Mac Geeks

Today I switched from LaunchBar back to QuickSilver. While crawling the Blacktree website I found some other interesting stuff.

First thing is Visor – an extension for the Terminal.app which offers a so called Quake-style Terminal window. When installed, Visor offers a global keyboard shortcut which opens a Terminal window. The Terminal window will slide in from the top of the screen. Another hot key stroke will hide this Terminal window again.

The second application from Blacktree is Nocturne. This will change your screen colors to a black/white screen for simulating kind of night vision:

The switch from day to night mode can be done automatically by sense of the light sensors of the MacBook Pros.

In the new, the Leopard version of Apple Mail.app they introduced so called Data Detectors. These try to recognize useful data in the mail text to offer special actions on them. Such useful data are for instance addresses, telephone numbers or dates. When you place your cursor over such data in a mail message Mail.app is marking them and offering actions like creating an appointment from an date, large typing telephone numbers or creating addressbook entries from signatures.

But like me most of the people hardly ever use these features. But on the other hand the effects of the Data Detectors disturb selecting the text for copy and paste. Unfortunatly you can’t turn them off via the Mail.app preferences. You have to open the Terminal and type the following magic words to disable them:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

Now simply restart Mail.app and they’re gone. To reactive the Data Detectors obviously this should help:

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors NO