I often have Safari open while working on a project in Xcode, looking up stuff on Stack Overflow and the like. A few times, I've searched something in to the web address/search engine field of Safari, and a word or two from what I typed in and it will be entered into the Search Navigator in Xcode, even though I didn't type it in there. It doesn't do it every time.
EDIT: Text entered in through the Search Navigator can pop up in Safari too.
This doesn't cause any problems, but the words it picks don't seem to have any relevance, and I'm curious as to why this oddity is happening.
I'm running Xcode 4.6.3, Safari 6.0.3, and Mac OS X 10.8.4
Is this a glitch? A half-baked feature?
What you are seeing is the OS X Global Find Pasteboard in action. Anywhere the private class NSFindPanel is invoked (typically in conjunction with a text field) this global pasteboard will get invoked and provides a single, central location for 'find' metadata which includes the most recent query:
In addition to communicating search strings via the find pasteboard, the standard Find panel for NSTextView also communicates search option metadata, including case sensitivity and substring matching options. This metadata is stored in a property list as the NSFindPanelSearchOptionsPboardType value on the global find pasteboard. As such, third party applications may store additional keys in this property list to communicate additional metadata as desired to support the various search options common to many third-party applications' Find panels.
from Section "Find Panel Search Metadata" in the NSTextField documentation on developer.apple.com
I believe the design intent to be, if you've performed a search in one app, there is a reasonably high probability that you'll be doing the same search in another app, so the global find pasteboard acts as a syncing mechanism between Find fields on disparate apps. For those coming from other operating systems, this would appear to be very odd behavior where the find capabilities of an app are very much sandboxed to their own process -- the most recent search term is an app-specific search term, not this global shared space.
As far as replication is concerned, you can always trigger the reported behavior by coping text to the clipboard, then pasting it into a Find field. When you switch from application to application the global find pasteboard will update the find NSFindPanel. This is why you see it going both ways between Xcode and Safari -- as both use NSFindPanel, both reference the global find pasteboard and sync up when the next time they get focus.
Unfortunately, this is not a user-configurable kind of setting; all NSFindPanels have this behavior and there is not a System Preferences or defaults preference you can set to change the behavior. Consider filing an issue with Apple at bugreport.apple.com
Related
I'm working on a program that acts as a Windows Accessibility / UI Automation API client, consuming accessibility data from other programs (much like a screen reader does). I'm looking for a way to get the full path of the current "document" (or other file) open in a program. So, for example, Word might give me the path to the current .docx file, Paint the path to the current image file, WMP the path to an audio or video file... you get the idea. Is there a way to do this?
On a Mac, I'd use NSAccessibilityDocumentAttribute, but Windows doesn't seem to have an equivalent accessibility property. A few other questions I looked at:
Getting the path & filename of the open document in any Windows application (last answer in 2009, may have been unaware of accessibility APIs, no answer gives reliably accurate data)
How to get filename and path of file opened in Notepad? - five years old, specific to one program, only answer given is incomplete.
So... is there any equivalent to NSAccessibilityDocumentAttribute, and if not, is there a reasonable way to re-implement it (possibly doing stuff outside of the accessibility tree / API)? It's more important that this return correct information (i.e. never give me a file that isn't open in the relevant program/window) than that it be universally available.
I'm using C# (via System.Windows.Automation for accessibility) but could use other languages if needed, so long as they'll run on Windows 10 (downlevel support nice but not mandatory).
I'm using Win7 but looking for a cross os solution, but this isnt even working in my Win7. I'm trying to change the icon of just the current profile. So what i did was:
I created shortcut of firefox.exe and moved it to my documents
right click on this shortcut and then changed icon
but in firefox the taskbar shows normal firefox icon and so does the top left icon (see attached image plz)
How can I change this icon?
Thanks
Here's another topic i made on ask.m.o trying to ask the same thing: https://ask.mozilla.org/question/725/custom-icon-per-profile/
As of Firefox 57, this is not possible from an extension.
WebExtensions do not permit the window icon to be changed from an extension.
Prior to Firefox 57 (or non-release versions w/ legacy add-ons)
The combination of the title of your question and the text of your question make it unclear what you desire to accomplish.
If your goal is to dynamically change the window icon of a currently running Firefox process then you will need to follow something along the lines of the second or third method listed in nmaier's answer.
If you goal is to always have a different, static icon used for the primary Firefox windows for a specific profile, that is quite easy.
You will need icon files of the appropriate format for each architecture for which you desire this to work.
The following assumes Windows, it is easily expanded to other architectures by including an icon file with the same name, but appropriate file extension and format.
