Catching Up on Some OS X Apps


A few Mac OS X related items: uControl for Panther, tabbed terminal emulation, using your iSight camera, and the new Finder.

  • I got the latest update to uControl, the utility that let's OS X users turn their CAPSLOCK key into a Control key. Without it, my hand starts to ache from reaching down with my pinky to hit the Control key. Even, when I'm not using Emacs, I'm using Emacs controls in Safari and Mail. This is one of the things that Panther broke when I installed it but the new version seems to work fine now. There are still a few pseky bugs, but its a huge improvement.
  • The latest version of iTerm, the tabbed terminal emulator for OS X seems to have fixed a few bugs that bothered me and introduced a few more, that I can live with for now. Most importantly, the performance is improved.
  • SecuritySpy is a nifty program that let's you use your iSight camera for something other than iChat. The program let's you monitor multiple cameras at once and even contains a web server that serves up images from the camera. You can create time lapse movies, or just snap shots when the program detects motion. I liked it, but its not worth $50 to me. I think its the software Apple should have included with iSight. If you're interested in using the iSight for other things, there's a couple of stories by Derrick Story on the O'Reilly Network that you might want to check out.
  • I've heard mixed reviews of the new Finder. Personally I think its a nice improvement. I like the left hand navigation and especially how that carries through to applications. Much more convenient than a favorites menu for me. I used PathFinder in Jaguar, but the new Finder is good enough that I don't use PathFinder anymore.

The other utility that I use all the time that broke when I installed Panther was CopyPaste. CopyPaste kills the "c" key in Panther. There doesn't seem to be a new version of that yet.

Got any other "can't live without" OS X applications? Write a comment and share them with me.


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Last modified: Thu Oct 10 12:47:20 2019.