Keynote 2 Keynote

You’ve got a snazzy desktop picture, and a killer GeekTool stats/info display. But something is missing. Your dock just doesn’t jive with everything you’ve got setup. Not even setting the dock up to auto hide will please you. I was in that boat a few weeks ago, and now Mathew, the proud owner of a brand new MacBook is as well. Matt wrote me a quick email today asking for assistance.

I was wondering whether you’d ever come across a way to get the dock background to disappear/become transparent? I can’t seem to find an option anywhere and you seem to be the kinda guy who’d know such things!

Ask and you shall receive Matt :) I use an application created by Unsanity called ClearDock. ClearDock is free, easy, and available as a universal binary. Once ClearDock is installed it’s somewhat hidden. You can find it in the System Preferences and then under Application Enhancer.

At first glance you’ll notice that there are a few options that you can set. If all you care about is a transparent dock background then uncheck the Re-Color The Dock Background check box. That will give you a nice transparent dock like this screenshot. The other features that ClearDock offers are changing the color of the dock’s background, the dock’s border, and the color of the running application’s triangles. With a hint of creativity you can come up with a wild scheme like this :)

Hope this helped Matt!

Its getting late and I have to drive 400+ miles tomorrow so this’ll be a quickie :) After talking about trial software that comes with OS X I started thinking about Quicktime and what ‘going pro’ actually gets you. And to tell you the truth, I really had no clue what pro will give you other than being able to display videos in full screen. So I took a trip to Apple’s Quicktime Pro page to find out why I would want to ‘go pro’ and here’s the low down.

• Gives the ability to watch movies full screen.
• Pro allows you to save your favorite movie trailers on your computer.
• Easily create slideshows with a soundtrack
• Record video

Out of those 4 features the only one I could see myself doing on a regular basis is viewing video in full screen. So Quicktime Pro really isn’t for me. Not being able to watch Quicktime videos in full screen is sort of a bummer though. So I did a bit of digging around I found an easy workaround that scores big points in my book :)

Watching videos in full screen without Pro is actually quite easy with a simple AppleScript!

If you’ve never used an apple script before here’s some basic instructions. Open up the Script Editor.app found in your Applications directory. Copy and paste the following code into the Script Editor.app window.

tell application "QuickTime Player"
        present front movie scale screen
end tell

Now click

File > Save As…

and save it as an Application.

You’re all set! Now anytime that you are watching a video with the Quicktime Player simply run this application that you’ve made and you’ll instantly be watching videos in full screen :)

This works on my machine with Quicktime 7.1.5, your results may vary with other versions.

Yesterday I wrote up a simple review of GeekTool. Today I’m going to show you how to take advantage of its power and build a clean, custom, functional GeekTool setup. Usually when you hear anything about GeekTool you see a desktop that looks similar to one of these. While these setups might be useful in some situations, they aren’t what I would consider pretty. Prepare to get your hands dirty, we’re playing with code! (ok, ok… it won’t be hard, I just had to psych you out!)

Here’s a preview of what the following GeekTool scripts/commands will look like if you implement them all. Displayed in the screenshot is iTunes album art, iTunes track info, monthly calendar, internal ip addresses, external ip addresses, the wireless network you are connected to, time since you’ve restarted your computer, and cpu/memory statistics. You can easily pick and choose what info you’d like to display with GeekTool. Keep reading and I promise that you’ll want to use at least one of these GeekTool entires!

Before I start I’d like to thank everyone who’s code I’ve used. I’ve given you full credit by citing each script/command, if you are the author of a script and I mis-cited the source, let me know.

top -ocpu -FR -l2 -n20 | grep '^....[1234567890] ' | grep -v ' 0.0% ..:' | cut -c 1-24,33-42,64-77

uptime | awk '{print "UPTIME : " $3 " " $4 " " $5 " " }'; top -l 1 | awk '/PhysMem/ {print "RAM : " $8 " "}' ; top -l 2 | awk '/CPU usage/ && NR > 5 {print $6, $7=":", $8, $9="user ", $10, $11="sys ", $12, $13}'

sh /Users/neyoung/bin/airport.sh

#!/bin/sh
myvar1=`system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | grep -e "Current Wireless Network:" | awk '{print $4}'`
myvar2=`system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | grep -e "Wireless Channel:" | awk '{print $3}'`

echo "Airport : $myvar1 - $myvar2"

bash /Users/neyoung/bin/ipaddresses.bash

#! /bin/bash

myen0=`ifconfig en0 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'`

if [ "$myen0" != "" ]
then
    echo "Ethernet : $myen0"
else
    echo "Ethernet : INACTIVE"
fi

myen1=`ifconfig en1 | grep "inet " | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | awk '{print $2}'`

if [ "myen1" != "" ]
then
    echo "AirPort  : $myen1"
else
    echo "Airport  : INACTIVE"
fi

echo "External :" `curl --silent http://checkip.dyndns.org | awk '{print $6}' | cut -f 1 -d "<"`

cal | sed "s/^/ /;s/$/ /;s/ $(date +%e) / $(date +%e | sed 's/./#/g') /"

