New Hidden Preferences for Advanced Users
So what are these new hidden preferences? A few people have asked for the ability to dim the control panel further or remove it entirely. We didn’t want to add any UI to the application, so we’ve implemented some settings for those advanced users who want to play around with the control panel.
Let’s talk about them for a moment. Each preference can be edited with the Terminal application.
alphaValueActive – Determines the opacity of the control panel when the mouse cursor is over the control panel. This value can be between 0.0 and 1.0. Any value above 1.0 or below 0.0 will be treated as 1.0.
The default alphaValueActive value is 1.0.
alphaValueInactive – Determines the opacity of the control panel when the mouse cursor is outside the control panel. This value can be between 0.0 and 1.0. Any value below 0.0 will be treated as 0.15, while any value greater than 1.0 will be treated as 1.0.
The default alphaValueInactive value is 0.15.
An example of how you might use this value is setting it to 0.0, which will make the control panel completely invisible when not hovering the mouse cursor directly over it. This way, you can hide the panel completely but still use it when you need to. (Provided you don’t forget where you put it. If you have, click Think’s icon in the Dock.)
controlPanelPersistent – Determines whether or not the control panel exists at all when Think is not the active application. The possible values for this setting are YES and NO. When set to NO, the control panel will only appear on the screen when the illumination panel is visible. At all other times, the control panel will be removed from the screen and will not appear when hovered over.
The default controlPanelPersistent is YES.
Setting Hidden Advanced Preferences
Each of the three new preferences can be changed with the defaults command in the Terminal application.
1. If Think is running, quit it.
2. First, open Terminal.app inside the /Applications/Utilities folder.
3. Depending on which preference you want to edit, enter one of the following three commands:
defaults write com.freeverse.think alphaValueActive 1.0
Replace “1.0” with any value between 0.0 and 1.0 that you prefer.
defaults write com.freeverse.think alphaValueInactive 0.15
Replace “0.15” with any value between 0.0 and 1.0 that you prefer.
defaults write com.freeverse.think controlPanelPersistent -BOOL YES
(under 10.5.x)defaults write com.freeverse.think controlPanelPersistent YES
(under 10.6.x)The “YES” value here can be YES or NO, depending on the behaviour you prefer, as described above.
4. Launch Think to see your changes. If you want to make more changes, quit Think before doing so.
If you have any questions, feel free to post them here or contact our support team directly.
xoxoxo,
Freeverse
