the list instead of scanning directories automatically, and it's SLOW. Apparently it loads each image as you skip to it, making it impossible to quickly browse through a long list of images. A good imageviewer should load images in a separate thread so loading doesn't lock up the interface, and should also pre-load the next image when you stop and look at an image so you can instantly skip to the next one.
Actually, it was some time since I tried it, so I tried it again, and I now have an even better idea of why I hate it!
Shit sux, saged.
I'm curious about the "OpenGL accelerated" bit. What possible use would a 2D image viewer have for a 3D accelerator?
Drawing and scaling images when displaying, is the obvious answer. Doesn't help much when other parts of the program are the bottlenecks, though.
>image viewer stuff
I'm looking forward to your OS X viewer, WAHa. I'm looking forward to the ports of it too, of course. ; )
> your OS X viewer, WAHa.
WRITTEN IN PERL!
So instead of using standard blitting functions, now you have to set up a 3D context, set up structures, make a surface, and use a texture on the surface. And what do you get for that?
Lanczos? No? Bicubic? Maybe? What?
And scrolling won't be faster either. Pretty much every chip made since the mid 90's has a 2D accelerator.
This is a square peg and a round hole. Sure, you can do it, but why would you?
Lanczos eats CPU's for breakfast. I vote something that is quality (ie: not "Nearest Neighbour") that runs quickly.
you need this:
http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Desktop-Manager.shtml
and this:
http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/
and this:
http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
and this:
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
and this:
http://www.mindlube.com/products/emacs/
and
a >1 button mouse.
for picture viewing (fap fap) i use this:
http://richardk.info/slides/
a directory based image viewer, very fast.
> http://mac.softpedia.com/get/Utilities/Desktop-Manager.shtml
Never liked virtual desktops on any platform. And why bother when Exposé is so much more intuitive?
> http://gnufoo.org/ucontrol/
After I edited the default Finnish keyboard layout (Apple have never apparently bothered to actually look at a Finnish PC keyboard to find out what the keys are actually supposed to do), the keyboard works as well as I can expect it to, so that program doesn't look too useful for me personally.
> http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
Haven't gotten pissed off enough at Terminal yet to try and replace it. The international support looks good, though. Any other reason to use it?
> http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
Most bloated program EVER. A magnificent monument to bad program design. I still use it though because everything else sucks even more. I wish Bits on Wheels actually had some endgame code and global upload limits.
> http://www.mindlube.com/products/emacs/
Hahahahah no.
> a >1 button mouse.
Got one!
> http://richardk.info/slides/
Without even trying it I can tell I'd hate it. Hasn't a single Mac user tried ACDSee on Windows?
I use iTerm mostly because of international support and tabs.
> Hahahahah no.
;)
> And scrolling won't be faster either. Pretty much every chip made since the mid 90's has a 2D accelerator.
Yeah, that's what I thought too. Then I actually wrote some code for blitting an image to the screen.
Turns out Mac OS X fucking fails it at drawing images. Somehow drawing the image to an offscreen buffer which is then drawn on the screen (like Mac OS X windows normally do) is really fucking slow. You can try this out on a Mac by opening a really big image in Preview, maximizing the window, and scrolling it. It will be choppy as hell.
Apparently you can turn off the backing buffer, but that makes window updating break so badly it's completely useless. Maybe I am missing something there, though. Either way, with the backing buffer on, I'm not going to be drawing anything at fullscreen size or even quarter screen.
Using OpenGL seems to be the way to get something as simple as a smoothly scrolling display of a 2d image.
Didn't you know you're not supposed to maximize windows on a Mac?
Just finally got intarbutt access at my new joint today, and saw this thread.
When I want to browse a directory full of images, I do this:
Note that I'm still using Jag, so things might have been changed a bit in Tiger.
You can't consider yourself an OS X tweaker without TinkerTool: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html It lets you tweak a whole bunch of stuff. Also, there's some tweaks for Safari here, though the most desirable one, which removes the god-awful brushed metal interface from Safari, is not Tiger compatible yet. http://www.scifience.net
(By the way, would it kill Apple to start following their own HIGs again? I've hated this brushed metal shit ever since it premiered in QuickTime Player 3.0.)
