How cool is this? Thanks to Stephen Morley you can create the Mac OS X dock effect of icons expanding as you mouse over them using JavaScript. In the range of 130 lines of code, Stephen has crammed some serious image processing code. To fully appreciate this, you have to visit the demo page.

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There are times when the default unix tools installed on Mac OS X fall short. For instance, wget which is used to download files over the web using http, https, and ftp, is not available “out-of-the-box.”

Fink is one of several package managers available for Mac OS X that make it easy to download and install any number of software applications/tools.
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If you are ever in need of a simple (free) clipboard manager, I recommend you check out Jumpcut. This application works quietly in the background, saving each text copy into an internal buffer. When you want to paste information, click the icon on the menu bar and you’ll see a list of recently copied text, choose the one you like and you’re good to go…

Having the ability to copy/paste multiple lines of code, from multiple source files, has come in handy many times.

In the image below you can see the menu bar icon for Jumpcut, along with a list showing my four most recent entries copied into the clipboard.

One other really nice thing about Jumpcut is that it’s open source. If you are looking to learn about Cocoa development, specifically one which pokes around with some interesting system stuff, give Jumpcut a look.

For those who are new to working with Unix, I want to take a moment to introduce aliases. The simplest means to think of an alias is as a text shortcut, used inside a Terminal window, to represent one or more commands. On second thought, maybe that isn’t the simplest means to describe an alias. Let me try again using an example…

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One of the joys of working on a Unix system is the ability to tweak various system settings, even better when you can do so from a command-line shell (terminal). The means to get there on Mac OS X is the defaults command. Using defaults you can read, write and delete various application and system preferences.

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In general, the chime upon startup of my Macbook Pro is welcome. However, there are those times that I’d rather much rather boot up in silence, such as a meeting or other relatively quiet event. I’ve found myself in that situation more times that one would expect and needed a way to work around this. Applescript is one approach.

What follows are two short applescripts, one to mute the volume on shutdown/restart, and one to reset the volume at bootup. I run the first script when I want to shutdown my machine (in place of using the system menus to accomplish the same).

Click here to paste the code below into the Mac Script Editor

tell application "Finder"
  display dialog "What would you like to do?" buttons
      {"Shutdown", "Restart", "Cancel"}
      default button "Shutdown" with icon caution
  if button returned of result is "Shutdown" then
    set volume 0
    shut down
  else if button returned of result is "Restart" then
    set volume 0
    restart
  end if
end tell

I saved the code as an application with the name ShutdownScript, and set the Run Only option. I then placed this application in the Dock. When run, the dialog below is shown:

The code to set the volume at boot time is all of one line:

set volume 5

As before, I saved this as an application and this time I added it to the login items so it is run whenever I boot my system.

You can also change the icon that appears by replacing to caution to either note or stop. The results are shown below:

With these short scripts, you can now boot up in silence.