InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed > Desk Accessories

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Desk Accessories

Desk accessories were once a special type of application that lived only under the Apple menu. In Mac OS X, however, the Apple menu doesn't contain any applications at all (aside from the Recent items). Nevertheless, a number of included applications fill the role previously played by the now-extinct desk accessory, such as Calculator, Clock, Key Caps, and Stickies.

Calculator

The Mac's system Calculator has remained the same for almost fifteen years. Mac OS X puts a new face on the old standby. The Calculator application (Path: /Applications/Calculator) is shown in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1 The Calculator finally gets a facelift.

The Calculator can be operated by clicking the buttons in the window or by using your numeric keypad. The number keys directly map to the calculator counterparts with the Enter key equivalent to Equal.

Clock

The Clock (Path: /Applications/Clock) is a digital/analog timepiece designed to fit into the Mac OS X dock or float on the desktop as a shaped window. Starting the Clock application will, by default, place a small analog clock in the Dock, as shown in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2 The Clock adds a digital or analog watch face to the Dock or Desktop.

Preferences

To configure the Clock application's time display, choose Preferences from the application menu. The Preference panel is displayed in Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3 Configure the clock's display.

Choose your clock settings based on a combination of analog, digital, and window types:

Analog— The default view of the clock is the analog wall-clock style. If desired, click the Show second hand check box to display the Clock's second hand in addition to the minute and hour hands.
Digital— The digital Clock display resembles a tear-off calendar page. Both the date and time can be seen in this view. The digital display offers the option of flashing the time separators each second (:), or displaying the time in 24-hour mode.
Display— Finally, the Clock can be shown as either an icon contained in the Dock (its default mode), or in a shaped-floating window with variable transparency. If you choose the floating window, drag the transparency slider from left to right to decrease the transparency of the window.

After you make your choices, close the preference window and the changes will take effect immediately. To automatically launch the Clock at startup, use the Login System Preferences panel.

Advanced Clock Customization

Many Mac OS X applications can easily be customized by editing the application resources. Unlike earlier versions of the operating system, OS X typically stores pictures, sounds, and even interface description files as user-editable items within an application's folder structure.

In the case of the Clock, the images for the digital and analog faces are stored as TIFF files and can be edited with any TIFF-compatible graphics software, such as Photoshop, or Graphic Converter (see Chapter 8, "Installing Third-Party Applications").

Follow these instructions to open the existing interface files:

Navigate to the Clock application using the Finder (path: /Applications/Clock).
Press Control and click the Clock application icon.
Choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up contextual menu.
Open the Contents folder, then the Resources folder.
The editable TIFF files are background.tiff, ClockTitle.tiff, and Clock02.tiff.

After editing the TIFF files, quit and then restart the Clock application. Your changes should take effect upon launch.

Key Caps

Key Caps (Path: /Applications/Utilities/Key Caps) is a very simple application that displays your keyboard mapping and enables you to determine what special characters are available for a given font, and how to type them.

Key Caps displays an onscreen view of your keyboard layout when it's launched. The Apple Extended USB keyboard is shown in Figure 6.4.

Figure 6.4 Key Caps shows your keyboard layout and available characters.

The field at the top of the Key Caps window can be used to test typing (either using the real keys or onscreen keyboard). Pressing the Shift, Option, Control, and Command keys (and combinations thereof) will show the special characters that can be generated. You can change the font used in the display by choosing from the Font menu.

Stickies

Stickies (Path: /Applications/Stickies) is a reimplementation of the original Mac OS post-it note desk accessory. The new Stickies uses the Cocoa API to provide the functionality of the original program, but with several additional features—such as multiple fonts, colors, and embedded images.

Stickies is a digital version of a Post-It notepad. You can store quick notes, graphics, or anything you might want to access later. This takes the place of both the notepad and the scrapbook. The screen displayed in Figure 6.5 is covered with Stickies.

Figure 6.5 Stickies can contain any information you want.

Stickies does not use the standard Mac OS X windows. Instead, each window appears as a colored-borderless rectangle when not selected. When active, three controls appear:

Close Box— The close box, in the upper-left corner of the Stickie, closes the active note. Closing a note erases it.
Maximize/Minimize— In the upper-right corner is a second box that changes the shape of the current note to best fit the text. Clicking the box toggles between two sizes for the current note.
Grow Box— Dragging the grow box, located in the lower-right corner, shrinks or expands the window dynamically.

In addition to the three visible controls, Mac OS X Stickies also support windowshading, just like in Mac OS 8 and 9. Double-clicking the title bar of an active window will shrink it to the size of the title bar. Double-clicking again will return the window to its previous size. When in Windowshaded mode, the Stickie displays the top line of text from its contents directly in the title bar of the collapsed window.

The Stickies application has very little configuration—using the Preferences located under the Application menu, you can disable confirmation of window closing. The rest of the menus enable you to customize the Stickies that you currently have opened.

