For those of you who are used to my usual musings on society, politics, and just general stuff, you’ll can safely skip this entry. This is a completely geeky blog entry, that applies pretty specifically to OS X Lion.<\/p>\n
So I don’t talk about programming\/scripting much, since well I don’t do much of it, and what I do is usually so specific to my needs, it doesn’t make sense to share it with the world. In this instance however, I think this’ll have a fairly common application.<\/p>\n
I’ve actually started using spaces, or as they call it now Mission Control in OS X. I’ve previously fiddled with it, but I’ve never really put it into standard use in my daily work. However, with Lion and its iOS like gestures, I have finally started using it. What I’ve done is put each of my basic organizational tools in its own space, so its easy to four finger swipe to it. My standard setup has five spaces:<\/p>\n
So this serves me pretty well, except when:<\/p>\n
What I’d like to have happen would be for Safari to open a new window in my main workspace. However, Safari has different ideas, and opens a tab in one of my other spaces with Safari in it, and switches to it. (usually the Toodledo one, although I’m not quite sure how it makes its choice.) Usually, I try not to write any code\/scripts, I start with Googling around and see if I can find something that fits my needs. <\/p>\n
So, as per my SOP, I went Googling and found a good script by jaysoffian<\/a> over at MacWorld<\/a>. Its from the Snow Leopard days, and actually using it has a few quirks that may be Lion specific. It does a great job if there are no instances of Safari in the main workspace, but if there is a minimized window, it believes this is sufficient to open the page in the current space, however Safari opens a tab in one of the other Spaces with Safari in it. So, more Googling for me! I found a script by relishgargler<\/a> over at MacScripter<\/a> which determines if a minimized window of the application exists. Since, I only have one space where Safari could be minimized, this works for me.<\/p>\n The final quirk that I came upon was an edge case, that probably qualifies as a bug. If your last interaction with Safari was while it was full screen, it opens the link in a window, but the title and close, minimize, resize, and full size buttons are obscured below the menu bar. I did some fiddling that’ll fix that, however, I wasn’t able to find a way to see if this condition existed, so I just put the fix in for it every time that it could occur, which means that the window will do a little dance frequently. It isn’t ideal, but it works. <\/p>\n