Concern

A really annoying thing about Mac OS X is that it saves some things you drag-and-drop to Finder (for example, the cover art in iTunes) as “clipping” files, like “pictClipping” for picture files. People long ago figured out that pictClipping files kept the actual image stashed in the resource fork, which file identifies as a “ms-windows icon resource.”

I haven’t had any luck finding some simple way to batch convert these “icon” files into real images, but as it turns out, these files seem to mostly be real image files, like TIFF, JPEG, or PNG, with some weird header. Someone figured out how to convert these to TIFF, if the image in the pictClipping is a TIFF, and so I used this to write some Automator actions that convert pictClipping images to TIFF, JPEG, or PNG. You can save these workflows as Finder plugins, meaning that you can right-click on any pictClipping file, and try to convert that file to some format.

The workflows:

• Convert pictClipping to JPEG.workflow
• Convert pictClipping to PNG.workflow
• Convert pictClipping to TIFF.workflow

These are a little sucky, because you have to experiment with each one until one of them works (it should be easy enough to write a little meta-workflow that handles all three, but I’m too lazy right now).

Since it runs as root, and uses up a constant, large, and annoying amount of CPU, RAM, and disk bandwidth, I must bid it goodbye. I lost probably an hour’s worth of work altogether today, just waiting for spinning beachballs to stop while the thing was running.

Welcome back, Quicksilver.

I’ll echo some great OS X apps that run as little icons in the menu bar:

• FuzzyClock, which renders the time as a “fuzzy” string, like “quarter after seven” or “nearly eight”. My only wish is that it would also show the date, like “monday, april thirtieth.” Too bad it’s closed source (but, at least he isn’t trying to charge $9.99 for it, which a lot of Mac “developers” like to do).
• Spirited Away. This app will automatically hide applications that are in the background, and haven’t been used in a while.

(Both of these via the magic of Merlin)

Edit: I hacked together a date menulet, which has no preferences panel yet, but does what I want.