Hi!
And thanks for the great app!

I have a major problem with iChat’s buddy list. If I’ve set the list to be well-sized on my external screen and I change to PowerBook’s screen, it’s (the list) height will be one and half times the PB’s screen! And if it’s well-sized on the PB’s screen then it’ll be only few centimeters high on external screen. So now I wonder if this is a bug in iChat or FMN? Or is iChat built on Carbon (or other non-Cocoa) so that it could be the reason?

Another question. Is there a way to exclude an app from the list? It doesn’t matter if it needs some .plist or terminal stuff…

Thanks for answering
-jyrki

Hi,

We’ve had other reports of trouble with iChat’s buddy list, but I’m not sure if I understand what you’re saying. Does the buddy list change size in a bad way when you change monitor configurations, or does it not change size at all?

You can exclude an app by editing a .plist file. The file in question lives in the app bundle at (take a deep breath):
Forget-Me-Not.prefpane/Contents/Resources/Forget-Me-Not.app/Contents/PlugIns/AXModule.plugin/Contents/Info.plist

You’ll need to add the app’s bundle identifier to the list that’s already in there. You can figure out the bundle identifier of an app by, for example, looking for its preferences file in ~/Library/Preferences and removing the .plist extension from the filename. So if you find “com.apple.iChat.plist” there you could deduce the bundle identifier for iChat was “com.apple.iChat” (which it is).

Yes, we need a better interface for this. It’s on the TODO list.

Hi,
and sorry for the first, unclear post. English is far from my native language

Yes, the buddy list (or lists) change size in a bad way. What I meant is that even the toolbar may be stretched strangely when changing monitor configurations. It won’t be bad if it would stay unchanged on the both monitors (or well, I’ll see wether it’s bad or not), so that’s why I asked how to exclude an app.

Thanks
-jyrki

Ok, thanks for the info. We plan to add an interface for excluding certain windows and/or apps without hacking plist files. The solution may be just to exclude that window. Unfortunately, we’re pretty busy with other things at the moment, so we may not get to it right away. In the meantime, I guess excluding iChat with the plist hack is your best option.

Thanks for a very cool app.

I have trouble with my Mail.app windows and my Adium windows. Everything else seems to be working great, or at least very close.

With both the apps I mention above the windows just end up on the wrong screen. So…
from solo to dual: windows that are normally all kept on the lappy screen are moved to the extra screen. Same with Adium.
Don’t know if this is a normal idiosyncracy, and it doesn’t seem like the plist hack would be appropriate.
Any advice is welcome.
r

I don’t use Mail.app or Adium, but I think my co-author uses Mail.app and doesn’t have any problems with it. Just to make sure, you have had the windows open on the second screen before, and you haven’t restarted the apps or closed those windows in the meantime? Note that if you close your mail window and open it again FMN doesn’t know it’s the same window. Same goes for restarting the app. (Hiding or minimizing is fine, BTW.)

This is a nice app, and I’m glad I ran into it. However, you know what would be SO MUCH MORE HANDY for me (not that you’re sitting at the edge of your seat or anything)?

I would love a GENERAL preference pane, that I selected an application, and then hit “Save Windows Relative to Screen”.

My main complaint, in case you’re wondering, is I use a lot of Stickies.app (not the useless Widget Dashboard thing that I immediately turned off the minute I launched it once and found every widget behind the scenes snarfing my CPU). But the original Stickies.app that came w/ OS X initially (except I’ve modified them to have scroll bars).

Anyway, when I open or close my Stickies, which I always have neatly organized at the top right corner of my desk space, then blam, they’re somewhere else in the middle of my screen. This happens mostly when I switch between my 23″ monitor and my laptop monitor between work and home. I’ve been through the plists, etc, and if I could fix it I would.

OH YEAH, and since I’m on a rant about nothing anyone cares about but me anyway, where the heck did Virtual CodeTek Virtual Desktop fall off the earth and go? The minute Tiger came out, they split and left the best virtual desktop app by far in the dust.

p.s. I used to hate iTerm.app cuz it was so slow. Then I used it cuz I got addicted to the tabs and the slowness just sort of became almost a non-issue. Now, they’re in psycho development mode, and it’s awesome. There’s even a dial for how fast vs. CPU you want to spend.

Jefe: I definitely understand what you’re getting at as far as wanting a way to save state on a persistent per-app basis. It’s something we’d like to do if we get the time.

As for CodeTek Virtual Desktops, my co-author used it and loved it as well. He’s got an Intel Mac now so he’s using Virtue instead and he’s pretty frustrated with it. Unfortunately, that’s often what happens when you rely on closed-source software.

It’s on my agenda to try iTerm again, but I have yet to find any cocoa-based terminal that matches an X11-based terminal for speed/memory footprint/CPU usage. Plus, I can use focus-follows-mouse between the terminal and my NEdit windows, which is a nice productivity boost.

Thanks for the comment!

this would be even more useful if after an unplanned restart, it could start up the apps from the last session. i really miss this feature from linux.

I really like “Forget Me Not” on our Windows XP computer..
but, awhile back I deleted the last note, and since then have not figured out any way to create a new note ?

And yes “Forget Me Not” is visible in the dock, but no obvious way from there to create a new note ?

Thanks

Les: Forget-Me-Not is a Mac OS X application that doesn’t run in Windows and has nothing to do with “notes” of any kind, so I think you’re probably looking for another website.

FMN doesn’t appear to work under Leopard — any chance of an update soon?
I can’t live without it!

@Mario – Yep, Leopard busted FMN a bit, but we’re working on it. Unfortunately it seems Apple introduced some new, eh, quirks into the main API that we use and we haven’t quite figured out how to work around them yet. Trust me, we feel your pain!

