I’ve said it before and I hope that I never get to stop saying it: the Mac community has some of the most damn creative people working in it! How often to you see a really clever user interface implemented in some game and wonder why can’t we get stuff like that in OS itself? One of my personal favorites has today become a reality thanks to the fine folks over at Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop blog which today introduced the world to a small Mac hack called Visor.
Remember in Quake (and many other FPS titles) how you could always bring down a terminal window from which you could enter in cheat codes and such? Well, some clever guys have figured out a great little hack that allows you to have OS X’s terminal window drop down from the top of the screen via a customizable key combo. So you can be working away and need to jump out to the command line for a something and now, it’s just a quick key-combo away. The visual effect is of course, very slick and not to leave well enough alone, they’ve also made it so that you can easily embed any quicktime composer (.qtz) file which will play behind the terminal window (but you do have to adjust the transparency level of your terminal window ahead of time).
You really do have to see this in action to fully appreciate it’s usefulness – so of course they’ve also made a movie to show it off properly. Essentially this is accomplished by creating this as a plugin for SIMBL but it works fantastic and if you use the terminal on anything more than a casual level, it’s a must have in my book. Nice job guys.
Installation instructions and download links here.
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