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Monday's Mac Gadget
For years, the QuickDraw component of Mac OS provided common display and printing functionality to applications. Like many other things Apple, this was revolutionary at the time, but as the years passes, has come to show its age. Fortunately, Mac OS X includes a new model called Quartz, which provides cool features like text smoothing and anti-aliasing. Unfortunately, this is only available to Cocoa (not Carbon) applications, until now... Silk is a "haxie" or hack for OS X that will convince Carbon applications to use the Quartz smoothing and anti-aliasing features normally available to Cocoa applications. This is good news since lots of vendors have chosen the less time-consuming route of rewriting their application under Carbon, so that it will run under both Mac OS 9 and X.
Silk is a preference pane, and is made available under the System Preferences of OS X. The first panel allows you to enable Silk, and to further specify if loaded during login. This pane also helps identify applications that could benefit from Silk; by dragging an application icon over the pane, it will tell you if the application is Carbon or Cocoa. Of course, if it is a Cocoa application, Silk will provide no benefit. The other pane will let you exclude certain application from being helped by Silk, since due to its "haxie" nature, may not work predictably with all applications. So make your Mac text look its best, and try out Silk today! Have any other Mac Gadgets that make your Mac look good? Just send an e-mail to John, and he'll check it out.
Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you with those cool things that we all just have to have on our Macs. Shareware, Freeware, Postcardware, Emailware, and even commercial apps, Monday's Mac Gadget is here to help you find and use the best of these programs. John is a software engineer who works in the corporate R&D group of a Fortune 500 company, focusing on all aspects of communications technology. He has several degrees that claim he knows what he's doing when it comes to computers. After watching co-workers reinstall Windows, search for device drivers, and experience other horrors during the day, he's glad that he comes home to a Mac (compatible) computer. Have any comments, suggestions, or favorite Gadgets? Drop John a line at You can also Post Your Comments below. Current Monday's Mac Gadget
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