Control Option Command

Lately the internet has had a wave of sites using the cherished Konami Cheatcode to reveal easter eggs or similar functionality in the site or app.

I wrote a (crappy but working) class to implement such functionality in ActionScript about a year ago here.

I decided to polish it up a bit for the benefit of myself and anyone else and in the process ended up creating a small utility class to work with keystrokes in the process.

You can download the (fairly self-expaining) classes and a sample project right here, or read on for a bit of explanations.

(Text) Keys.as.
(Text) Konami.as.
(Archive) Neatly zipped + example.

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Do you use any Adobe products? Tell me if this sounds familiar: “Oh hai! I need to update some totally unrelated stuff on your machine! You know, some camera raw stuff or InDesign whatchamacallits, so I’m just going to force you to quit all your browsers, because lordy lordy who knows what might happen if you coincidentally were looking at interwebs while I was installing this shit. Woohoo!”

Yes… The old adobe installer/updater. Let me count the ways I hate you. Quite a few! So, more out of spite than anything else I started checking out what browsers might not be sniffed up by the dreaded ugly beast that is the Adobe Installer/Updater. Turns out they’ve been thorough. Fluid gets away with it, but it’s really not that great for anything but site-specific stuff (which it was made for, and indeed does very well).

So in the end I wrote my own web browser, and of course I did it in AIR (Adobe Integrated AIR Runtime… RAS!).
So let me advice you; This is NOT a good browser, and it is NOT much of a feat to have written it, but it WILL work during an Adobe installation does its thing, and it IS fucking hillarious to use Adobe technology to subvert Adobe technology.

The source is available in the app itself, and you’ll notice that I’ve used this guys styles to pretty it up a bit. Knock yourself out if it takes your fancy. If you install the app you’ll get a very basic browser. A URL field, back and forward history buttons and a search field. Impressively it seems to remember your logins from other browsers, which is not my doing at all. Clicky clicky badgy badgy to install.

If you managed to visit this blog in the 10 minutes or so before this post goes live you might have been slightly befuddled by the fact that your address bar doesn’t say parallaxdenigrate.net as you might have expected, but rather ctrloptcmd.com.

So I’ve finally moved the blog to a new domain, and let me tell you; It wasn’t easy. Oh, exporting and importing the MySQL tables was a breeze and implementing the 301 redirect wasn’t too complicated. No, the challenge was in deciding on a domain name that wasn’t already taken. In the process I probably bought about 15 domains just to get one I liked enough to use.

Now, gentle reader, you might ask yourself “What the fuck is supposed to be the point of all this?“, to which I might reply; “Well, even if parallaxdenigrate.net was a amusing domain name to the likes of me who are blessed with an odd sense of humor, it’s not exactly what you’d call memorable. Try to tell someone to type in ‘parallaxdenigrate.net’ into their browser and you’ll see what I mean.” You, in turn may exclaim something along the lines of “Are you retarded? How the blazing hell is ‘ctrloptcmd.com’ easier to remember than your previous parrylaxy thingie? You suck. I’m not gonna read your blog anymore.” at which juncture in our fascinating exchange I might counter with “Aha! But if you just remember controloptioncommand.com, which naturally redirects to this, abbreviated form of the same sequence, I think you’ll find it immensely easier to keep lodged in your cerebrum the unified resource locator corresponding to this, my humble blog.” at which point you’ve probably left so I’d be talking to myself.

Regardless! Here it is, the new and not at all improved version 1.000001 of parallaxdenigrate controloptioncommand.

Although I’ll be keeping parallaxdenigrate.net online for a while just to make sure nobody gets lost, I’d strongly encourage you to update your bookmarks and feeds.

How’s that for a TitleCased title?
So I’ve been checking out Path Finder again. The thing with Path Finder is that it’s very nearly awesome, but there are a few things that bug the hell out of me. I may or may not come back to the most irritating shortcomings in a later post, but I’m going to address one of the main issues straight away; Path Finder has crappy support for AppleScript.
I love that little quirky language that actually gives me loads of control over the OS, but for some reason you can’t just rewrite your old AppleScripts to do a check for the current “Finder app” and react upon it with the same code. I have no idea why porting the Finder Dictionary to the Path Finder Dictionary is so hard (if I did I’d be writing some way cooler code than I currently am) but it bugs the hell out of me when some of my most frequently used scripts won’t work anymore. It’s like sitting down on a Mac that hasn’t got Quicksilver installed. You feel like you’re typing with boxing gloves.

Therefore I’ve set out to port my most crucial scripts so they’ll work whether I’m in Finder or Path Finder.

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I use a 15″ MacBook Pro that I carry between work and home. At work I have a 30″ Cinema Display which means I can actually have half of the Flash IDE showing at once. Mostly it’s plug and play but every once in a while some app just doesn’t realize that I’ve unplugged the huge display and some window ends up at some awkward position where I have to drag it out and resize it, or even worse; It ends up outside the boundaries of the laptop screen altogether.

AppleScript to the rescue. Copy this script and save it into your AppleScripts folder. You can assign it to a Quicksilver hotkey if you’d like, but I find it’s convenient enough to just launch it from Quicksilver in the usual manner.

What it does is simply resizing the window and centering it on the display. There are more elegant ways to do this, but this one works even with apps that have little or no support for AppleScript at all. You can adjust the lines:

to fit your screen real estate as those values are set to center on a 1440 / 900 display.