Ahunter sticks toe into brave new world...OS X

Thanks for the tip AHunter. Sharity did the trick. I wonder if there is a way to set up the NT server so X can see it without help from any third party softwares.

I must admit, the more explore the more I like Mac OS X. There is plenty of good features in here. I don’t care for the dock, yet, though. It is going to take some time for it to grow on me.

There is a problem, that I haven’t gone about fixing yet. The CD Burner, or maybe it is the SCSCI card. One of the two, causes panics. But, it is easy enough to avoid the panic. If there is no disc in there, panic averted. It took me a day of a bunch of crashes before I realized that it wouldn’t crash if the dumb disc wasn’t in there.
Oh well. I guess I just need the proper driver, but since this is just a machine I am borrowing for a while, and I won’t need to do any burning. I will put that in the back of my list as tasks. (I avoid the bad news that the driver is not available yet.)

I have been trying to buy Learning Carbon by OReily and Associates. None of the stores around here have it. I guess I will have to buy it online, but I don’t want to wait for it to ship. Oh well.

pat

A Mac is definitely going to be my next computer.

Yesterday, I finally got the big box down to my apartment. Hooked it up, plugged it in and hit the [POWER] button. 33 MHz. Color. Back hardware. Thousands of dollars in 1993; $130 on eBay. There is no substitute.

Black hardware. Another one of my typos.

X-Assist! X-Assist! I love this thing!

X-Assist is a freeware app that puts an application menu where it belongs except with a user-configurable hierarchical menu plus Control Panels (in other words, it is the restoration of the Apple Menu and the Application Menu).

I should mention that my conventional launcher is OtherMenu. In other words, nothing gets to take up screen real estate in order to serve as an application launcher.

That Dock (already minimized to its smallest possible size and ignored entirely on a daily basis) is history.

Yesss! What’s not up, Dock? Heh heh…easier than I thought…

To go Dockless in OS X, you need the following functions accomplished by other means:

€ An application launcher. There are already myriads of launchers available for Mac OS X, and the Dock makes a miserable launcher anyhow. I use the above-mentioned X-Assist (available at VersionTracker) and I use an alias to my OtherMenu folder from Mac OS 9 as my X-Assist Items folder, so I have the identical menu of applications in both operating systems. Other people prefer something that looks and feels more like Apple’s classical Launcher. A popular choice is Drop Drawers. (No accounting for taste. I don’t want anything cluttering up my screen when not in use). A popular choice is Drop Drawers.

€ An application switcher. A means of switching between open applications and seeing at a glance what applications are running. Again, there are many choices and, again, I’m using X-Assist for that as well. X-Assist is amost exactly like the classical Applications menu except that it contains a user-configurable launching menu within it, so it accomplishes both tasks to my distinct satisfaction.

€ Access to the trash. Yeah, the bloody trash resides by default in the Dock. Well, you can put anything INTO the trash with a simple Command-Delete keystroke, whether you can see it or not. Or, if you prefer the thrill of dragging something onto the Trash icon, the freeware item TinkerTool (once again available at VersionTracker) lets you put the Trash on the Desktop where it belongs. Unfortunately, the Trash-on-the-Desktop doesn’t OPEN when you double-click it; only the Trash-in-the-Dock will open properly on request. And if you can’t open it, you can’t pull something OUT of it if you change your mind, see? So what you do is, you make a folder and give it a distinctive name like “This is X Trash, dummy” and drag it into the trash, then you reboot in Mac OS 9 (or 8 or 7 or whatever, any Mac OS you use that ain’t X). Do a find in Sherlock (or Find File if you are using elderly Mac software) for the distinctively named folder you trashed, and you’ll find that it is located in an invisible folder named “.Trash” (notice the period). Use any of the many available tools that let you change a folder’s characteristics from invisible to visible. (I used DeskZap, a System 6 era Disk Accessory believe it or not.) Make “.Trash” visible. Go to the surrounding folder (it bears your logon name and resides in the Users folder) and make an alias to the now-visible folder “.Trash”. Name the alias “Trash”. Put it somewhere you can find easily when you reboot into X. Reboot into X. Place alias you created on your Mac OS X desktop. If you have trash in the trash can, you can double-click the Trash alias and it opens. To throw away the first item, you’ll need to use Command-Delete, but if the trash is occupied by at least one item, you can drag things into the Trash alias as well.

€ Nuking the Dock. Boot into Mac OS 9 (or 8, etc). Double-click the Mac OS X bootup volume and drill your way down to System/Library/Core Services and there you will find a folder named Dock.app (Mac OS X “Cocoa” applications may look like folders under classical pre-X versions of Mac OS) or else an application named Dock (Mac OS 9.1 only and depending on your settings). Either way, drag it out of Core Services and put it somewhere in case you ever want it back. Reboot into Mac OS X. No dock!

Way cool, AHunter3.
X-Assist is a great way to get a list of running apps, maybe I could learn to love the dock, but I certainly like the X-Assist method better.
One questoin, though. When you remove the dock does Open Apple-Tap to switch through apps still work?
That is a Windows feature I am glad Apple picked up and used. I might leave the dock there, just to have a way to loop through the open applications.

pat

Nope, open apple-tab doesn’t work without the dock turned on.

Another way to nuke the Dock. Go into terminal mode and move Dock.app to another location. You will have to use sudo to move or change the name of the Dock. Just another way to move it, without logging into classic.

sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app Dock.app

This will move Dock.app to whatever folder you happen to be in.

pat

In my case, I’m first and foremost a Filemaker geek, and I need Command-Tab to cycle forward through records (in Browse Mode) or layouts (in Layout Mode) so I’ve long since disabled the Application Switcher in Mac OS 8.6 and 9, and I’m exquisitely happy to have disabled it in Mac OS X as an unintended side-effect of nuking the Dock.

If you wanted a Dockless existence with Command-Tab still cycling through your running apps, I’d keep an eye out for QuicKeys native for X, which will be worth having for a variety of reasons once it is released, and simply set up Command-Tab to cycle through applications as a global macro.

There’s a nice little piece of software called L2CacheConfig that gives you full use of your processor under MacOS X. I’m getting substantial speed increases since acquiring it!

http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=9077

If you have a G3 or G4 processor, install this sucker posthaste and turn speculation ON. It feels dramatically faster. Menus just pop down without that 2-second delay. Launch time seems quicker too.

(Speculation is not advised for earlier processors, and I did not notice any appreciable speed increase until I enabled speculation on my G3 PowerBook)