Mac OS X tweaks - notes for myself

Turn off the annoying bouncy crap:
Go to System Preferences and under "Personal" choose "Dock" and de-select: [_] Animate opening applications. Now instead of the annoying bouncing, the glowing dot beneath an icon will wink slowly - indicating a startup without being obnoxious about it.

How to get a black background:
Make a 128x128 solid black .png image.
Put it in
/Library/Desktop Pictures/Solid Colors/
And then the "Solid Color" choices will have it, just like it should have all along.

iMouseFix almost, but not quite, fixes the rotten pointer acceleration. The default acceleration is great for the (RSI inducing - not an exaggeration: I already can feel the pre-pain signal that says "If you keep that up, you WILL be wearing a brace.") trackpad. Unfortunately it's lousy for a proper two-button trackball. The result is that the pointer moves way, way too slow when moving slow. Setting the pointer speed is not the fix, the acceleration curve is harfy.

Installed the Logitech configuration tool and found a four(!) button trackball. This solved the dopey default acceleration curve and lets me define the "extra" buttons as button 3. IT's not quite natural, but at least now I can open links in background tabs without playing silly menu games.

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To do:
1. Opera
- Upgrade to version 9.25 Done.
- Get an Opera skin that is the same as the default, except has a proper gray background for the Speed Dial page. The skin based on the unreleased Opera version 1 was a good start. Modified to use grays instead of white or "Window" and it's about what I want. I've named the modified version sanity.
- Get the ?style=mine button Got it.
- See if OS X can interpret right&left click together as middle click so opening a background tab is trackball-only. It can't. The Logitech configuration tool provides a work-around, with sufficeint hardware.
- Set Opera to view source in a text editor Done.

2. IRC client.
- Find one, get the colors sane, hopefully have python for scripting.

3. IM client
- Find one, get the colors sane

4. Smultron - text editor
(Swedish for "wild strawberry")
- Get the colors sane
- Get proper file tabs

5. Set up Time Machine with the external drive

6. Find a (free) image editor that actually works. I would have no issue using GIMP if it actually ran. Crashing it is as easy as opening a new image and trying to draw on it. That's it.