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February 05, 2007

And Now I Can Go To Bed

I'm slightly anal about certain things.

This attention to detail manifests itself in many aspects of my life: how I lay out documents, how work processes I invent flow, the right punctuation for a blog post are just a few examples. It just has to feel exactly right, otherwise I'm completely unsettled. The worst for me is that I'll even stay up thinking about it.

One particular thing that bothered me since I've gotten my Mac was the lack of date indication on the menu bar. I was content at first, to leave it as a little cross to bear. That was until my RSS reader pointed me towards MagiCal. It seemed reasonable and was pretty much what I was looking for (I like the little icon that they use). The only problem that I had with it was the placement of the icon. It sits to the right of the system icons based on loading order. It's location was unacceptable to me! It doesn't seem like it's in a logical place – right next to the time. Slightly disappointed by this, I followed the other link in the TUAW post, that of MenuCalendarClock for iCal.

I thought MenuCalendarClock would be better. I thought there were two good things about the program right off the bat. I really liked one of the icons that they used for the menu bar date (the one drawn in the same style as the power icon) and I liked that I could choose which side I'd like the indicator to show – far right or far left. Both options, though initially positive didn't make the cut. The icon only showed the day and not the month, and the placement to the far right caused the power indicator icon to separate the system time from the date. I settled on doing away with the icon and using other functionality in the program to indicate time and date. I also turned off the system clock to keep from having two clocks in the menu bar. This change bugged me as well. I didn't like the font of MenuCalendarClock because it didn't match that of the actual system time.

My neurosis over the imperfections have kept me from sleeping tonight. They've been gnawing away at me slowly. I had to get up and do something about it. So after a bit of searching I found this explanation of how to display date in the OS X menu bar. It's perfect! The grouping of the date and time together, the matching system fonts, the spacing – It's all nice and neat!

Ah... relief.

Labels: Rant, Tech

Posted at 7:00 AM
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