Create a simple overlay, extracted extension. You will need a minimum of 2 files:
<extension-dir>instal.rdf
<extension-dir>\chrome\icons\default\main-window.ico
Example, fully functional, install.rdf:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#">
<Description about="urn:mozilla:install-manifest">
<em:id>window-icon-change#nowhere.foo</em:id>
<em:version>1.0.0</em:version>
<em:name>Window icon change</em:name>
<em:description>Change the Firefox main window icon.</em:description>
<em:creator>Makyen</em:creator>
<em:unpack>true</em:unpack>
<em:targetApplication>
<Description>
<em:id>{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>3.0a1</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>43.0a1</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>
</Description>
</RDF>
NOTE: The "<extension-dir>\chrome\icons\default\" directory is different than the one in the response by nmaier. In that answer the "icons" and "default" directories reversed and will be non-functional.
You will probably want an additional file:
<extension-dir>chrome.manifest
The chrome.manifest file is not required. However, not having it may result in a single line being printed to the error/browser console (if you even have that open). If the chrome.manifest file exists, even if zero length, there will be no complaint in the console that the file could not be read.
Install the extension. The easy way to do this is to create a zip file with those three files; then change the file extension to .xpi; then drag and drop it onto a Firefox window running the profile in which you desire it to be installed.
You can expand this to include icons for whatever sub-windows you desire. You will need to determine the ID for each sub-window. The icon file name is just the window ID with the appropriate extension for an icon in the architectures you desire. "main-window" is just the ID for the main Firefox browser window.
Creating an extension to test this took less than 5 minutes. You should find it reasonably easy to accomplish.
This assumes that there is not a custom main-window icon located at (Windows, default install location):
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\browser\chrome\icons\default
as that directory is for all profiles and is searched first.
This will not work if the extension is either restartless or extractionless.
You can find a brief amount of information about window icons on MDN. nmaier mentions the docs talking about bundles. When talking about Mozilla add-ons, a bundle is your add-on package.
The icon file(s) will be at (Windows):
<profile dir>\extensions\<extension-dir>\chrome\icons\default*
Once the extension is installed, you can change it/them manually without re-installing, if desired.
Add-ons created to solve this
Based on the discussion in the comments, I created a Firefox Add-on to allow setting the window icons for the profile. It is much expanded upon the 5 minute add-on mentioned in the comments. The addition is entirely in a UI for the options dialog for selecting the icon to use and assigning it to the various different windows Firefox opens. You can get it from Mozilla Add-ons under Change Profile's Window Icons. Unfortunately, it's not possible for that add-on to function as of Firefox 48 which requires add-ons to be signed. To dynamically change the icon requires changing files which must be signed. Thus it's not possible to dynamically change the icon with add-on signing required.
Instead I created a few add-ons which statically change the window icon. You can find them on AMO.
Well, there are some ways that spring to mind, but all with their own issues:
Using Window Icons provided by an add-on you install into the profile (the docs talk about bundles, but add-on can also use this technique). The add-on must be em:unpack and have the icon(s) in chrome/default/icons exactly. It is possible that the Firefox in question has an own set of icons bundled in the $appdir/chrome/default/icons, in particular on *nix and since they are checked first, they will be used instead of the add-on provided add-ons. So while this approach works for custom add-on windows, it might not for built-in ones.
Copy and patch Firefox itself, aka. the sledgehammer approach. Different for each platform (e.g. under Windows you'd have to swap out the icon resource of the firefox.exe).
Create a tool that will switch out the icons of a running window. There is no code to do so in Firefox that would be accessible from javascript, so you need to go binary and platform-specific, e.g. WM_SETICON on Windows.
Edit 1:
Actually, thinking more about it, I'd install an add-on with some platform-specific js-ctypes code that would then switch out the icons, e.g. the already mentioned WM_SETICON on Windows.
Usually you'll need a window handle for the platform APIs, which Firefox refuses to provide to JS. But as a workaround for that:
Store the window title.
Set the window title to a new uuid.
Call a platform API to find the new uuid titled window handle (FindWindow on Windows). mintrayr uses this scheme for Windows/Gnome(GTK/GDK), also not in js-ctypes.
Restore the window title.
Load/transform the icon file to something the platform supports (HICON on windows). I once had a patch somewhere on bugzilla that enabled loading of arbitrary images as window icons FWIW, but let it slide. Should be still somewhere and could give pointers.
Switch the icon using the obtained handle. E.g. Sending two WM_SETICON for small/big icon on Windows.
Edit 2
Turns out nsIBaseWindow exposes a nativeHandle these days, as I learned from your other question. so the window-title–hack isn't needed any longer. However, nativeHandle might be an 64-bit pointer, which isn't really supported in JS land without some trickery... Better not parseInt it... Also js numbers are floats.
ctypes.voidptr_t(ctypes.UInt64(nativeHandle)) should work, though.