TinkerTool sure looked nice, but in the end I didn't want to turn on any of the options it had, except for the Safari debug menu that I had already enabled. Too bad, I do like programs like that (TweakUI for Windows is another favourite).
Well, personally, all I really use TinkerTool for is to put the Dock at the top left corner of the screen -- OS X will let you move it to the left, but it takes TinkerTool to get it away from the middle of whatever edge it's on. Having the Dock in the middle is just one of those things that kind of... grates me. But to each their own.
Now that you mention it, I did that too. It's not all that important though since my dock always covers most of the screen height anyway, so the difference is minimal.
Also!
How do you get Safari to use Mona for japanese pages?
Short answer: You can't. Safari doesn't let you change fonts by language, and neither do any other WebCore-based browsers I've tried (OmniWeb, Shiira). If this is a deal-breaker for you, try Camino, a Moz-based browser (which is far more OS X-friendly than Firefox): http://www.caminobrowser.org/
Longer answer: SafariStand http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16687 is a Safari tweak that adds various features to Safari, including one that lets you "alter" certain web sites that you go to. (It changes on your end only, of course.) It'll remember those alterations in the future, so when you go to the site again, the "changes" you made will reappear. One of the settings is using a custom stylesheet. Maybe if you made a stylesheet that eplicitly used the Mona font for <body>, then set up SafariStand to use that stylesheet whenever you went to http://4-ch.net/ascii/ or whatever... Haven't tried it myself, though.
SafariStand seems sort of nice, if a bit buggy. The interface could be a bit sleeker too, but overall it's fairly useful. Adds some functionality I'm used to from Firefox, too.
>>Finally, an unsolved problem: I have been completely unable to find an even halfway decent image viewer for Mac OS X
http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/graphcon.htm is decent, if not very fast.
> if not very fast.
DISQUALIFIED.
Luckily, I've get my own viewer running already. I just need to polish up the interface and add some more basic functionality to it before releasing it.
Graphic Converter does too much to be a simple image viewer... And it tries to be an image editor, but it's not very good at it... But it's been around on the Mac for, like, fifteen years or so.
http://wakaba.c3.cx/sup/kareha.pl/1122405906/ <-- Alpha version of my own image viewer in here, if anyone wants to see it.
I use GQview as my image viewer on unix/X.
Apparently, it has a Mac port: http://gqview.darwinports.com/
It's fast, loads thumbnails in the background in a separate view pane without any noticable app slowdown, has various image transformation options, etc. Of course, the port may suck.
I've used GQView in Linux, but I wasn't very impressed. On the other hand, I didn't hate it all THAT much either, which is a pretty good achievement, I guess.
HOWEVER! Now is the time for self-promotion! My own image viewer is getting farily usable, and it beats the pants off everything else out there! http://wakaba.c3.cx/sup/kareha.pl/1122405906/
Gah. GQview is nasty. Last time I tried it (2.0.1, IIRC):
a) It didn't to background loading (so they fixed that?)
b) It couldn't do animated gifs (*)
c) Navigating the tree with keys alone was nasty.
d) Leaked memory at a disturbing rate.
e) It's slow.
And a host of other minor things I've fortunately forgotten.
The only UNIX image viewer I've seen that doesn't completely suck is xzgv (yet only if you spend a couple hours beating it into submission), and that's an unmaintained relic. In the end I found myself using ACDsee classic through Wine.
(*) Yet GQview uses gdk_pixbuf, which supports animated gifs. What's wrong with this picture?
I was told Kuickview has a similar interface to ACDSee, but I haven't tried it and I don't know if it's anywhere near as good.
>The only UNIX image viewer I've seen that doesn't completely suck is xzgv (yet only if you spend a couple hours beating it into submission), and that's an unmaintained relic.
