Beryl: OSX Exposé for Linux and a Whole Lot More

I posted a while back about ‘Skippy’ for acquiring that OSX Expose goodness in Linux. Well, since then I’ve had the luxury of using Beryl for about a month. It’s got a few bugs since it’s still developing, but very usable. Some of it is just eye candy, but things like the minimization of all of my active windows so I can find the one I’m looking for is very helpful. I use Expose a lot at work on OSX 10.4 and so having it at home makes for excellent consistency. Here’s a great video of every feature I can think of:

Beryl on Ubuntu via YouTube

And here a few screenshots from my desktop.

Application Switcher
Beryl-AppSwitch

Expose-ish
Beryl-Expose

Desktop Cube
Beryl-Cube

I hope you enjoy the pictures. I’m certainly enjoying the experience.

Linux and OSX: Create a Symbolic Link

‘Symbolic Links’ in Linux are pretty much the same as ‘alias’ files or ‘shortcut’ files in OSX and Windows respectively. And you can create them just as easily in any Linux Gui by right-clicking on a folder or file. However, creating or moving a symbolic link to a location outside of your user folder usually involves being the ‘super user’ or using ‘sudo’. It’s so simple to do with the Terminal, I can’t see trying to work around within the gui. So, I hope you find this helpful.

I found this info here thanks to a good friend:

http://help.hardhathosting.com/question.php/95

It’s such a good note to keep around that I wanted to have it on my own site.

In the Terminal enter the following:

ln -s [TARGET DIRECTORY OR FILE] [SHORTCUT]

For example:

ln -s /xampp/htdocs/work /Users/username/xamppwork

This points a symbolic link located in your home folder (xamppwork) to “/xampp/htdocs/work”

I am finding this to be very useful for using XAMPP to develop dynamic sites or to work the bugs out of WordPress themes. I have my working folder inside my Documents directory and then place a symbolic link to that folder inside the XAMPP server’s ‘htdocs’ directory. Pretty slick.

NeoOffice 2.1: Much Faster

The new NeoOffice 2.1 for OSX is a big improvement in optimization. Previously I was seeing a lot of redrawing in the toolbars, especially when the window is resized. Now the toolbar comes back all at once. I upgraded my parents’ 450MHz Dual G4 and noticed a considerable improvement. I’m looking forward to seeing the difference on my fiance’s PowerBook G4 400MHz.

It’s still in the ‘Early Access’ stage, so you will have to give them some money to get it, but it’s a great tool and definitely worth supporting. Here’s the site:

www.neooffice.org