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:

• The standard mouse driver is the WORST EVER. I've never used a system with such horrible mouse acceleration, and no way to turn it off. FIX: http://www.usboverdrive.com/ - a custom USB driver that give much smoother mouse movement, and lets you configure the buttons better. Also lets you disable the horrible acceleration on the scroll wheel.
• I've seen some people complain that they can't put Dashboard widgets on the desktop. You can, if you turn on development mode: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2005/tn2139.html#TNTAG13
• A similar little command makes Safari a whole lot more useful to developers, turning on the debug menu which contains lots of goodies: http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/faq.html#anchor14
• For those who like the command line, there are a lot of tools to access Mac OS specific stuff. I've had some fun with osascript, which can issue AppleScript commands to control apps.
• I had some trouble getting screen on remote machines and the Terminal to get along, until I changed the terminal type in the preferences to "rxvt".

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.

>>9

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!

• It does pre-load images, which is kind of useless when it's not done in a separate thread. Instead of slowing down to load the next image, it slows down to load the next-to-next image.
• Completely non-sensical interface behaviours: Option-arrows to pan? Plain arrows just makes the machine go "boing"? Clicking and dragging on the image moves the window instead of scrolling? Moving the the window is near impossible since it's glued to the screen edge? I'm sure the author likes this, but to me it just makes no sense whatsoever, and I just end up fighting with the program to make it do the simplest things.

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.