Using the Hide feature

Okay, what did I miss here? When I use the 'hide' option, it hides alright. But how do you get it to reappear?

I've had to quit and relaunch but I thought I saw an aswer to this. Just searched for it and couldn't find it, though.

BTW, a nice companion to this would be to have a 'nav' button that will make the window but not the buttons transparent so CFE stays active but you can see through it to the nav option. You can always hide it to control the nav program.

In the spirit of the FE being the main control program, I'd also suggest that CFE perform auto-dimming of the screen brightness. Right now, I use Shades to control dimming at night. All it does is put a non-active window at the front that varies in transparency. Maybe CFE could do the same either at sunset or on command.

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Originally Posted by Bugbyte

Okay, what did I miss here? When I use the 'hide' option, it hides alright. But how do you get it to reappear?

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Click it's icon in the Dock and it should come right back (cmd+tab to it).

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BTW, a nice companion to this would be to have a 'nav' button that will make the window but not the buttons transparent so CFE stays active but you can see through it to the nav option. You can always hide it to control the nav program.

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I'll look into that.

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In the spirit of the FE being the main control program, I'd also suggest that CFE perform auto-dimming of the screen brightness. Right now, I use Shades to control dimming at night. All it does is put a non-active window at the front that varies in transparency. Maybe CFE could do the same either at sunset or on command.

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I've thought about that and there are really three solutions. The best is hardware based where you have light sensors to tell it what the ambient light is. Obviously not everyone will have such hardware available.
The second is time based, but as the sun isn't quite as consistent as we'd like the results will never be quite right. It also wouldn't account for overcast days.
Finally the simplest approach is simply a plugin button that allows you to (un)dim when you feel like.
Of course all three are dependent on the Mini being able to dim the monitor, otherwise my hardware is needed ;)

-dave

Well, not exactly. My monitor can't be dimmed and is incredibly bright at night. Shades is a program that puts a transparent window over top of all other windows. You get a slider that controls the window's opacity. I works better than gamma, IMHO.

The sunset based option would be good enough for me. It might be nice to be able to dim it on command, but I'd settle for auto-dim at sunset.

I wonder if shades can be controlled via applescript?

It is not applescriptable, but obviously, you can try to user interface control it. I poked around with it but couldn't get it to work.

Isn't there a feature in Leopard that records what you do?

FWIW, I think the shades approach is pretty good if we ever want to include some kind of brightness control. I found a link on how to generate transparent windows with kOverlayWindowClass (http://cocoadev.com/index.pl?DesktopAnimationHowTo) and then using CGContextClearRect to set the alpha value (http://lists.apple.com/archives/carb.../msg00920.html).