Thank you for writing FMN. It’s a total lifesaver when you have multimonitors (can’t believe Apple hasn’t done something about it on their own).

Hope you guys can get the API figured out soon.

@autumnist: I’m glad you like FMN. I’ve reported the relevant bugs to Apple and mentioned them on the quartz-dev mailing list, which is all we can do at this point. We have a version that sometimes mostly kinda works on Leopard, but it tends to occasionally leave windows *outside* the screen, so I’m a bit uneasy releasing it. If you build from the darcs repo you can try it out yourself.

Thank you for this great app that I have just discovered, and which seems to do exactly what I have been looking for.

However I still have a problem with my windows, which make FMN almost useless in my experience: I am running Tiger (10.4.11) and using VirtueDesktop with 6 desktops.
I have not performed extensive testing yet, but it looks like FMN does a very good job for the windows that are in the current destkop when I connect/disconnect my external screen, but fails to correctly rearrange the windows lying in other desktops (this observation is however variable according to the application considered).

Am I missing something, or is FMN actually unable to handle multiple desktops? (the latter hypothesis would be surprising as you describe the initial development of FMN as a plugin for Desktop Manager, and you say that your co-author is using VirtueDesktop…) (I have not tested FMN with Desktop Manager btw)

Thanks for any hint you will be able to provide.

FMN *should* handle multiple desktops just fine — we’re big virtual desktop users around here. What apps are you seeing problems with? Note that some apps are just problematic in general w.r.t. FMN.

Thank your for your reply.

I have made more tests (I am using a MBP 15″ and an external 23″ screen):

- *Without* VirtueDesktops, and with a dozen apps running (1 to 20 windows per app), when I connect the 23″, I can arrange the windows the way I want in the big screen, then disconnect the 23″ and everything returns just fine in the 15″ (OK, this is just what I expected from FMN – it has just failed once when I put the MBP to sleep *before* disconnecting the 23″, then all the windows were scrambled in the 15″ when I woke up the MBP, probably because FMN does its job when the screens are connected/disconnected “live”, but cannot do it when the computer is sleeping?)

- *With* VirtueDesktops, and *all* the windows in a single desktop: everything goes fine just like above. Now, if I switch to another desktop (which is therefore empty in the present test) *before* connecting the 23″, then I connect the 23″: all windows in the “main” desktop are still arranged just fine, BUT when I disconnect the 23″ (again with the empty desktop as the current one), then everything gets scrambled in the 15″ (and from there, if I connect the 23″ again, it gets scrambled too). When I say “everything”, I mean all windows from all open apps (i.e. iCal, Mail, Camino, Safari, Terminal, BBEdit, Papers, Pages, Keynote, TextEdit, Preview — not exotic apps!), except the Finder windows, which oddly enough fall back into place nicely.

One final – and perhaps critical – note: I have configured my multiple monitors in such a way that, when I connect the 23″, it becomes the master screen (i.e with the menu bar). Maybe everything would work better if I kept the MBP screen as the main screen (not tested), but this would require manually moving all the windows I want to work with in the 23″ – which is not super – and going back and forth between both screens whenever I want to access either a window or the menu bar…

Sorry for this long post, I did not know how to explain in a shorter way, and thank you for your help.

Any feedback on my previous post??

Thx!

I don’t really know what could be causing the problem. My labmate used FMN with VirtueDesktops for a long time and it didn’t have any trouble with the windows on other desktops. What version of FMN are you using? As long as you stick to the released versions (i.e. don’t build from the darcs repository) things should just work. OTOH, the last version of Tiger I used was 10.4.10 so I suppose it’s possible that Apple broke things in Tiger like they did in Leopard.

I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to devote much effort to solving this — I’m using Leopard now and FMN doesn’t even work for me at all.

I am using FMN 1.0.2 available on this site (and 10.4.11), nothing special.

Well, I guess I am stuck with my problem. I may try to track an hypothetical conflict with one of my startup or login items, I will let you know if I find something.

Just to make sure: can you confirm that changing the main screen from the small one (MBP) to the big one (external 23″) (or vice versa) is not relevant? (i.e. FMN should work just fine in both cases?)

Any hope that FMN will work with Leopard one day?

Thanks.

Nothing in FMN cares which screen is the main screen. I have always used my external monitor as the main screen when it’s connected and so has my labmate. One thing that might be interesting: which side is your laptop on relative to the 23″ monitor? We both put ours on the right, aligned at the bottom of the screen. This might be relevant because this configuration means there are no negative coordinates onscreen, and I’ve seen Apple’s code get freaked out by configurations with negative coordinates.

I’ve given up on FMN for Leopard, at least until I have a lot more free time. (In fact, I just wrote a note to that effect on the main FMN page.) Apple doesn’t seem to want to fix the problem that keeps it from working, so there’s not a lot I can do without a major rewrite, and even then I don’t see a way to do it without using haxie-like code injection techniques. I’m really quite annoyed by it but there’s not a lot I can do about it right now.

I tried almost everything: the MBP on every possible side of the external screen, all startup/login items or preference panes related to window handling disabled, earlier versions of VirtueDesktops (O.54 beta 2 to beta 5), and even Desktop Manager… no way to make FMN working fine in other desktops than the current one, I am giving up.

In a way, I will upgrade to Leopard with less regrets (I am stil waiting for other compatibility issues to be solved before) knowing that I will not loose the FMN features that have never worked for me
I am sad nevertheless to hear that there is no hope anymore to have a functional FMN with Leopard, I will fill a bug report at Apple to complain about the lack of this basic feature, which was perfectly working in Mac OS 8-9, as far as I can remember.

Thank you again anyway for FMN, and for having replied to all my queries.