Menus

Stickies are not, as you might think, individual documents. All the notes are contained in a single file written to your Library folder. The File menu enables you to create new notes, export individual notes to text files, and print the contents of notes:

New Note— Creates a new blank note. (Command+N)
Close— Closes the active Stickie note. (Command+W)
Save All— Saves changes to all notes. (Command+S)
Import Classic Stickies— Imports note files from Mac OS 8/9.
Import Text— Imports a text file into a new note. Text can be in plain-text format, or rich-text. Font style information is retained.
Export Text— Exports the frontmost note to a text file.
Page Setup— Configures printer page setup.
Print Active Note— Prints the frontmost note. (Command+P)
Print All Notes— Prints all notes.

Although the Edit menu does contain your standard items such as undo, redo, copy, cut, paste, and so on, it also has advanced features inherited from the OS X Cocoa API. In addition to the normal Edit menu items are two components you might not expect within a simple post-it application: find/replace and spell checking. These are excellent examples of the advanced features easily implemented in Cocoa-based applications. Because you'll be seeing these features frequently, we'll take a closer look in a few minutes.

The Note menu offers control over the formatting of the text in each note. Take some time to play with these settings—you might find more control in Stickies than in some word processors!

Font Panel— Opens the Mac OS X Font panel for font and size selection. The Font panel is introduced in Chapter 3, and covered at length in Chapter 10. (Command+T)
Bold— Bolds the currently highlighted text, or toggles the typing mode to between plain and bold. (Command+B)
Italic— Italicizes the currently highlighted text, or toggles the typing mode to between plain and italic. (Command+I)
Copy Font— This unusual selection copies the font style from the current text selection (size, font face, color, and so on) so that you can easily apply it elsewhere. (Command+3)
Paste Font— Pastes a copied font into note. If text is selected, it takes on the attributes of the copied font. If no text is selected, the style is applied for all subsequent typing. (Command+4)
Use as Default— Sets the current font settings as the default for new notes.
Text Colors— Opens the Mac OS X color picker (refer to Chapter 3 for details) and enables any color to be applied to the font being used.
Note Info— Because Stickies aren't actual files, you can't look at their creation dates in the Finder. Use the Note Info option to display the creation and modification dates for the frontmost note. (Shift+Command+I)

What would a Stickie note be without a bright-colored background? The color menu contains the common post-it colors for your enjoyment (yellow, blue, green, pink, purple, and gray).

Find and Replace Dialog Boxes

Using the Find submenu within the Edit menu, you can perform a full-text search of all the open notes. You can search and replace any or all the notes, as well as choose to perform case-sensitive or whole-word searches, as shown in Figure 6.6.

Figure 6.6 Have 1,000 Stickies and can't find the right one? No problem, use Find!

The Find Panel has two fields: Find and Replace with. Enter the text you want to locate in the first, and what, if anything, you want to replace it with in the second.

You can also control the breadth of the search using the scope feature. Use Current Note to confine the search to the frontmost window, or All Notes for everything. To ignore the case of characters while searching, click the Ignore Case check box. If you only want to match entire words (not pieces from the middle of words), check Whole Words. When the search is defined, use one of the five buttons at the bottom of the panel to start an action:

Replace All— Replaces all occurrences of the text with the supplied string. You will not be prompted for each replacement.
Replace— Replaces the currently found item with the replacement string.
Replace & Find— Replaces the currently found item, then finds and highlights the next occurrence.
Previous— Jumps backward to a previously matched string.
Next— Finds and highlights the next matched string in the document.

After starting a search (Command+F), you can use the shortcuts: Find Next (Command+G) and Find Previous (Command+G) to continue searching without the Find panel open.

Spell Checking

As with find and replace, spell checking is another very common activity that is implemented in many Cocoa Applications.

From the Edit menu, choose Spelling. This will open a basic spell-checking panel, as shown in Figure 6.7.

Figure 6.7 The Spelling panel can locate and correct common missspellings in your work (yes, I meant that).

You can use the panel by itself by entering words that you want to correct into the field by the Correct button and then choosing Correct. Alternatively, navigate through the potential spelling errors using the buttons in the Spell Check window:

Ignore— Click Ignore to skip a word that you don't want to fix.
Guess— Finds other words similar to the misspelled word.
Find Next— Skips from word to (misspelled) word in your note.
Correct— Fixes the error. If multiple possibilities are shown, choose the correct word from the list on the left, and then choose Correct.
Learn— Adds the currently selected word to the Mac OS X dictionary. Switches default dictionaries using the Dictionary pop-up menu.
Forget— Removes the currently selected word from the dictionary.
Dictionary— Chooses from multiple installed dictionary files. The Default Mac OS X installation includes a single dictionary.

The Stickies application includes another way to visually check your spelling skills—the Check Spelling option under the Edit menu. This highlights misspelled words with a red underline and is used heavily throughout Mac OS X. OmniWeb, a popular Web browser, even checks your spelling as you type into Web page fields!

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