Panther Patter

Thanks to those of you who wrote in with the answer to my Dock question.  It turns out that I’d been trying to drag folders into the same Dock region that holds my application entries, and that’s no good.  Folders can be added in the area where the Trash can, minimized windows, and running applications not already in the Dock sit.  It hadn’t even occurred to me to try to add them there, because that’s where active stuff (and the Trash) goes.  Static links to resources go in the other area, as far as I’m concerned.  Just another little shove toward jettisoning the Dock and registering DragThing.

As for iPhoto plug-ins, I did find BetterHTMLExport pretty quickly, and the 2.0 version has exactly what I want—and about ten times that in stuff I won’t ever need.  If I were creating galleries, it would be a godsend.  I’d register it.  But all I really want is a plugin that lets me set the size and image quality of exported JPEGs, and that then exports them with smooth scaling instead of the jagged scaling iPhoto uses.  Frankly, iPhoto should do all this without needing a plug-in, but it doesn’t.  This seems like a simple little widget, one that could be created quickly and released as freeware.  Anyone have any leads on one that exists, or interest in creating such a tool?  Heck, point me at a good beginner’s resource on how to analyze and create iPhoto plug-ins and I could take a swing at it myself.  In my copious spare time, of course.

Panther’s been pretty cool so far—it certainly feels much snappier than Jaguar did—although there are (as always) things that annoy me.  The behavior of drag-selecting in the List view changed, and not for the better.  The reintroduction of labels (and where were they until now?) is nice, but I would have preferred a better presentation of them in OS.  Then again, Exposé thoroughly rocks not just the house, but the neighbor’s houses as well.  The fact that I can shuffle just those windows associated with the current application is just too darned awesome.  Exposé also revealed that Mozilla-based browsers create a small hidden window offscreen, one that you can’t really access but is still there.  It comes zooming in from the upper left when you invoke Exposé, and zips away when you un-expose everything.  I wonder what it’s doing.

In case you didn’t see this pointed out elsewhere, the main page (at least) of the Sprint PCS site is an XHTML+CSS layout now.  One of these days I’m going to have to compile a list.

• Panther Patter was published on Thursday, November 20th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Mac and Standards categories.
• There have been no replies.