Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Productivity
Afloat - window floating and transparency at the stroke of a key
Afloat is a killer System Preferences utility that adds a 'float on top' option and customizable transparency settings to virtually any Cocoa app in Mac OS X. Once installed (and you restart any Cocoa apps that were running), new keyboard shortcuts and a couple of options under the Window menu will offer all sorts of handy wndow management and see-through goodness. Great for those times when you have windows layered on top of each other and just need to glance at something underneath, and when you're using a bittorrnet client to download a Quake 4 demo and you're sick of it falling underneath Adium every time you switch to chat - or just for those times when you want to show off with some sexy transparency. Check out Afloat's ReadMe (PDF link) for more details.
Afloat is freeware, a Universal Binary, and available from Emanuele Vulcano's site.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Tyler G said 3:32PM on 8-05-2006
i LOVE this thing!!!
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lOUDsCREAMEr said 3:49PM on 8-05-2006
btw, im the localizer (zh-tw) for this little app ;-)
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tia said 4:00PM on 8-05-2006
miticoooooo!!!!!!
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marc said 4:13PM on 8-05-2006
"transparcy"?
seriously. who did you sleep with to get this job?
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Yuri Walkiw said 4:48PM on 8-05-2006
Please at least try to keep typos out of the title. That way I can't tell you guys are lazy when skimming headlines on Newsfire.
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Gyamtso said 5:21PM on 8-05-2006
Will the spelling checkers close their pie-holes, please. These are the posts people who don't get all gooey in the nether regions just because something is about Macs but still use their Mac with relish read this blog for. This is good information, even if it is gooood infomratiob.
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ted said 6:52PM on 8-05-2006
"These are the posts people who don't get all gooey in the nether regions just because something is about Macs but still use their Mac with relish read this blog for."
What? Did you have your mouth full as you were saying that?
Anyway... regarding the misspellings and constant grammar mistakes -- you guys seriously need to get a handle on this. Scott, Dave. Please, it's embarrassing. You get paid for this. Do a professional job.
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David Chartier said 8:22PM on 8-05-2006
Ted does have a valid point. In the age of OS-level spell-checking, this should more or less be a thing of the past.
I'm trying to re-tool my blogging workflow to try and work around some of our limitations; right now, the only browsers we can usefully blog in are Firefox and Camino - neither are spell-checking aware. The Firefox 2 beta is, but its implementation is wonky and it gets overridden by rich-text browser input systems, which renders the spell checking useless.
Personally, I'm trying to get in the habit of writing my posts in external Cocoa apps. I'm bouncing between using Journler and Yojimbo, though I'm leaning towards Journler because of its far greater organization features (smart folders, labels, etc.).
Rhetoric aside: I apologize for the errors, and rest assured we're working to make a better, spell-checked TUAW for you.
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Serge said 10:16PM on 8-05-2006
Afloat is a wonderful little app. Two thumbs up for the developper !
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Alex P said 11:12PM on 8-05-2006
http://macupdate.com/info.php/id/14862
GeekBind does this too : ]
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echidnae said 12:16AM on 8-06-2006
David, Camino's nightly trunk builds on the branch and trunk have spell checking currently implemented in form fields like the one I'm typing this comment in. I haven't tried Firefox's spellchecking, but I do know they are dependent on some of the same code in both browsers, so I'm not sure what's different in the implementation in both browsers.
Just throwing that out there for ya :)
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David Chartier said 1:00AM on 8-06-2006
#10: I just went to GetCamino.org/development, is that the latest nightly you're talking about? It's downloading as I type this. Let me know if I need to get/build it from somewhere else, and feel free to share some details; I've never grabbed source and built my own copy of anything.
Thanks for the tip.
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echidnae said 1:38AM on 8-06-2006
David:
Sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. Like Firefox, Camino's devs make nightly builds available each day at this url:
http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/camino/nightly/
You can just download the actual app there, no getting the source and building yourself required. The builds that have the spellcheck in them are the ones marked "trunk" and "1.1-M1.8/". The latter is what Camino 1.1 will be, eventually. The other builds, marked "1.0-M1.8.0/" is what Camino 1.0.2 uses, and that won't have spell check. I've been using the latest "1.1-M1.8" build for today, and it seems to be working fine, so that's what you'd want to download. Sorry for the confusion...I know this can be confusing!
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David Chartier said 9:40AM on 8-06-2006
echindnae: Rats, just as I suspected. The spellchecking works in forms like this one, but it gets overridden in our CMS post editing window, I would imagine because of the custom rich text tools they've built into it. The red underlining doesn't even show up in there (but it works in this form here).
Oh well, at least I have a Camino that will do *some* spell checking. Thanks!
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pseudoprometheus said 3:59AM on 8-07-2006
#10: Yes, GeekBind does the same thing, but it doesn't look like it's a Universal Binary, which Afloat is.
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