Blurry Text on External Monitor with Snow Leopard

One of the problems I have off and on with my MacBook Pro is that every once and a while when I have it plugged in to my Dell 2408WFP monitor the text in Terminal and Coda seem to have blurry text.  Its like the font smoothing that Mac has built in has been turned of just for those applications.  When I installed Snow Leopard this problem was on all the time, nothing I tried seemed to get rid of it.

Looks like I wasn’t the only one with this problem because the great guys over at Mac OS X Hints just posted a hint that will fix this problem.  Sounds like there is a bug in Snow Leopard that turns off the font smoothing for some external monitors.  Of course none of the Apple monitors have this problem but if you didn’t shell out the extra cash for one of their beautiful monitors you might have this problem.  The fix is very simple,  just open up Terminal and then paste in:

defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2

You can try out using 1 or 3 as the value you are setting to have less or more font smoothing. You will need to restart the app you are having problems with and may even need to unplug and replug in your monitor.

if you decide you just want to get rid of the change just open up terminal and paste in:

defaults -currentHost delete -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing

This will remove the key/value pair that you added and you will be back to the default Snow Leopard way of font smoothing.

MacOSXHints – Re-enable LCD font smoothing for some monitors

EDIT (9/11/2009)
Looks like you can also set the value back to the default value by going in to System Preferences and selecting the “Automatic Font Smoothing” checkbox, this is found at the bottom of the “Appearance” section.



Google Gears, Snow Leopard and Safari 4

As like many Mac users, I upgraded to Snow Leopard this past week.  As expected there are a few programs that don’t work.  One of those is Google Gears in Safari 4.  Google gears seems to still work correctly in Firefox on Snow Leopard but not in Safari.

If you go to http://gears.google.com where you normally would get a install button you get this message:

“Your browser is not currently supported.”

Searching around I found a ticket in the gears code.google.com for the issue.  This morning someone from google updated it with some helpful information.

Snow Leopard and Safari 4 introduced some changes which are incompatible with Gears.
Apple made these changes to improve the security of their OS and of Safari. While we
continue to talk to Apple about the issue there is no workaround for us at this time.

Gears continues to work with Firefox on Mac OS X.

You can watch the ticket yourself by staring the conversation.

http://code.google.com/p/gears/issues/detail?id=847#c6

Follow up post:  Work around for Google Gears and Snow Leopard



Backing up Flickr

Stories of people loosing every image they have uploaded to flickr have been bouncing around the last few months. It’s nothing new to the web, company provides a service and has some rules and whenever they feel those rules are violated they take action. Right or wrong, it has not helped the trust in the “cloud” at all. So what can you do? Well Dan Benjamin took the FlickrTouchr script which allowed you to download a flickr set to your ipod and modified it to backup your all of your flickr pictures, sets and all.

Check out his article about it here:
http://hivelogic.com/articles/backing-up-flickr/
or you can just grab the latest version of the script from github:
http://github.com/dan/hivelogic-flickrtouchr/tree/master

Not something I currently am going to do as I keep a all of my images on a portable external drive which gets backed up weekly to a terabyte network drive and also gets backed up to Backblaze. I only upload to flickr the images I think are worth people spending there time to look at. The rest go up on my personal photo site hosted by dreamhost.



Drag table row to a div with jQuery

One of projects I am working on has a long list of classes in a catalog.  These classes are listed on the screen in a table which is sortable and filterable.  Users search through these classes trying to find ones that they want to register for, when the find one they can click on the “add to cart” button in that classes row.  One of the requirements that I was given for this listing was that users should also be able to drag a row to the cart. jQuery UI’s draggables works very nicely but after doing a quick proof-of-concept test I found that draggables don’t work on on table rows very well.  I couldn’t get jQuery UI to drag anything.

If you check out the documentation you will find a option for a “helper”.  This option can either be set to a string (‘clone’ or ‘original’) or you can provide a function which returns the helper object.  So I wrote up some code to create a div with the selected row in a new table.

helper: function(event){
return $('<div class="drag-cart-item"><table></table></div>')
.find('table').append($(event.target).closest('tr').clone()).end().appendTo('body');
},

Then all you need to do is set up a dropable area that knows how to handle that helper.

('#cart').droppable({
drop: function(event, ui) {
var classid = ui.helper.find('tr').attr('id');
var name = ui.helper.find('.name').html();
$('#cart .selected').append('<li id="'+classid+'">'+name+'</li>');
}
});

Check out the working demo



jQuery hover with a fade

@rmurphey sent out a question on twitter yesterday that I got interested in.

#jquery on hover, i want to stop a fade, clear the anim queue, and start an opposite fade — what am i doing wrong? http://bit.ly/QykYd

See it on twitter

All she wanted to do was use the hover event (which lets you define 2 functions one for the mouseenter event and one for the mouseleave event) and start fading an element when you enter and stop and fade back to normal when you leave. The problem was that her code wouldn’t ever fade back.

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