bruceb

Today I snagged the 3.1 patch from a mirror site and applied it, just in case there are things I want to do by way of administrivia or whatever before my account runs out in June, then moved WoW onto my external "stay there until I put you on CDs or something" drive. Since then I've spent almost all day experimenting with rearrangements of my working tools: what goes on the dock, what just goes into Overflow, reactivating Spaces and seeing what conceptual categories seem satisfying, and so on.

I realized that I'd sacrificed a fair amount so as to free resources for WoW's increasing overhead. With that off my plate as a consideration, I am freshly impressed by just how much this system can do without fuss, and reinforced in my sense that I did make a good choice last year when I settled on it.

One of my ongoing tasks right now is to identify the things that I never do actually use and get them cleared out. I'm aiming for a situation where more and more of the choices I face when I look at bookshelves, closets, kitchen cupboards, or hard drives are choices I know I've liked or have serious plans to try out. Google's OSX desktop search-and-launching utility turns out to help me with that.

I've used Quicksilver for years - I think it was still in a single-digit beta release when I first tried it out, or at least a much smaller two-digit number than is now the case. And it does a fine job with program launching and the accompanying search for data and apps I may be wishing to use. But as time goes by, it seems like it's been adding more and more features I have no use for and often don't understand at all, and when I'm prone to being flustered or frustrated, that's bad news. In a low-keyed sort of way I've been on the lookout for something that might do just the stuff I want to do in that regard.

Google Desktop for Mac turns out to be what I'm looking for. It keeps an updated index of the volumes I mark for it to track, and brings up a search-and-launch window that's set up well for me, with large type and a very wide entry window. (Quicksilver has a bunch of options for presentation, but none of them suit me so well.) It's pretty quick to come up, quick to interpret my search, and then launches something and/or goes away itself without a fuss.

And that's all it does.

So it's suiting me very well.

Are there utilities that let you adjust the lists of things to be synced without actually having the docked unit currently connected?

I recently got a new keyboard, one of Apple's aluminum ones, and love it. No problems there. I also got one of their current Mighty Mouse units, and I am having problems with it. In particular, it does not reliably register a single Secondary Button click (as assigned in Sys. Pref.) as a right click in WoW. Has anyone else had that problem? Anyone got suggestions for a fix? I've actually gone back to my two-button Logitech, at least for the moment, while looking around for more info.

Now this is nifty in the software department. Moody lets you tag music by color out of a 4x4 grid and then get a playlist of tracks tagged with that color, or any of those colors if you select several.

The underlying idea is that the 16 slots in the grid have whatever meaning you want to give them - they suggest sad to happy on the horizontal axis, and calm to intense on the vertical, but the designations are all in your hands. So it's a device for assembling a set of thematic playlists and calling them up again, simply.

Nifty!

I haven't had any luck turning up an answer on my own, and may as well confess to ignorance.

It looks to me like the browser bar menu (which I use a lot) in both Firefox 2 and 3 is significantly larger than its counterpart in Safari. Is this just me not being able to judge size reliably? If it is larger as I think, is there anything that can be done to shrink it? It is one of the things that always ends up driving me back to Safari despite stuff like Adblocker.

Here's Safari first, then stock Firefox 2:




The Firefox font seems awkward to me, and harder to read after a while. That's what I'd like to change.