Rael Dornfest, co-author of Mac OS X Panther Hacks, has selected these three hacks from the book for your sampling pleasure. The first two detail how to find anyone in your Address Book who has an Amazon Wish List, and how to build a GUI to your Unix scripts with a bit of Perl/Python; the third is fun.
Hacking Mac OS X Panther
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I found this kind of funny. It would be a good idea however for someone who doesn’t want to shell out the few dollars to get a rotating platform… However, I think that he could of made it a bit more interesting by showing an ‘advanced’ version of it. Maybe something where the inners were stripped down and the iSight was embedded flush, with a flat front finish to it. Of course this is for little hacks, but it’s always fun to see what is possible. I may do this with an old fan as well, except… better. I may actually take a look at this book sometime, I dug the varied subjects included in the examples.
Needed some Lego Mindstormers magic, so the remote user could stop/start the oscillation.
I was just reading the book and came across a hack #7 regarding the Fast User Switching menu. Eugenia immediately came to mind. Now a name like “Eugenia Loli-Queru” doesn’t have to take up a large portion of the menu bar.
http://winswitch.wincent.com/
Thanks for the tip. I am getting a powerbook soon and will probably set that software up. Even better because it’s free.
Man, that is one awesome utility! I followed your link, downloaded and installed the WinSwitch utility and now I have about an inch and a half of reclaimed space on my menu bar! Very good!
For me, just that one hack would have justified buying the book. I will have to go and check out the rest of the book now!
Very well researched document. I’m not much into hacking myself [I’m not proud of it, it’s just not something I spend a lot of time worrying about] but it seems to me that with the keynote at WWDC in mind, Automator would take care of this a lot easier, or at least of some of the tasks.
I guess the Automator will be several gazillion miles beneath the dignity of the UNIX virtuoso who can no doubt resolve the Meaning of Life through an uberlevel vi script.
For the technically superficial such as yours truly, the Automator will come in quite handy indeed.
The only thing that I really care about is that the Mac is alive and offers something for the nerd and the n00b alike. That has to be a good thing.
Champagne on me when Apple reaches 5% market share again.
Competition drives innovation.