Brooks Andrus » OSX

Customizing Your Mac OS X Folder Icons

brooks — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 12:06:28 +0000

Tired of those lame arse filing cabinet folder icons? Looking to make a particular folder stand out? No problem. Step inside my friends, and I’ll show you exactly how to remedy this situation.

Hide / Show Mac OS X Desktop Icons

brooks — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:59:33 +0000

So you want to make a screencast and you’d like to put your best foot forward which means, in my case at least, hiding the mess that is your Mac OS X desktop. No sweat. In the screencast below you’ll learn how to quickly build two Automator applications that will allow you to toggle the visibility of your desktop icons on or off.

The shell commands you’ll need to build your Automator apps:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
killall Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

*Update*

You can reduce this to a single Automator app that checks the current visibility and toggles to the opposite state using the following bash script:

# checks visibility and stores value in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop)”

# toggle desktop icon visibility based on variable
if [ "$isVisible" = 1 ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
else
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

***************************************************************************

And for the truly lazy–a precompiled app that toggles visibility on or off:

http://www.brooksandrus.com/downloads/hide_icons.zip

Run Eclipse from the Command Line on OS X

brooks — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 00:38:16 +0000

If you’re looking to launch Eclipse passing in the -clean parameter on OS X you’ll want to cd into the eclipse directory that contains your Eclipse.app package and use the following syntax in bash or your favorite shell terminal:

./eclipse -clean -vmargs -XstartOnFirstThread

The arguments following ./eclipse are all passed to Eclipse and the arguments following -vmargs are passed to the Java jvm.

As an alternative you can modify the Eclipse ini file (see image below for ini location). If you alter the ini file, the arguments set there will be passed in each time Eclipse is run as opposed to a one time deal with the command line.

Why would you want to use the -clean argument? According to the documentation the -clean argument provides the following:

Cleans cached data used by the OSGi framework and Eclipse runtime. Try to run Eclipse once with this option if you observe startup errors after install, update, or using a shared configuration.

Newly installed plugins will often not work until Eclipse has been run with the -clean parameter. After a good chunk of time the Eclipse workspace may also become corrupt and -clean can sometimes work wonders. If you’re having Eclipse workspace issues check out Riyad Kalla’s excellent article.

Finally, if you’re like me and have hard time remembering where in the Eclipse help documentation you kind find all of the Eclipse startup arguments and their uses the Jing screengrab below should help.

Mac OS X – Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

brooks — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 04:38:19 +0000

I always forget how to do this because I toggle this rather sporadically so I’m adding it to the public record.

To show hidden files in Finder pop open your terminal and type the text shown in the screen grab below.

To go back to hiding files we obviously just flip the AppleShowAllFiles flag to FALSE.

*Update*
As noted in the comments its nice to have the text available for easy copy and paste into your terminal.

Show:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Hide:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

*Update 2*

You can use this script toggle between states:

# check if hidden files are visible and store result in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)”

# toggle visibility based on variables value
if [ "$isVisible" = FALSE ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

You can also download an Automator application which will toggle hidden file visibility here:

http://www.brooksandrus.com/downloads/show_files.zip

Coherence–Parallels blurs lines between host and virtual os

brooks — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 05:31:17 +0000

As many of you no doubt are aware, Parallels has released a new beta build with a wicked cool feature known as coherence. Coherence allows the virtual desktop to interact with the native desktop in a fairly seamless manner. This short screencast (30 seconds) gives a small taste of the “coherent” feel Parallels brings to running Windows on Mac OS X.

Setting Eclipse and Java application JVM heap size on Mac OS X

brooks — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 22:50:41 +0000

The other day I kept on getting annoying “out of heap space” errors in Eclipse while running a memory intensive Java application I had written and it took a bit of searching to find the answer, so I thought I’d make a quick screencast that demonstrates how to increase the heap size of the JVM that Eclipse uses as well as how to increase the heap size allocated to your Java applications by Eclipse.

This screencast is also available in podcast format for video iPods.

Setting Mac / Unix Environment Variables – Adding Executables to the System Path

brooks — Wed, 24 May 2006 17:29:48 +0000

After years of resistance I finally caved and bought a sleek, shiny MacBook Pro over the weekend. I’ve been slowly figuring out how to set up my AMES development environment and that means figuring out the basics of using the Unix shell. I struggled to find a simple explanation of how to set environment variables, so I’m inserting a couple of screen grabs which illustrate how to add MTASC and Swfmill to the PATH environment variable.

I downloaded, unzipped and placed the mtasc and swfmill binaries in their respective folders in the following folder:
/usr/local/bin
Method 1 : A Session Variable – Using the bash shell, this adds the mtasc and swfmill binaries to the PATH variable for the current terminal session. When you close the shell and reopen it, you’ll have to add the files to the PATH variable again.

There’s actually a typo in the screen grab–it should be:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin/mtasc:/usr/local/bin/swfmill

Method 2: Add to Startup Script – Place the command in a startup script called bashrc which can be found along the path below. The modified PATH will always be available to any bash shell and no further editing is needed.
/etc

This method is similar to how environment variables are set in Windows (without the gui absraction layer). the bashrc file is a simple text file and you simply add the commands to this script which is run everytime the os loads.

I can now reference mtasc or swfmill in the bash sell by simply typing the executable name!Since, I opted for the “set it and forget it” method, I know I at least will benefit from having something to reference the next time I have to set up OSX or Linux (I vaguely remember doing this when I first forayed into Linux a year ago and cursed my laziness at not writing down the process)….maybe there are others out there who have shared the pain of leaving their comfortable Windows double-wide trailer and gone hollywood with the glamorous mac-villa “Made by Apple in California” :)