mac-os-x

Mac OS X Question: Is there a notification program for Mac OS X, like the notification balloons that appear on the task bar in Windows?

As of Mac OS X 10.5.7 there is nothing built into Mac OS X to provide this functionality, but there is a great, free application named Growl which provides similar functionality.

There are several cool things about Growl. First, it works with a number of Mac applications, including but not limited to Firefox, Easy Batch Photo, Komodo Edit, and NetNewsWire.

A very important warning: When you drag your folder over to the PLACES section of the Finder, make sure your image looks like the image shown above, where the folder is clearly going to be placed between two existing folders. If you drag your folder over to the left side, and you're highlighting another folder in the PLACES section, you're going to end up moving your folder to that other folder. That's a great technique for moving your folder from one place to another, but it's not what I'm trying to describe here.

Problem: You're using the Mac Finder, and you're in one directory, and you need to move to a directory/folder that is somewhere else in the system hierarchy. It sure would be easy if you could just type in the name of the folder you want to move to, but you don't know how to do this.

Solution: Whenever you're using the Mac Finder, or other Finder-related components in Mac OS X applications, you can use this magic keystroke to let you type in the name of a directory/folder that you want to move to:

[Shift][Apple][g]

jEdit

jEdit is an open source Java-based text editor that has been around for years. On the positive side it's free, reasonably quick, and most importantly, it has a ton of third-party plugins. All those plugins are what keeps me coming back to look at jEdit from time to time.

I was just working on a new AppleScript program on my Mac, when I had to remember where to install my script so I could access it from the Mac menu bar.

After digging around real quick, I saw that I installed all of my original scripts in this Mac folder:

/Library/Scripts/AlsScripts

I think I did this so my scripts would appear near the top of the list of available AppleScript programs, as shown in the following figure: