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:
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.
Seeking Application Ideas
Ever since the now very quiet drunkenbatman hosted the Evening at Adler and Gus Mueller posted, “How to become an independent programmer in just 1068 days”, its has been a goal of mine to one day live the indie Mac developer dream.
Over the years I’ve dabbled in Mac OS X development but have struggled to find the time in between a full time job and also having a life to be able to see something through from start to finish. I’m convinced the ideas are sound because frequently others eventually release similar products. My last endevour was for a better archiver than that provided by the Finder. It was to be dead simple, taking interface cues from things like AppZapper. I discovered a little while ago that the fine folks at Apimac had created Compress Files, which implemented my ideas and more.
Frustrated by this lack of time I decided to do something about it (after a small helping of procrastination). Last week I successfully negotiated a reduction to 4 days per week at my day job, with the fifth day allocated to Mac development. The first day of my new job is Mon Feb 11, 2008. However I find myself with a bit of a problem, I don’t have any current projects to actually work on. Heeding the advice in Gus’ post for Lesson #1 I’m seeking ideas from the Mac using community for a small application that I can use to get started. So if you got an idea for a small application that you don’t mind sharing feel free to post a comment and let me know, it might be just what I’m looking for.