Mostly off topic, but Gwenview does not suck! ... Provided that you have all the KDE overhead whatsits installed, which OS X doesn't. Anyway.
It thumbnails in the background, it does delayed smoothing when scaling images (so the unsmoothed scaled image loads almost instantly), it does lossless rotations (jpegtran, yuck, I know), filtering by criteria, duplicate finding (although much less useful than GQView's duplicate finder), and it looks inside zips and tars. It supports a whole mess of common and uncommon image formats including jp2, mng, svg, xcf, psd, and animated gifs.
I haven't used ACDSee, but I'm guessing that Gwenview's speed isn't too bad either.
I can tell you right off that Gwenview is slower than ACDSee, if for nothing else than the fact that ACDSee has highly optimized JPEG loading code, and doesn't use libjpeg.
And much more important than loading thumbnails in the background, does it load images in the background? Or does it lock up while loading each new image like almost every viewer out there?
>And much more important than loading thumbnails in the background, does it load images in the background?
As far as I can tell, Gwenview does load images in the background. Selecting other images, changing directories, and opening menues works fine even as I load (and scale/smooth) disgustingly large images in excess of 4000x3000 pixels.
He didn't mean background as in background process, but rather loading one image while you're viewing another, so that transitions are instantaneous when your decide to switch.
ACDsee gives you the option to forwards and backwards cache images. It works wonderfully. You do, of course, notice it slow down if you jump too many images ahead too quickly.
WAHa: Pity I don't use/own a Mac. I've been bemoaning the lack of a decent image-viewer/manga-reader on Linux for ages, and Xee sounds great. Closest I've got is someone's script which decompresses the archive and uses something like gview to display it. That's more a convenience issue than anything else (it seems application developers rarely do anything about what we like to call and "interface")... :/
Seems there's talk of porting Xee through GNUstep, but I think that's a bit beyond me.
>ACDsee gives you the option to forwards and backwards cache images.
Oh. Well, good thing it's an option, then. I'm not too thrilled over the prospect of dedicating a few dozen megabytes of my system memory to caching a series of images that I may or may not view in the near future, especially since they rarely take longer than a second to load without cache, anyway. To each their own.
The forward/backwards cache is what makes the viewer. That, and the background task loading. One second per image might not seem like much, until you realize you want to view an image one hundred images forward in the list.
>One second per image might not seem like much, until you realize you want to view an image one hundred images forward in the list.
I'm afraid I don't see the logical connection. With background task loading, doesn't that become more a question of how quickly you can click the forward button than how long it takes to load each image?
>>46
I'm afraid I don't see the connection, either. ACDsee's forward/backward cache is good for maybe five images (presumably dependant on file size) in either direction of your sorted list. Jumping a hundred images will force a demand-load of the image.
I do agree though, that the cache makes the viewer. It just makes things that much more pleasurable to use. I just don't quite get what you mean by a large jump. Unless you're implying that it has to decode each image in sequence before it'll get to the one you want, which is clearly not the done thing.
>>45
I think the best answer to your question is to simply use some version of ACDsee for a few weeks (I personally favour 2.43, even if it's missing half the later features). You'll realize pretty quick why some of us think the OSS viewers are poor.
This is a problem ACDsee solved in the mid 1990's. It's pathetic that ten years later there's still nothing comparable in the OSS world. Some people found a clue and tried ripping off the interface (gtksee), but they messed up anyway.
> I'm afraid I don't see the logical connection. With background task loading, doesn't that become more a question of how quickly you can click the forward button than how long it takes to load each image?
Yes, that's exactly what I was saying - WITHOUT background loading (which almost every image viewer out there lacks), skipping a hundred pictures forward becomes an exercise in frustration. With something like ACDSee (Or Xee! Yay me!), it's child's play.
Also, at least up until version 3 of ACDsee (where I stopped upgrading because it was becoming too bloated), the cache only loaded one single image ahead, and only cached the previously viewed image. This is quite enough for most purposes, and I copied that behaviour in Xee.
