Sunday, August 25, 2002

Command-tab again I take back half of my complaint about command-tab. It still sucks that Apple removed the ability to override it, but they fixed it so that it toggles between the most recently active applications. That's exactly how I wanted it to work. 12:48:43 PM    comment New XPath, XSLT and XQuery Drafts New XPath, XSLT and XQuery drafts. The XSLT, XPath and XQuery working groups have put out a great deal of new work, including updated XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XPath and XQuery Functions and Operators, XQuery 1.0, XPath and XQuery Data Model, XPath and XQuery Formal Semantics, XQuery Use Cases and more. [xmlhack] Yay, a new mountain of specs from the W3C. 11:50:36 AM    comment Command-tab Argh, in Mac OS X 10.2 Apple made it so that you can't override the command-tab functionality. The way it works by default just sucks and the app I was using doesn't work anymore with that keystroke. The author is saying that Apple made this change to prevent it. Getting my fingers to adjust to using option-tab is driving me crazy. 11:22:09 AM    comment Sherlock URLs When I started playing with Sherlock I quickly realized that it would be very handy to be able to open it to a particular channel automatically. For instance I think the dictionary channel is very useful and would like to be able to have a hot key associated with it. You can do this using sherlock URLs. Sherlock defines its own URL schema (sherlock:) that the Finder can use to open it to a particular channel. You can even specify the query to use. The URLs look like sherlock://com.apple.dictionary and if I wanted to search for a definition on the term "browser" I can do sherlock://com.apple.dictionary?query=browser. Here are the names for the default channels. AppleCare - com.apple.applecare Dictionary - com.apple.dictionary eBay - com.apple.ebay Flights - com.apple.flights Internet - com.apple.internet Movies - com.apple.movies Pictures - com.apple.pictures Stocks - com.apple.stockQuotes Translation - com.apple.translation Yellow Pages com.apple.yellowPages For most channels adding query="terms" to the URL will work to perform the search, but for others it's different. For instance on translation to set the Original Text field you use sherlock://com.apple.translation?source=hello. Using zip, usually works where an address is involved. I'm not sure what the rest are yet. These URLs work from within the Finder and from Internet Explorer, unfortunately Omniweb uses its own URL parser and complains that it doesn't understand the scheme. 11:14:54 AM    comment Apple Ships W3C XQuery In of all places, as part of Sherlock. It isn't exactly clear to me why they chose to use XQuery for this, but it's there. You can read about it in the documentation for building Sherlock channels. The odd thing, at least in their examples, they don't even really use it as an XML query language. 10:17:09 AM    comment Metal look on Mac OS X Apps Another new thing Apple brought along with Jaguar is a checkbox in Interface Builder to enable the use of the metal look and feel in custom apps. This means you can build your own apps to look like Apple's iApps. I've personally always been a little lukewarm to the whole metal look thing, but it's kind of interesting to play with. Now since they made this a simple checkbox in Interface Builder, you can also get rid of the metal look in apps or add it to those that didn't have it before. Here's a screen showing the new Addressbook and Sherlock in both normal look and metal look. Addressbook usually has the metal look, and sherlock now doesn't (thought it used to before they made it a Cocoa app). I'm not sure how Apple chooses which app gets which look. Because of the way Mac OS X apps are built you can try to alter any Cocoa app to do this. If you try it, definitely make a copy first and change the copy. This is really a harmless change, but I'm not sure how Apple's updater will work if you change the apps. You just need to find the nib file for the window you want to change, open it in Interface Builder click on the title bar of the window and then either check or uncheck "Textured Window". Save the nib and load the App and it should use/not use the metal look. To find the nib, you have to open the bundle for the application by using the finder and then choosing "Show Package Contents". The nibs are under Contents/Resources/{language}.lproj, where language is the language you want to change. You might need to open a few nibs to find the one that contains the main window for the app. Is this useful? Probably not, but I didn't like the fact that Apple made the new calculator have the metal look so I changed it. So far, the only App I tried this on that didn't work was Omniweb. 10:03:59 AM    comment Mac OS X 10.2 - Jaguar I wasn't planning on picking up Jaguar right away, but I just couldn't resist. Installation went without a hitch and the performance improvement is incredible. The added features are nice too, but it's mostly the little things that are better in this release. It's funny, I thought OS X was pretty polished already, at least visually anyway, but Jaguar has improved it even more. The slightly altered look of the aqua elements is a nice improvement, not a huge change, but nice anyway. The one new app that I'm really interested in is Sherlock. Not because of what it does, but because of what it could do. I was never that interested in Watson because it's based around a more complex plugin architecture for its apps. Sherlock is much different in the way it works. It's more like a web browser where the UI is a native GUI instead of HTML forms. Integration logic comes from Javascript and of all things, W3C XQuery. It will take a while to see the potential, but Sherlock is a much more interesting App then most people think. 9:47:07 AM    comment

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