Updated Applications
Over a year ago in Update Expectations I noted three Mac applications that I had bought, which had seen little or no attention since their release. Today I noticed that one of these apps had seen a major new release. The application in question is AppZapper. The changelog on i use this notes the following:
- Free for all 1.x customers!
- Completely rewritten from the ground up for Snow Leopard
- Faster, smarter, easier to use zapping
- New ‘Hit List’ feature lets you browse and filter all of your apps
- New ‘My Apps’ feature lets you store license info for purchased applications
- Many overall improvements
This is great news. Although it would have been nice to see some evidence the application was still alive in the 3 years between updates.
Also worth noting is another app that I mentioned in the original post, Xtorrent has also seen some recent activity with the release of Xtorrent 2 in beta. I wonder if we’ll ever see any of those amazing new features promised for Disco.
Font Smoothing in Snow Leopard
Apple have touted Mac OS X Snow Leopard as having no new features. Whilst there are no new big ticket features there have been plenty of tweaks and refinements. One part that got this treatment was the font smoothing options in System Preferences. In Leopard this allowed you to enable font smoothing and choose between four different levels of smoothing. In Snow Leopard there’s now only a single option to enable the smoothing.
The problem with this change is that is appears to default to the light option. As previously identified in, “Consolas on Mac Update”, my preferred fixed width font Consolas doesn’t look nice with the light smoothing and I prefer medium. Fortunately you can still choose the medium option but setting the preference directly via the defaults command in the Terminal:
Exclude Directories From TextMate Side Bar for Faster Find in Project
I’m not much of a user of TextMate project files, generally preferring to just mate . in a directory. This works great until the directory or one under it contains large, irrelevant files like log files or database dumps. Its at this point you start encounter massive slow downs in the otherwise very useful ‘Find in Project…’ function. The slow downs turn into crashes if the files are big enough as this results in TextMate atttempting to grab vast amounts of memory. Eventually the OS tells it to, “bugger off, 1Gb is all I can give you”, or something along those lines.
A common solution, particularly when working on Rails projects is to create a shell alias that just invokes mate with the directories of interest. This works ok but given I’m working on a mix of project types (Pylons, Rails, Radiant) I wanted a solution that did the reverse: Choose everything except what I want to exclude. Informed by an answer to a question on Stack Overflow I came up with this:
As the comments in the script note I have this in a file called ‘ate’ in ~/Local/bin, which is in my PATH. I can now happily go to any directory, type ate and have it ignore that list of directories.
Bash Git Completion with Mac Ports
Git comes with bash completion support which comes in handy for completing branch names and things like that. To get this support when installing git via Mac Ports you must add the bash_completion variant. You’ll also want to install the bash_completion port. After that you need to add the following to your ~/.bashrc file:
if [ -f /opt/local/etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /opt/local/etc/bash_completion
fi
For reference I have the folloowing Git related config in my .bashrc:
Consolas on Mac Update
Today I followed my own directions on installing Consolas on my Mac Pro. The original directions were put together when installing it on my Mac Book. The downloaded disk image had a different volume name, as did the meta package. So the the command I used to launch the font installer was:
open "/Volumes/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0/Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.0.mpkg/Contents/Packages/OpenXML_all_fonts.pkg"
After the installer ran I went about making it the default font in Terminal. After doing so and setting it the same as it was on my Mac Book (13pt, antialiasing on) it looked terrible on the Mac Pro. Compare the two images below. I was after the latter.
After a little bit of confusion I decided to check the font smoothing style in the Appearance preference pane (in System Preferences). Turns out it was set to Automatic (best for main display) on the Mac Pro and Medium (best for Flat Panel) on the Mac Book. Changing to Medium and relaunching Terminal had it looking identical on both machines.