Putting up the tree

Getting a head start on the Christmas decorations this year. 

Putting up the Christmas tree has always been something I look forward to every year. This year however, is the first time I'm putting up the Christmas tree together with my wife. We decided to keep things simple, and I think it looks pretty good.

Now that the tree is up, what's left is to fill up the empty space under the tree!

Let it Snjor

Christmas is just around the corner, and what better way to bring some festive cheer to your desktop than having it snow!

Snjor, that's Icelandic for snow, lets you do just that. Once it's running, little white blobs will slowly, almost hynotically, fall across your desktop. You set the snow to lazily drift about on your screen or wreck havoc by bringing down a blizzard.

Leopard's Stacks - here's how to make it better

One of Leopard’s new features is Stacks. Stacks let you place any folder into the Dock and clicking on it will spring the contents of the folder in a Grid or a Fan. It’s quite visually pleasing, but it’s gotten some flack because you can’t assign an icon to a Stack. Instead, the icon would be of the latest file in the folder. And that makes it rather difficult to distinguish between different Stacks.

So... how do I tell which Stack is my Downloads folder?

Thanks to Optica Optima, my Stacks now look like this.

Visually distinct Stacks, and the translucency is very attractive.

Here's how we do it. Before we proceed, we should define the Sort behaviour of the Stacks. So right click (or command click) on the Stack, and sort by date modified.

Get the icons from this link. The page is in Japanese, but you shouldn’t have any problem finding the link to download the icons.

Choose the icon we want, and place it into the Downloads directory. In the example below I’ve renamed the icon to download_icon. Since we want the latest item to be displayed first in a Stack, we’re going to use the Unix touch command to set the modification date to somewhere in the future. So fire up Terminal, and enter the following commands.

cd Downloads

touch –mt 202001010101.01 download_icon

This will change the modified date of the download_icon to the year 2020, January 1^st, 1:01:01 am.

You can do this for other Stacks in the same manner.

I found out about this from Daring Fireball.

Update:

There's a second set of icons for Stacks. And this time, the icon's modified dates have already been set to the year 2010. So all you need to do is to sort the Stacks by modified date, and forget about the Terminal.

All the icons can be downloaded from optima-optica.

WriteRoom for distraction free writing

The month of NaNoWriMo is upon us, and budding writers around the world are prepping themselves to complete a novel within a month. The pace is fast, the enthusiasm is furious, and the writer has to be ready not to drift from the goal.

To do all that, all forms of distractions must be eliminated, and that's where WriteRoom shines. WriteRoom's tag is "Distraction free writing" and that's what you get. At first launch WriteRoom goes into fullscreen mode and all you get is a blinking green cursor and a black, empty background. No desktop, no browser, no email clients in sight. Just you and your text. It can't get any simpler than that.

WriteRoom in fullscreen mode.

WriteRoom in window mode.

There is a free version of WriteRoom and that was the version that I used all the while. I thought it served my needs - that's until I tried the shareware version. In my opinion, a great application is an application that caters to needs that I didn't even know I needed. The shareware version provides many more customisation and tweaks that really helps to improve the transition of your thoughts onto the screen.

Just take a look at the customisations you can make to WriteRoom. I really like the "typewriter scrolling" option so your focus is always on the middle of the screen while the rest of the text scrolls upwards. You could also change the text and background colours but I like the retro green text on black background theme. It brings be back to the days when I first set my eyes on my first PC.


You can also use WriteRoom from other applications. There's an "Edit in WriteRoom" which is an Input Manager plugin. I'm not sure if this still works in Leopard since I've read Leopard doesn't support Input Managers any more. But if you're on Tiger, installing this Input Manager will add an "Edit in WriteRoom" menu item into the Edit menu of other applications. So if you're blogging in Safari, you can click the "Edit in WriteRoom" menu item, the text in the current web form will be transfered into WriteRoom for "distraction free writing". And when you're done, just save and close WriteRoom and the text you edited will be copied back to Safari. Pretty neat! Since this feature is not officially supported in Leopard, I can still use the Services menu. WriteRoom lets me copy text and use the Services menu to send the text to WriteRoom for editing. And when I'm done, it's just a copy and paste action. Quick and easy.

I did notice one inconsistency. Whenever I change the font in the Preference, the existing text in the document does not reflect the new font. I had to restart WriteRoom before the new font is properly displayed. Other than that, WriteRoom works great for me.


I've written this review in hopes of getting a free WriteRoom license. Hopefully I'll get it, but even if I don't get it, I had a great time reviewing the application.