There are dozens of applications that will place information and/or icons in the top menu bar (many of which are on this list, which is by now a little bit dated - there are many more such apps now). But why, oh why, is there no way to place those icons in a specific order and have them stay there?
You can drag icons around in the dock to your heart’s delight, and even off the dock to watch them go “poof” (which is just a little too appealing to some children - we suspect more than one parent has discovered an empty dock, because one of their offspring was having so much fun dragging the icons and watching them explode! But at least you can put the dock icons in the order you want them). But the top menu bar items can only be moved if they do not produce a drop-down menu when you click on them, and even if they don’t react when you click on them, that doesn’t guarantee that they will be moveable, nor that they will forever stay put at their current location.
For the small percentage of top menu bar icons that can be moved, you can hold down the Command key, then click and drag. But try this on an item that produces a drop-down menu, or otherwise intercepts mouse clicks for its own purposes, and it just isn’t going to work. Thus, we put up with a disorganized top menu bar, with icons in no particular order.
The thing is, if we reboot the system the icons usually reappear in exactly the same spot, so there’s got to be something, somewhere that determines the order in which they appear. But what, exactly? We doubt that Indiana Jones could discover the preference file or other mechanism that controls the order of these little beasties.
You’d think that by now some Mac software author that has an obsessive-compulsive streak (like Monk, the fictional TV detective) would have figured out how to reorder the icons and would have published the details, or even some software to assist in the process. But noooo….. So, we figure this must be something buried deep in the bowels of OS X. Otherwise, how could it possibly be that utilities that will allow you to tweak the dock seem to be a dime a dozen, but there is nothing out there that allows even the most basic reconfiguration of the top menu bar (including the icons that won’t move in response to Command-Click + drag)? If there is, we sure haven’t stumbled across it, and that unordered top menu bar is what’s making us crabby this week.
We haven’t seen too many episodes of Monk, but we suspect he’d hate the Mac, or at least this aspect of it. We know, because we’re a little OCD too, and this drives us right up the wall!
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The weekend is upon us again, and with the record high price of car-go-zoom juice, a lot of folks here in the CrabApple Forest are looking for ways to keep ourselves amused without driving too far. There are games that just pass the time, and then there are games that make you think. Reversi, also known as Othello, definitely falls into the latter category. It’s an easy game to learn, but you’re not going to master it in a single weekend!
Here’s how Wikipedia describes the game:
Reversi and Othello are names for an abstract strategy board game which involves play by two parties on an eight-by-eight square grid with pieces that have two distinct sides. Pieces typically appear coin-like, but with a light and a dark face, each side representing one player. The object of the game is to make your pieces constitute a majority of the pieces on the board at the end of the game, by turning over as many of your opponent’s pieces as possible.
For more information on the game, including the rules of play, see the Wikipedia article on Reversi.
If you’ve never played Othello as a board game, it’s probably because all that manual chip-flipping can get pretty tedious, and few people have the patience for it. Of course, when computers came along, it became possible to let the computer do the chip-flipping, so the players could concentrate on the game, and that brought about a revival of interest. And, as it turns out, a computer can make a pretty good Othello opponent, in case you’re stuck at home alone and feel like playing something a bit more challenging than solitaire.
That’s where MacIago comes in. MacIago is a freeware Othello/Reversi style board game for Mac OS X.
The MacIago options are shown here:
And if you don’t like the appearance of the board, there are a handful of plugins that can be downloaded to change it.
How good a game does MacIago play? Well, it could beat BigCrab, but then that’s not sayin’ much. We think that unless you are some sort of Othello master, you’ll find it a worthwhile opponent. And we like the fact that the difficulty level can be changed, so that if you’re teaching the game to the kids they won’t become frustrated because they always lose.
The only option that we think the game is missing is to flip the chips individually, in slow motion, so you can see exactly what’s being turned. Right now it just flips all the chips at once, so you are often left with that “What just happened?” feeling. Another nice option might be the ability to go back a turn or two - not only would that be helpful when you are learning the game, so you can see the relative effects of various possible moves, but also it would give you an opportunity to see exactly what changed in the last move. Even if you could simply click a button or hold down a key and have it highlight the chips that were flipped on the last turn, that would be helpful.
Even so, we think that MacIago is a great way to stretch your mind, and you can’t beat the price. So, what’s your favorite Mac OS X freeware game? Tell us in the comments and maybe we’ll review it in an upcoming post.
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