October 4, 2003
Fixing the dog.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy actually. But there are these dozens of niggly little annoyances that I’ve discovered whilst traversing the gap between OS 9 and OS X. Most of them I can deal with. It’s usually just a matter of changing the way a certain navigational action or keyboard command is performed. Not so bad. But there are other things. Things that make no sense to me whatsoever. Things that eat up my time and patience — all because some bit of functionality I became used to in OS 9, is now dead-straight busted in OS X. An issue of particular annoyance happens to be in Fetch, my FTP client of habit. In the 3.x version of Fetch, a list of all previously visited server directories was stored in a cache file. Every time you accessed a new directory, it was added to the Directories menu. This made moving up and down through the directory structure of a relatively large web site pretty much a snap. I didn’t need to back-step through the hierarchy of subdirectories and up again, because my entire history was available in a single menu. When Fetch turned 4.x and all OS-exy, the Directories menu was still there, but it severely crippled. The contents of the list was now stored in a very limited internal 64KB cache instead of a separate file. This meant that you could only have a certain number of directories available in the menu at any given time. And the list wasn’t static. Items dropped off the list as new directories were accessed. More directories would appear in the menu if the paths were short. Less directories if the paths were longer. And less still if you happened to have multiple FTP sessions on the go, since all windows shared the same 64KB buffer. Aarrgh. Well, apparently I wasn’t the only finding this behaviour a bit aggravating. I stumbled across several threads on the Fetch Softworks Message Boards where folks were singing a similar tune, but one thread in particular proved invaluable. Jim Matthews — the author of Fetch — admitted that something had slipped a cog and offered a slick AppleScript solution to bumping the size of the internal cache.
tell application "Fetch 4.0.3" set «property pMCS» to 1000000end tell
To check whether the modification took, use this second script:
tell application "Fetch 4.0.3" get «property pMCS»end tell
That’s it. The dog is fixed. My cache is capacious. The menu is brimming with path names from here to there and back again. Productivity is soaring through the roof. What more can I say? Thanks Jim. One less annoyance in my day goes a long way.
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