Dock Detox & 10.3
I'm not a big fan of haxies anymore, or crazy-ass UI enhancements that slow everything down. I generally know what I want to do, and in general (especially with the advent of OSX) the computer works slower than myself, so anything that causes a regression better be making it up in my productivity in a big way.
So far, that pretty much just means MenuMeters, VirtualDesktop, & DockDetox. There was an iChat haxie I was using before the advent of iChatAV so I could type more than one line (seriously, look at that and tell me that UI hasn't gotten wholly messed up at Apple), but that's about it.
VirtualDesktop is pretty much good to go, with the caveat that it really has some Expose problems going on, but they seem to be mostly cosmetic. I have some other issues with this product, which I used to be heavily involved in (um, my name is prolly still in the credits). Good people (it's one of the few shareware programs I've actually purchased), just were going in a direction where I thought it wasn't worth the effort. Pretty much everything I thought was going to happen has happened, which I'm sure they aware of. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the Expose issue, or what the technical details are. I'm hoping they'll just be able to recognize that expose has been invoked, and stop it's own window views, and if you select a window that isn't on the current Desktop it will automatically switch you over to it.
MenuMeters works, but isn't really optimized for 10.3 yet, and has to be manually started. I love this app though, especially since the code is available.
The lack of DockDetox is really getting to me. I just love this app, especially in 10.3 where there seems to be some sort of UI-priority going on that can make a dock bounce really hiccup what you're doing. Looks like it's going to be december. There are few things I hate more than a bouncing dock icon, it's just plain stupid. Why there are simply badges one can apply (stop sign for error, exclamation point for needing your attention, etc) is beyond me. I hate the fact that I have to install the whole APE haxie, but it's worth it just for this one piece of software.
Posted by drunkenbatmanNovember 20, 2003, at 01:36 PM