And dmpk2k is entirely right that ACDSee got it right a decade ago, and nobody's caught up yet. (Except me! Yay me! OK, honestly, Xee is nowhere near the snappiness of ACDSee, largely because I don't have hand-optimized image loading code.)
It also caches one image behind, if you're going backwards. I like to call it predictive loading, and it's a brilliant idea.
To clarify what WAHa is saying in regard to zipping forward (which I often do): If you're stuck with a non-caching viewer, zipping forward is low. You move to the next image, wait for it to load, recognize it, then move on. It takes me substantially less than one second to recognize an image, or scan for some relevant detail I'm seeking. So, I'm wasting at least 2/3 of my time waiting for the damn image to load.
Or, I can use a more intelligent approach: while I'm scanning the previous image, load the next. Transition is instantaneous. Repeat. This combined with ACDSee's wonderful speed means I can scan through many images a second.
You could look at the thumbnails too, except that thumbnails often contain too little detail for what's going on... like, say, manga, or other images that differ primarily in fine detail. I actually detest thumbnails, because with ACDSee they're not even necessary. It's faster for me to focus on one point on the screen and flip than it is to move my eyes (experiments to this effect indicate I'm not unique either).
Once you get used to it, waiting pisses you off.
Actually, I think I'm off on a tangent compared to what WAHa's saying. If he meant just holding down the space key, then yes, that works too.
I prefer using the speed for recognition though. It's wonderful.
You are, but what you said holds true too.
Generally I don't care much for thumbnailing in image viewers either, thanks to ACDSee largely making them irrelevant. I use them when doing mass organization of images, but that's it. When looking for a particular image, it's about even time between looking through thumbnails and looking at full pictures in ACDSee.
>>51
Aha, you're talking about looking through 100 images. Call me stupid, but all the previous talk sounded like you wanted to go immediately to an image 100 ahead in the sequence (when you say jump, I think of an ASM jump, like PC+100).
That said, I think we've nutted this one out nicely.
dmpk2k and me were talking about slightly different things - I meant doing the equivalent of jumping directly 100 images ahead, but this is usually done by just holding down the Next Image key until you get there. If you don't have background loading, this process is extremely painful.
Footagehead is the best image viewer I've found so far. http://www.zankasoftware.com/footagehead/
Well, the remote browsing is clever, although not actually all that useful. But the interface has a lot of junk in it. I haven't actually tried downloading it to see if it does background loading.
I still say Xee wins!
After actually testing it: It's the first image viewer other than Xee that I've found that actually browses directories and loads images in the background. That places it way beyond most Mac image viewers. However, it's too bad it doesn't really do anything beyond that. There's no zooming, no GIF anims, no pre-loading, and of course none of the more advanced features I like to have in an image viewer, like some basic file handling.
Xee wins!
Bwana http://www.bruji.com/bwana/index.html
Lets you view nicely formatted man pages from within your browser by typing man:foo in the URL field.
Clean Archiver http://www.sopht.jp/cleanarchiver/
Archive utility that can exclude Mac-specific files like .DS_Store and icon files for cross-platform friendliness.
Cronnix http://www.abstracture.de/projects-en/cronnix
Nice GUI for cron. Lets you schedule any event that can be triggered from the command line: application launches, scripts, etc.
Drop7zip http://forums.emuscene.com/weblog.php?w=14&sid=c538b531951a3f02e9297330bb4e56da
Archive utility for the 7zip format, also uncompresses a lot of obscure formats.
Genius http://homepage.mac.com/jrc/Software/
Helps you memorize things.
GIMPshop http://plasticbugs.com/index.php?p=241a
GIMP build with a Photoshop GUI.
iCal Events http://www.benkazez.com/icalevents/
Lets you preview upcoming iCal events.
iTaf http://itaf.sourceforge.net/
iTunes alarm clock. Nice features like the ability to run scheduled alarms, wake from sleep & set the system volume.
Pester http://web.sabi.net/nriley/software/#pester
Very simple reminder app that will pop up with a user-defined message.
