Solipsism Gradient

OK, I found out why Klicko apparently wasn’t running on the PowerPC test machine; accessibility was turned off there, and I forgot to check for it.

So I pushed out a second beta of Klicko. Please reload if you got the older one. Sorry…

And yes, it’s sort of inspired by Wilhelm Busch‘s line:

Wie lieb und luftig perlt die Blase/ Der Witwe Klicko in dem Glase!

(also quoted here.)

Yesterday I, for the N+1th time, was annoyed at Mac OS X’s click-through behavior. I’m not the only one (see also here, and a follow-up). Basically, I have several apps in the Finder’s toolbar, and I constantly find myself either starting one of them by mistake, or losing the selected folder by accidentally clicking in the sidebar. Yes, easily recoverable, but annoying. I’d also like to have it off in other apps.

So I finally sat down yesterday evening and did something about it. The result is Klicko (click on the link to download the beta). Just run it, and click-through will be disabled for all apps while it’s running. You can set it to start at login; quit to return to the old behavior.

Yes, I know. The icon isn’t too good; suggestions are welcome. This is basically thrown together over a few hours, and I wanted first to get it out and see if others find it useful.

Niceties: while it’s running, shift- or command-clicks will get passed through as usual, if you do want click-through at that moment. It does NOT inject code, hack running applications, or do any magic like that; it just intercepts clicks (or not, depending on the click).

Problems: this is a beta version. It might run on 10.4 (Tiger); the APIs were already there, but I’m not sure if they worked OK. I don’t have a Tiger system anymore, so I can’t test it. It’s a Universal app so it should run on PowerPC Macs, since there’s no machine-dependent code I can see; but in a brief test I ran on my sole remaining PowerPC machine (a venerable PowerBook G4), it didn’t work at all. I’ll be trying to debug it there over the weekend.

Meanwhile, on Intel Macs running Leopard, this should work. Bug reports welcome…