One thing that I'm really enjoying about the Macintosh is the abundance of small responsive developers. Take my more recent experience: I've been getting more and more reluctant to disconnect the PowerBook and work outside my office. The reason? I'm using a big 21" (1856x1392) monitor in the office. When I "undock", all of my windows move into semi-reasonable positions (but not sizes) for a 1280x854 display. So there's a bunch of time that I waste to rearrange and resize all the windows. When I "re-dock" I have to the same thing to get back to optimality for the big screen. This is compounded by the fact that I'm using virtual desktops. What I need is something that rearranges and resizes the windows based on the presence or absence of an external display. This being a Macintosh, I figured that this was exactly the kind of job for AppleScript (I suppose you could argue that this is a feature request for CodeTek Virtual Desktop, but I don't believe so). So I started looking for a way for AppleScript to figure out how many displays there were. I wasn't having much luck, and figured that I was going to have to write a scripting extension that could talk to Cocoa/Carbon and get the job done myself. I even went as far as downloading an Apple Code sample.

Tuesday I came across Extra Suites which is a package of scripting extensions that can do all sorts of stuff. One of the extensions lets you get information about the screen - dimensions, etc. Alas, It only worked for a single display. I say worked, because late Tuesday night I sent e-mail off the the Kanzu e-mail address, asking about multiple display support. Wednesday morning when I sat down in front of my machine, there was a prerelease of Extra Suites 1.0.2 that contained a new command to count the number of displays, and the screen info command had been extended to take the display number as a parameter. I'm not sure I've gotten such quick response from an open source project... Needless to say, the $10 for Extra Suites is less than the cost of the relevant Cocoa books and the time and hassle of figuring out how to do this myself.

So the next step is for me to figure out enough AppleScript to write a window layout script that can position the relevant windows (I have a standard setup) according to the display configuration. They'll even (mostly) be on the right virtual desktop, because CodeTek Virtual desktop can switch desktops from AppleScript -- I have a request in to them to move single windows across virtual desktops -- maybe in the next release. Once I get that going, Kanzu is going to get my $10. It's just a small matter of time and programming.