On Mac OS X, this Firefox plugin will do just that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/fosx-label/. Also on GitHub: https://github.com/jf/fosx-label. Thanks to Noitidart for pointing out this very useful plugin.
Tested on Yosemite 10.10.5 and it works perfectly!
FITS files can contain several images (or more generally n-dimensional arrays) and tables.
Is there a way to automatically open images e.g. with the ds9 application and tables with the TOPCAT application when I double-click the FITS file in the Mac OS X Finder?
I'm thinking of something like FITS Explorer from AstroSoft, but free and nicely integrated into the Mac (i.e. Finder, Quicklook).
If such a thing doesn't exist, what is your workflow for browsing and opening images and tables in FITS files?
I just found QLFits which is a Mac OS X Finder QuickLook plugin that display some FITS header info and an image simply by hitting SPACE after selecting a FITS file in the Finder.
The same guy wrote FITSImporter:
a Spotlight plugin that allow you make spotlight queries against dedicated FITS header keywords. It provides also additional information in the "Get Info" panel of the Finder (⌘-I).
Both are open source (GPL licence), the code is available on github: QLFITS, FITSImporter.
They are not perfect though (e.g. I didn't see a way to get at the different extensions in a multi-extension FITS file, although the description says there is; and you can't use QLFits to browse tables) and development seems to have stopped, but still well worth a try!
Apart from recommending you QLFits, you could try to write an AppleScript application, or Automator action using any scripting language, which explored the FITS file, and sent table-based FITS to TOPCAT, and image-based FITS to DS9, and make that application the default for FITS files.
I have a question about my Mac program's preferences window. I have an application with a CoreData-based back end. My program includes a feature that allows users to switch out the database for a different one. I do not expect users to do this very often—perhaps once or twice a year.
Now, many of the options that users can tweak are stored in the database. These options need to be configured once every time that a new database is used, because they are specific to the database itself.
The Apple Human Interface Guidelines on Preferences state this:
As much as possible, ensure that users rarely need to reset
preferences. Ideally, preferences include settings that users might
want to change only once. If there are settings users might want to
change every time they open your app, or every time they perform a
certain task, don’t put these settings in preferences. Instead, you
could use a menu item or a control in a panel to gives user modeless
access to these settings.
My question is this: Are my database-level settings valid candidates for the preferences window? Does "once or twice a year" count as "rarely"? If not, are there any downsides to creating a second panel (with many panes that are controlled by an NSToolbar) that looks just like a preferences panel but is accessed from a different menu item ("Database Preferences" for example)?
I see database-level settings all the time under Preferences in various apps (1Password and MacJournal come to mind). Thus, Preferences often contains both database-level settings and "actual" preferences that go in a plist file. The former (the data-base level settings) is absolutely crucial, being the actual data. The latter (the plist file) isn't as important and losing this data shouldn't cause too much harm, as it's just simple settings the user can easily get back to manually.
On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with separating the two, especially if your app is a multi-window (document-based) app that can have many databases open at once.
But I do think it's simplest to just put it all into the Preferences. That's what you probably should do, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise.
To answer some of your questions directly:
Are my database-level settings valid candidates for the preferences window?
— Yeah, I think they are. And many apps (such as 1Password and MacJournal) do this too.
Does "once or twice a year" count as "rarely"?
— Yeah.
Are there any downsides to creating a second panel?
— If you have a good reason to separate the two, I see nothing wrong with it.
Just my two cents.
We've got several web-based applications that are launched from our ERP system (SAP R/3 in this case, but since we're using ShellExec, I don't consider this a SAP issue). The problem is that we can either set the IE to "open every URL passed from the ERP system in a new window" or to "reuse any one of the existing IE windows" (same problem with tabs). Both settings are not acceptable for our users: one of the web applications is a rather bulky medical image viewer applet that wreaks havoc if invoked multiple times. The other option is a no-go either because this way opening the image browser for a patient automatically displaces the lab result display for the very same patient and vice versa.
I'd like to have some control over which window may or may not be reused. My idea would be a kind of "window tag" and a helper program that checks if a window with that tag exists - if it does, reuse it, if not create it. So basically
IELauncher SEARCH http://www.google.com
would open a new window and tag it as SEARCH.
IELauncher DEVEL http://stackoverflow.com
would open a second window, tagging it as DEVEL. Then
IELauncher SEARCH http://www.wikipedia.org
would replace the contents of the first (google) window only.
Is this possible at all? Do you have any pointers for me where to start? I don't even know what to look for...
I had to resort to some rather ugly methods - dynamically assembling a HTML page that uses JavaScript and window.open() to open and access a window by name, then close the page executing the JavaScript. Ugly, but at least this way you get the additional benefit of being able to control certain aspects of the browser window like switching of the menu bar, toolbar and location bar.