How to make a Mac screen saver that shows your uptime in Leopard

About nine months ago, I wrote about how to make a Mac screen saver to show your uptime, using Quartz Composer, a package from Fink, and Quartz Composer patch called Shell Command Patch. Not long after, Apple released Leopard, which seems to have changed Quartz Composer enough to break Shell Command.

I was getting all geared up on writing a post about doing this using another method (completely redoing it and everything), but looking in to this further just showed me I’m an idiot. It turns out the difficulty I was having is that Quartz Composer patches are saved in different locations. To be clearer:

  • In Tiger (10.4), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Patches/.
  • In Leopard (10.5), patches are kept in /Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/ or ~/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Patches/.

That’s it. Seriously. Incidentally, I found this information at Kineme.net’s page on the topic.

The new version of the Developer Tools does in fact come with an example patch that can run a command line tool (in “/Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Plugins/CommandLineTool”), but why mess with something that works?

Incidentally, I did have to mess with some of the parameters, also, but I don’t know if it’s because I’m using a different display (with different dimensions), or what. The following changes worked for me:

  • In the Image with String patch, I changed:
    • The font size to 14
    • The image width and height to 800 each

  • For the billboard patch, I changed the width to 0.25.

Otherwise, everything is the same.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Comics without the newspaper

I happen to love newspaper comics, but over the years I’ve either not gotten a newspaper, or not gotten a newspaper carrying all the comics I’d like to read. I know I’m not alone in loving comics; just take a look at Comics Curmudgeon . The people who both read and post comments there clearly love comics, which is half of what makes it fun. Add in to it with some of the cartoonists clearly joining in with the joke, and really its a lot of fun. The lack of print has made things difficult in the past, but I have tended to get by. The general solution most people use is to go to the online sites of newspapers carrying the comic of their choice, in particular, one that also puts it up online. The more industrious of us use things like the Perl tool dailystrips . Basically, you tell it the pattern for finding a comic of a particular date, and it scrapes the website for that comic. This works, but has some hangups. Most importantly, it means the newspaper is not getting a...
Read more

Xcode 3 language specification changes

So much has changed in Leopard that I am not surprised I cannot find anything about this yet. Basically, the plugin interface for Xcode 3 has severely changed. In particular, over the past few days I have been trying to make a *.pblangspec file for the programming language used by my group for software verification purposes (who, it ought to be noted, I do not speak for on this website). It turns out, that’s not what I really wanted to do. I am still trying to figure out what all has changed, but here are a few key differences: The file format is totally different. This is somewhat superficially noted by the fact that the file’s extension should now be xclangspec as opposed to pblangspec . For instance, I am using Resolve.xclangspec . The file format is totally different. I’m mentioning it twice, mainly to point out that there are no guides out there for it yet. It seems to make sense, if you realize that Xcode is now doing a lot more than just keyword matching a...
Read more

iPhone and iPod Touch, 802.1X and LEAP

This is more a note for people who were wondering like myself: the current OS X that comes with the iPod Touch and iPhone cannot handle either 802.1X or LEAP (before anyone tells me it handles 802.11x just fine, please remember that 802.1X and LEAP are specific forms of encrypting a wireless connection, not types of wireless connections. 802.1 1 x is instead a generic term used for the varying speeds of wireless, i.e. 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, ….) This is really too bad, as both are have been built in to Mac OS X since at least version 10.3, and also both are the main ways I can get wireless at OSU . I have every intent on finding out if this gets fixed with subsequent OS updates. Incidentally, a big reason I am posting this is due to some Apple Store employees erroneously telling me it should work on the iPhone and iPod Touch, since it is built in to Mac OS X, which shares a lot of common code with the OS X on both devices (as far as anyone seems to know). I don...
Read more