Jul
2005
Got my new iMac at last. It’s nice. Very nice. But it’s also meant several days setting everything up as it is on my PowerBook - well, perhaps it wouldn’t have been several days if I hadn’t kept getting side-tracked by some of the great new features in Tiger (and some inevitable spring cleaning of the stuff copied over)!
I think I’m suffering from install fatigue …
The only complaint I’ve got so far is that the screen is too bright at night. I’m one of those people who likes soft lighting, and even with the screen brightness on it’s lowest, after a while it can start to feel like it’s frying my eyeballs.
After a search on Google.com, I managed to find [DarkAdapted-> www.adpartnership.net/DarkAdapted/], a free application designed for home astronomers. The idea is to darken the screen so that your eye doesn’t have to re-ajust having adapted to looking through your telescope into the dark sky. It’s fully configurable in terms of gamma and colour, but I just have it set to 75% brightness, and launch it when night comes around.
Works perfectly except that it’s another app in the dock (that’s another gripe actually — the dock should be able to contain spring-loaded “drawers” for groups of apps. Mine is particularly crowded because I have it up the right-hand side of the screen where I’ve always been used to navigating, but at least it’s longer now than on my PowerBook!). So when I get around to it, I think I’ll create a new darker display profile and see if I can use [AppleScript ->http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/applescript/] for a one-click profile change. If you do it first, let me know! 
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July 14th, 2005 at 9:40 am
Have you tried going to System Preferences>Displays>Color and calibrating the highlighted display profile? If the selected profile is “Color LCD” then you definitely should calibrate it by clicking on the “Calibrate” button. If all you need is to control the brightness level I recommend you don’t select “Expert Mode” when calibrating. Simply follow the steps and make sure you choose 2.2 Television Gamma instead of 1.8 Standard Gamma.
Or you can choose the expert mode if you want to tweak it a bit more.
July 14th, 2005 at 10:11 am
Yes thanks, I’m quite familar with that having created several profiles for the Power Computing PowerCenterPro I used for years (one of the very, very last made after Apple pulled the plug, and the only one shipped to Malaysia!).
The iMac has it’s own display profile, “iMac” and my first recourse was to simply make a clone but with gamma set at 2.2 using the 9300 cool blue whitepoint. But opening the prefs, clicking displays, clicking color, selecting the profile and closing prefs again twice a day is more work than I want!
July 14th, 2005 at 10:29 am
Of course the dock can have groups of apps. Just drag your Applications folder to the dock, or create a special folder somwhere with aliases to the apps you want and then drag that to the dock.
July 14th, 2005 at 1:24 pm
Hi!
I’m not sure if you know, but there is a way to create a kind of ghetto “spring-loaded” drawer. I’m sure it’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but its a way to “group” icons and add a cool icon to your dock. Here’s how you do it:
1. Make a new folder, say, Graphics Applications.
2. Create an alias of the applications you want sorted. Be sure to remove the “alias” portion of the name at some point.
3. Move all the aliases you created into the folder.
4. An optional step, but a fun way to add a new, funky icon - create or visit a site with icons available and change the folder icon to a customized one. Could be something fun or something useful to help recognize the folder quicker. My GF, for example, has Boba Fett as her “Graphics Apps” icon.
5. Drag the folder onto the Dock above the trash can (or above the “link” if you still have it there…)
Now, if you click and hold the folder, you’ll get a pop up with the aliases listed. You can then click on those and launch the application.
Of course, the main drawback is that you can’t place a folder above the “line” (say, near the Finder icon), but there may be a hack out there which may allow it??
As for your iMac, give it a year, and the brightness will drop. My ACD did.
July 15th, 2005 at 1:23 am
As a partial solution for too many items in my Dock, I make a folder and place aliases of various apps in it, and add the folder to the Dock. I use different custom icons on the folders so that I can tell them apart. For example, the folder that holds my eight different browsers has an icon of one of the browsers.
July 15th, 2005 at 2:51 am
Thanks for your helpful suggestions, guys.
I used to set up folders with aliases in the Apple menu (OS 9) to launch apps but whenever I tried this with the dock in OS X it wouldn’t let me add the folder. I tried it again last week when I got the iMac with Tiger, wondering if it was now possible (my last attempt was in Panther), and got the same result.
But now I know why.
Jack has supplied the vital bit of information I was unaware of — you can only add stuff below the separator line! I’ve always wondered what that was for … doh!
I’ve just quickly tested it and obviously it worked, so when I get around to it, I’ll find some nice icons and set it up properly.
Now here’s a few other gripes:
1. The fact that apps can’t be assigned to function keys as they could in OS 9 without installing third party software. Actually, I think you should be able to assign your own global key combos for this, and not have user created keyboard shortcuts limited for use within apps as at present.
2. In the finder “Go” menu, mousing over “Applications” and “Utilities” should create a drop-down list of the folder contents, giving the option of clicking to open the folder, or mousing down to open a specific app.
3. I wish disks could be resized and partitioned without erasing them. It seems a bit daft to me that on getting a new computer, before I can do anything else I have to erase and re-install the OS. Even worse is the thought that if I ever need to change anything I have to erase the entire disk again.
But for all my complaining, I loved Panther, and Tiger is superb!
July 15th, 2005 at 3:39 am
btw.. on my 2 year old imac, the function keys above the number pad control the brightness. They aren’t labeled, but just push them and see what happens. If they work, you won’t need that other app. Good luck.
July 15th, 2005 at 5:36 am
Thanks, Rob. F14 & F15 control the brighness on the iMac, F1 & F2 on the PowerBook. But even with brightness set at it’s lowest, my iMac is too bright for me in dim lighting conditions.
BTW Jack, I don’t know what ACD stands for, but as I understand it all displays dim over time, and especially LCD screens. There’s actually some free software you can use to automatically compensate for the drop-off, but I can’t recall the name or link. Still, I’m sure you can locate it with a bit of searching.