29 January∞

Hard-to-see scroll bars

Have you perchance been viewing the Python documentation in Safari on Lion, and been frustrated that the overlay scroll bars can barely be seen?

This CSS, applied with Kridsada Thanabulpong’s User CSS extension, should remedy the situation.

body {
    background-color: white !important;
}

There is no change to the appearance of the page as the body element is completely covered. Update: The footer at the bottom of the page becomes unreadable white text on a white background, but whatever.

28 January∞

Safari history in Spotlight

For some reason, there isn’t an option to not show Safari history in Spotlight results. (Bookmarks can be turned off.) I worked around this by adding ~/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/ to the exclusion list in the Privacy tab of Spotlight preferences.

Screen shot of System Preferences window, showing a ‘History’ folder added in the Privacy tab.

26 January∞

iBook author for mathematical expressions →

Apple Support Communities

I’m not the only one thinking about the lacking support for mathematical expressions in iBooks Author. It works with MathType (as does Pages ’09), but this isn’t enough.

iBooks could do more than just display expressions. I’d find it very useful to be able to get more information about symbols: what is it defined as and where else is it used?

Maybe mathematical expressions could be another built-in widget type in a future version of Author.

23 January∞

Spotlight preferences

I was using my Mac, and wanted to access the Spotlight preferences without taking my hands off the keyboard. I thought it would be cool if I could summon Spotlight then press ⌘-comma but this does not work.

The arrows keys move up and down through results, and there is a “Spotlight Preferences…” option at the bottom of every results list. I found these ways to navigate quickly:

Use command with the arrow keys to move between sections.
Use control with the arrow keys to go all the way to the top or bottom.

So I can always get to Spotlight preferences by summoning Spotlight, search for anything, press control-down then return.

Alternatively, I could type ‘spotlight’ into Alfred or Spotlight itself.

20 January∞

Different Levels →

by Dov Frankel on For No One

The iPhone has two different volume levels: your ringer volume, and your audio playback volume. When audio is playing, or when an audio-centric app is open, the hardware volume buttons change the volume of the audio.

In Settings > Sounds, there is an option called “Change with Buttons”. The situation described above is when this option is on. When this option is turned off, the volume buttons should always change the audio playback volume and the ringer volume can only be changed from Settings > Sounds.

Well at least I thought that was the case, but I just did a test and sometimes with the option off, the volume buttons sometimes fail to change the keyboard click volume. Otherwise I think what I said is right.

The iPad harbors no concept of a separate “ringer” volume, and so its level can always go to zero. […] It has no Clock app for which to make an exception.

But does the iPad make an exception for Find my iPad? Sadly I don’t have an iPad to check.

(via Daring Fireball)

(Reblogged from thedov )

20 January∞