WebGrabber http://www.epicware.com/webgrabber.html
For the odd site wget won't work on.
wget http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html
Command-line http/ftp retrieval app. Enough features to choke a donkey.
Quicksilver http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
Very fast application launcher with a million features. Replaced the Dock and Sidebar for me completely.
VoodooPad http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/
Your very own Wiki.
Wizzard http://www.mistatree.org/SmallApps/Wizzard.html
Shows/hides invisible files.
X-Chat Aqua http://xchataqua.sourceforge.net/
Best OS X IRC client IMO, stable and powerful.
Any idea for applications that will allow you to specify character encoding for zip files? I'm trying to unzip some archieves containing shift_jis, I guess, they're Japanese.
Oh, it's probably EUC-JP they use in binary files, but anyway, I have no idea how to force an application to unzip with that encoding.
Ditto CleanArchiver. It's slick.
As far as Notepad replacements go (that's the Classic Mac Notepad, not the Windows text editor), I like NotePad: http://www.fornextsoft.com/index.php?page=note
Too many other replacements (VoodooPad) try to add too many annoying features to what was already a perfectly useful and simple app; NotePad is the one I've found that most closely emulates good ol' Notepad.
That being said, I've been trying Sidenote and finding it decent, if a bit obtrusive; it "sticks" to one side of the screen and pops out when you move the pointer there. But the right side is no good because that's where the scroll controls are, and the left is no good 'cuz that's where I put my Dock, so I end up triggering it on accident too often... I'd like to be able to attach it to the bottom of the screen. http://www.chatelp.org/?s=Sidenote
Shift-JIS art and OS X: after some experimentation, my best results are with monafont-mac-2.22.zip @ size 14. This looks good for pretty much everything except art that involves lining up vertical lines, like:
┏┓ ┏━┓ .∧＿∧
┏┛┗┓..┗━┛ （*´∀｀*）__ ┏━┓┏━┓
┗┓┏┛┏━━┓ /⌒ m６っ ） ┃ ┗┛ ┃
┏┛┗┓┗┓┏┛┏━| |/⌒)| ( /＼━━━━━━┓┃ ┃
┗┓┏┛ ┃┃ ┗━.| / ./;;::;l＿/ .￣ヽ ━━━━┛┗┓ ┏┛
┃┃ ┏┛┃ l＿/;;;;::;;;ﾄ-─'' ﾉ ┗┓┏┛
┗┛ ┗━┛ /;;//;;;::;;/ -──-＿/~＼_ ┗┛
／;;:;::::::;;;;ヽ､＿＿＿＿＿＿＿）
or
.| | | | | | | ｜ | | |｜ | |
.| | | ﾚ | | | ｜ | J |｜ | |
∩＿＿＿∩ | | | J | | ｜ し |｜ | |
| ノ＼ ,＿ ヽ .| ﾚ ｜ ｜ ﾚ｜ |｜ Ｊ |
/ ●゛ ● | .J し | | ｜| J
| ∪ ( _●_) ミ .｜ し J｜
彡､ |∪| | .Ｊ ﾚ
/ ∩ノ ⊃ ヽ
( ＼ ／ ＿ノ | |
＼ " ／ ｜ |
＼ ／￣￣￣ ／
I haven't found any Mona font version/size combinations that display these vertical lines properly. Any suggestions?
Found the right combo. monafont-mac-2.22.zip @ size 16. Yahooey@#
>>65
Congrats! ヽ(´ー｀)ノ
Time for more self-promotion! I finally released a 1.0 version of my image viewer:
I used graphic converter on my old imac (rip) under OS 9, and found it very useful for cataloging files. When you consider your OTHER options.. like manually opening and sorting.. it makes things a whole lot more bearable.
For those with an iBook or PowerBook that's just old enough to not have two-finger scrolling, you may want to give SideTrack a bash. And those with two-finger scrolling may even want to have a play; it does some cool stuff.
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/
I second >>69. SideTrack is awesome. I think its price ($15) is a bit steep, but I bought it anyway because it is very handy.