Showing posts with label Mac OS X. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mac OS X. Show all posts

Friday, October 18, 2013

Smash the Dashboard

Microsoft introduced widgets in Vista. These were tiny little programs which were supposed to provide you instant access to information. Minimize your windows and you could see your information right away. These digital tchotchkes were a bad idea: they hung around in your machine all the time, draining cpu cycles and resources while providing very little information. Also, it took some doing to get rid of them.

Truth be told, these seem to be borrowed from Mac OS's Dashboard. MacOS's Dashboard widgets and apps have the same idea. They sit generally unseen on the Dashboard and present themselves when you CTRL + LEFT ARROW from your desktop. These were meant to be cute and impressive. Tchotchkes  nonetheless. And just as useless, and just as terrible an idea.

I usually find the Dashboard to be more a nuisance than an aid. CTRL + LEFT ARROW when editing a document, and boom, paradigm shift to a screen that serves very little purpose other than to flummox and annoy. No thanks!

So here's how you disable it in Mac OS X:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
killall Dock


source: http://www.macworld.com/article/1046236/disabledashboard.html

to turn it back on (why? Seriously, why would you?), do
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean NO
killall Dock


Hasta la vista, Dock!

Friday, September 28, 2012

Getting Pinch-Zoom to work with Firefox in MacOS X

Just installed Firefox on Mac OS X Lion and realized that pinch zoom wasn't working. The Magic Trackpad is supported otherwise (swipe left for back, swipe right for next). Google solved the problem:

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/795269

You can restore the zoom feature by changing the values of the related prefs on the about:config page.
  • browser.gesture.pinch.in -> cmd_fullZoomReduce
  • browser.gesture.pinch.in.shift -> cmd_fullZoomReset
  • browser.gesture.pinch.out -> cmd_fullZoomEnlarge
  • browser.gesture.pinch.out.shift -> cmd_fullZoomReset
After this pinch-zoom started working, however, i found that it was a little jittery. The following options fixed this: