MeFi Projects

The side buttons on generic mice work really well for navigation in Windows... but not so much in macOS. By default they basically do nothing, and most software that claims to fix this problem (USB Overdrive, etc.) only binds the buttons to keyboard shortcuts with mixed results. While testing the Logitech MX Master, I noticed that unlike every other mouse I'd come across, its side buttons were acting in a suspiciously Windows-like manner on my Mac. (No blinking menu bars. No occasional destructive behavior. No mis-targeted navigation commands.) I decided to investigate this phenomenon in hopes of porting the behavior to all my other mice, and to make a long story short: it works! Really well! (Under GPL!)
posted by archagon on Jul 26, 2017 - 0 comments

Backgroundifier is a Mac OSX droplet-style app that converts image files of any size into pretty desktop backgrounds. Any image will work, but fine art and illustration looks the best. (You can see examples of the output on the app homepage.) There's a command line mode in addition to the GUI: if you go into the Backgroundifier.app bundle, you can either call into the Backgroundifier executable directly from Terminal (with the caveat that you can only save to and read from your ~/Pictures directory — sandboxing, sorry!), or alternatively extract the un-sandboxed command line utility from the Resources directory. On my laptop, I've even set up an Automator script that watches my primary pictures directory, automatically converts any new additions via shell script, and outputs the results to the directory I use for my desktop backgrounds. The app costs a buck, but most of it is open source. (I decided to exclude the UI nib file from the repo, at least for the time being.) It's written in Swift 2. You can find the repo here. Unfortunately, it's just a little bit out of date, but all the image conversion stuff should work fine. [more inside]
posted by archagon on Sep 27, 2015 - 0 comments