Monday, February 8, 2016

Quick Adobe Illustrator trick - moving pen points.

How many times have you put a point down on your design, only to have it land not exactly where you want it and then hit undo to try and put the point down on a better place?
Or perhaps said that you'd fix it after the whole shape is done.
Well, if you don't let go of the mouse button, you can just push and hold the space key and then drag the mouse while still holding the left mouse button.
Instead of moving the work area, it will instead change the point's position without changing how you set the manipulator arms.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

OSX doesn't like sharing.

I own a PC with Windows 7 and a mac mini with latest version of OSX. No I'm not a collector or have them just to say i have them, I actually use both of them. So naturally I sometimes need to share files between the two and to do that, I made a shared folder in Windows because at the time; that was the computer that was running.
When I first got the mac mini (it's so cute... especially with the stickers i put on it.) it had OSX 10.8.
So for sharing I had to use a 3rd party plugin to enable it to use the NTFS partition. Hm... ok...
Windows could read and write fine into OSX.
Then the updates came along and that plugin stopped working. Well damn it.
A friend of mine that is a real genie (he's an actual technician certified in most stuff apple) told me that OSX doesn't like it if the shared folders are not in OSX.
"So wait, instead of the computer telling the other computer - hey here is some data, please write it in your folder - it goes by itself and accesses another machine?"

I didn't really like that method as changes in an operating system or in a file system may ruin that.
I was expecting the transaction to go more like "here's a buffer, write it as you will".

He then said "You can do two things. Either make the folder to be shared in OSX and access it through Windows, or enable OSX to read *and* write in NTFS partitions."

Wait. So OSX already has the capability to do that but is disabled by default? - Yeah, it's Unix based after all. There is no option visible in any configuration panel though, so I can only guess that apple just didn't want it's operating system to be able to do stuff out of the box. It doesn't make sense to me since a lot of companies may run multiple departments with multiple systems. Why force them to either use FAT32 in networked drives or just only use ... osx ... oh....
And no, that 3GNTFS plugin thing won't work anymore. Or not well enough.

Well in any case, it seems you can enable OSX to read NTFS by using terminal and then edit a plist file to just tell it that it's ok to ready NTFS. And it is per volume, not global...

So i had to open terminal, then sudo nano etc/fstab (for the uninitiated, sudo means super user, do).
That would open a GNU editor called nano and load the fstab file that is located in the etc direc... folder. (could use any other editor in sudo mode i guess, he just likes that one) and write LABEL:DRIVE_NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse then save it with CTRL+O (It's a unix thing it seems. It means write Out.) Then restart the system.

I guess my main issue with this whole thing is that an operating system should let you do the things you need as hassle free as possible. Having the capability and then just not letting you do it...

I also have another issue with the sharing stuff in View info in OSX but that is a logic VS UI design thing instead of a technical one.