osascript /Users/neyoung/Pictures/iTunes Artwork/iTunesInfo.scpt

tell application "System Events"
	set powerCheck to ((application processes whose (name is equal to "iTunes")) count)
	if powerCheck = 0 then
		return ""
	end if
end tell
tell application "iTunes"
	try
		set playerstate to (get player state)
	end try
	if playerstate = paused then
		set trackPaused to " (paused)"
	else
		set trackPaused to ""
	end if
	if playerstate = stopped then
		return "Stopped"
	end if
	set trackID to the current track
	set trackName to the name of trackID
	set artistName to the artist of trackID
	set albumName to the album of trackID
	set totalData to "Track  : " & trackName & trackPaused & "
Artist : " & artistName & "
Album  : " & albumName
	return totalData
end tell

osascript /Users/neyoung/Pictures/iTunes Artwork/iTunesArtwork.scpt

file:///Users/neyoung/Pictures/iTunes%20Artwork/albumArt.tif

(* Set Defaults and Loctions *)

set iTunesArtworkFolder to ((path to home folder) as text) & "Pictures:iTunes Artwork:"
-- Artwork Folder

set DefaultArtwork to ((path to home folder) as text) & "Pictures:iTunes Artwork:Default:albumArt.tif"
-- When there's no artwork or iTunes isn't running. This is a transparent TIFF.

set DefaultFolder to ((path to home folder) as text) & "Pictures:iTunes Artwork:Default:"
-- Default Folder

set FromiTunesFolder to ((path to home folder) as text) & "Pictures:iTunes Artwork:From iTunes:"
-- Where iTunes saves the Artwork

set ArtworkFromiTunes to FromiTunesFolder & "albumArt.pict" as file specification
-- The Artwork from iTunes

set AlbumArtwork to (path to home folder) & "Pictures:iTunes Artwork:albumArt.tif" as string
-- The Album Artwork

set UnixAlbumArtwork to the quoted form of POSIX path of AlbumArtwork
-- Unix path to the Album Artwork


(* Check if iTunes is running. *)

tell application "System Events"
	if exists process "iTunes" then
		try
			
			(* Get Artwork From iTunes *)
			tell application "iTunes"
				set aLibrary to name of current playlist -- Name of Current Playlist
				set aTrack to current track
				set aTrackArtwork to null
				
				(* Is there any Artwork? *)
				if (count of artwork of aTrack) ≥ 1 then
					set aTrackArtwork to data of artwork 1 of aTrack
					set fileRef to (open for access ArtworkFromiTunes with write permission)
					try
						set eof fileRef to 512
						write aTrackArtwork to fileRef starting at 513
						close access fileRef
					on error errorMsg
						try
							close access fileRef
						end try
						error errorMsg
					end try
					
					(* Convert to Tiff *)
					tell application "Finder" to set creator type of ArtworkFromiTunes to "????"
					
					tell application "Image Events"
						set theImage to open ArtworkFromiTunes
						save theImage as TIFF in iTunesArtworkFolder & "albumArt.tif" with replacing
					end tell
					
				else
					
					(* If there's no Artwork use the Blank Arwork. *)
					tell application "iTunes"
						if (count of artwork of aTrack) < 1 then
							set aTrackArtwork to DefaultArtwork
							
							
							set unixDefaultFolder to the quoted form of POSIX path of DefaultFolder
							set unixiTunesArtworkFolder to the quoted form of POSIX path of iTunesArtworkFolder
							
							do shell script "ditto -rsrc " & unixDefaultFolder & space & unixiTunesArtworkFolder
							
						end if
					end tell
				end if
			end tell
		end try
		
	else
		if (exists process "iTunes") is false then
			
			(* If itunes isn't running use the Blank Artwork *)
			tell application "Finder"
				set unixDefaultFolder to the quoted form of POSIX path of DefaultFolder
				set unixiTunesArtworkFolder to the quoted form of POSIX path of iTunesArtworkFolder
				
				do shell script "ditto -rsrc " & unixDefaultFolder & space & unixiTunesArtworkFolder
			end tell
			
		end if
	end if
end tell

Final Notes

While working with GeekTool for the last few days here are some observations that I’ve made. GeekTool uses polling to check for updates to files/pictures/scripts. This has some drawbacks, one of which is high CPU usage if you set the refresh time to low for your entries. Normally 10 seconds works well. Another downfall of polling is that any output changes that a script generates won’t be updated till the GeekTool refreshes. By using events, GeekTool could use less CPU cycles and make updates to its display more timely. However, I don’t know if using events is even be possible with simple shell scripts.

I found one bug. Every once in a while my GeekTool entries overwrite each other. I think it’s just a display bug, because it was never permanent. If you close the GeekTool window and reopen it everything will be fine. I can’t figure out exactly how this happens, but it does time to time.

The GeekTool entries that I’ve illustrated in this article are by no means the only things that GeekTool can display. Remember, by using scripts and shell commands you can display just about anything! A few other things that people like to dispaly are hard disk statistics, a floating picture of your wife/kids/pet, or even a todo list.

The one thing that I’d really like to add to my GeekTool display setup would be current and average network traffic. I like to know when my internet connection is churning away so that if I’m not using it I investigate. A neat little graph would be cool :) But I’ve yet to run across anything to accomplish this.

I hope you’ve learned something by this article and that you’ll use some of the scripts/commands I’ve listed. I’ll make sure to make future post about other interesting things that I use GeekTool to display.