Mac Posts

This article posted to C Net got me to thinking. In the article, they talk about vaguely defined “benchmarks” showing that Windows XP with the beta of Service Pack 3 outperformed Windows Vista with Service Pack 1. I can only say one thing: duh. Quite frankly, I would have been more surprised if Vista had outperformed XP. This really is an apples and oranges comparison because Vista is a newer and more complex operating system. And I’m not exactly a Microsoft fanboy, either - I’m typing this on a Mac, using a Java journal client. Of course it is going to run slower on the same equipment than an operating system that was released six years ago. I’m sure Windows 98SE will beat the pants off of XP on the same equipment, too. Leopard, released a few months ago, won’t even run on hardware circa when OS X first came out and will almost certainly run slower on machines that were top of the line when Tiger was released. Hey, while we’re at it, we could compare Doom to UT3 to see which runs faster! If they wanted to do a more fair comparison, they would have compared them on different machines - top of the line machines when their respective operating systems were released, using adjusted benchmarks. Being that machines are much faster now than they were in 2001, I wager that the difference between them would be a lot less.

There’s been a good bit of debate about Leopard’s new translucent menu bar. For me, it doesn’t cause many issues. However, some of my coworkers despise it and, to be fair, I can see the arguments that many of the people who dislike it have: it doesn’t add anything to the OS and actually makes it more difficult to read the text. Well, here’s a litle tweak that will set the menu bar back to a white background. In the terminal, you can use the following command to change the default appearance of the bar: sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.appledowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1 Restart your Mac, and voila! White menu bar! Changed your mind? Set it back: sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' Restart your Mac and your menu bar is back to being translucent.

So it’s been awhile since I’ve written. In that time, my girlfriend has moved in here with me in Huntsville and, as always, dealnews has kept me very busy. However, it has not prevented me from occasionally trying my hand at something new. A week or so ago I decided that I was going to learn Python. However, as part of my nature, I simply can’t “learn” a language without having a purpose. For instance, I have never been able to simply read a book on programming - I needed a reason. So I’ve been giving myself reasons to do little tasks here and there in Python. One of them came to me just today. I have recently moved all of my development at dealnews from the PC to a Macbook. I’ve never been an OS-bigot - always use the right tool for the job, and the Mac - which in many ways is just Unix with pretty make-up - is the perfect platform. However, I still use many of the peripherals I purchased for my PC, including my Microsoft Natural Egronomic Keyboard that I adore. At home, I still use a PC (until I can afford a new Mac Pro), albeit with the same keyboard. One of the things I really love about the keyboard is that it has various buttons that are just … buttons. They can be mapped to do anything you want them to. There are five multi-function buttons at the top that can be mapped to run programs. So I’m sitting here thinking, “self” (because that is what I call myself), “why not write a little program to run on the click of that button and go to the next or previous track in iTunes, so that changing the music doesn’t involve any more effort out of my busy programming day than hitting an additional keystroke”. But, it must work both at home and at work, meaning that it must run in Windows and Mac. Enter Python I knew from previous experimenting in .NET that iTunes exposes a COM object on Windows. With that in mind, I quickly found this page that described almost exactly what I wanted to do in Windows. So that left the Macintosh. After an hour or so of digging on Apple’s website, I found this page that described how to access the COM on the Mac - and wouldn’t you know, the functions are slightly different. After that, it was pretty easy: import sys from optparse import OptionParser platform = sys.platform if platform == "win32": import win32com.client iTunes = win32com.client.gencache.EnsureDispatch("iTunes.Application") if platform == "darwin": from Foundation import * from ScriptingBridge import * iTunes = SBApplication.applicationWithBundleIdentifier_("com.apple.iTunes") def previousTrack(): if platform == "win32": iTunes.PreviousTrack() if platform == "darwin": iTunes.previousTrack() def nextTrack(): if platform == "win32": iTunes.NextTrack() if platform == "darwin": iTunes.nextTrack() def main(): parser = OptionParser() parser.add_option("-n", "--next-track", action="store_true", dest="next") parser.add_option("-p", "--prev-track", action="store_true", dest="prev") (options, args) = parser.parse_args() if options.next == True: nextTrack() if options.prev == True: previousTrack() if __name__ == "__main__": main() So yeah. It’s kind of code monkeyed together, but not bad for someone who’s only been doing Python for a week in the evenings. Passing either a -n or -p to the script causes it to command iTunes to go forward or back. Of note, to work on Windows, it does need the COM components from the Python for Windows extensions. I’m gonna expand this script some more in the future, but for now it does what I need.