Monthly Archive for November, 2006

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OmniWeb for $10!

Published on November 3, 2006 in Apple, Internet and Software. 0 Comments

OmniWeb IconOmniWeb is on sale this whole month for just $10, down from its normal price of $30 (TUAW clued me in). I have been back and forth between different browsers recently. I used Firefox for a while, but then switched back to Safari because Firefox didn’t render text as well and because it just didn’t have that native Mac application feel. But Safari has crashed on me lately every time I have tried to bring up a contextual menu, and it is slow as death. It eats RAM for breakfast.

I can’t really believe that I just paid for a browser, as I’ve never done that before in my life, but OmniWeb so impressed me that I bought it within the first five minutes of using it. The feature list is extensive – live previews of tabs, multiple workspaces, ability to set viewing preferences by site, an integrated HTML editor/viewer of sorts, and an absolutely gorgeous interface. Its also extremely intuitive; every button is exactly where you’d expect it to be. Don’t pass this one up!

Random Color Terminal

Published on November 2, 2006 in Apple, Software and Technical. 2 Comments

I’ve always wanted something like this. Daniel Jalkut of the Red Sweater Blog has created an AppleScript to randomize the color scheme of the terminal. Just drop it in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Terminal and it will show up in the script menu under “Terminal Scripts.” Click on it until you find a color scheme that pleases you.

There are two cool hacks that I came up with for this script. Both involve changing ~/.bash_profile (or the startup script for whatever shell that you use). If you don’t have a file named .bash_profile in your home directory, then create one. AppleScripts can be invoked from the command line by using the osascript command, and we can use this to our advantage in two ways.

  1. Every time we start up a new terminal, randomize the color. Simply add the line

    osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
    Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt

    somewhere in your .bash_profile (all on one line).

  2. Set an alias to the above command so that we can change the color very quickly without needing to navigate to the script menu with the mouse. To do this, add the line

    alias newcol='osascript ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/
    Terminal/RandomColorTerminal.scpt'

    to .bash_profile (all on one line). Now, whenever you type newcol at the command line, you will get a new color scheme.