Alternatives to Application Enhancer?

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WonderFool

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For the record, I did search for this topic around here, but I got mostly topics dealing with "Application" or "Enhancer" and not "Application Enhancer".

Some of the senior experts here seem to suggest generally avoiding APE because it seems to be invisibly tied to system instability. In my experience, I would have to agree - I had been blaming some instability on a freeware for Safari called Stand (or was it SafariStand?), which I would like to believe is not guilty, though really I don't know. I had been getting "Unexpectedly Quit" errors frequently, but not since I got rid of Metallifizer and Slider (APE Modules).

That said, getting rid of them left my system kinda weird. Safari, a brushed metal app (if I remember right), has the white look. (See below). I don't like the white look, but even before that I would rather not have 3 different looks - brushed metal, white, and the newer itunes 5 Smooth metal look. It gets really messed up, because everything is relative - brushed metal is relatively heavy and complex looking, and the white look is relatively washed-out. The Smooth look is my preference, but obviously very little is made to look like that. I am told the pro apps have a different look, which is great for them - I have some 3rd party apps that look different too but they are not the norm and I don't care.

Let me cut it short here before I bore you further with my aesthetic choices. I want to fix some of the apps APE's metallifizer left metallifized, and I want to know if there is something out there that can unify the apps without using APE. Preferably, I'd like to make them all (or most) the Smooth look.

That, and, any insight concerning APE would be appreciated! (For example, is there an alternative to ClearDock?)
 

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WonderFool said:
That, and, any insight concerning APE would be appreciated! (For example, is there an alternative to ClearDock?)
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I use Transparent Dock, Donationware/8$ Shareware to get the, well transparent Dock and some other bonus features. I can recommend it.

Referring to the APE question, I'd like to wait for more insightful persons than I am…

Greetings!
 
I don't think there's anything inherently unstable about APE. It's that anything that uses it has the potential to screw things up. There are other things, like SIMBL, that can be used to accomplish many of the same tasks — but their plugins come with stability risks, as well. (I'm also not aware of any SIMBL-based answers to your particular need, although there might be some out there.)

There are also more direct OS hacks, like Iridium and Shapeshifter (neither of which I've ever used at length, so I can't vouch for them). But IMO the risk is even greater with that kind of approach, since they don't try to provide isolation like APE and SIMBL do.
 
I've been using APE since I started using OS X. I have never had any problems. I don't use much, just FruitMenu and ClearDock.
 
virius said:
I use Transparent Dock, Donationware/8$ Shareware to get the, well transparent Dock and some other bonus features. I can recommend it.
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Thanks for that. I'll check it out as soon as I can. Like bobw was saying, I never had problems with cleardock specifically, though the other APE modules i was using seemed to be the root of some app-crashing. I figure since ClearDock isn't supposed to mess with anything but the dock, I will leave it unless Transparent Dock offers the same features. Got to go try it.

Come to think of it, there were some occasions trying to call up the dock (I have it on the option that it pops up when you put the mouse down there), it would fail to come up for a really long time. No response, like there was no dock. Switching users and such fixes it usually. Maybe another problem I wouldn't have if I didn't use APE? I don't want to blame just anything on APE, but if the mishaps go away when I get rid of it, I consider that enough evidence, and getting rid of Metallifizer/Slider seemed to help.
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Shapeshifter and such look a bit overboard for me, and anyway it uses APE (right?) so I don't really want to venture there. I don't really want customizability so much, basically because I'm pretty happy with what I've got. I just wish that I could unify all the themes to the Smooth itunes look.

And I forgot to mention...I would prefer freeware, though I would pay to get a unified Smooth look, if I had to. I haven't found any such thing though, and I was wondering if it is even possible? (Like for Finder?)
 
I'm certainly one of those advising NOT to use APE. I'm sure there *are* users like bobw who have no problems with APE and the modules they're using. Problem is that too often I've found people with strange problems suddenly having very good experiences with their Macs once they got rid of APE and all its modules.
I'm aware of the fact that unsanity tries its best to update APE and the modules often to keep the inconsisencies, bugs (which are known to do anything from "unexpectedly quitting" apps to kernel panics!) and instabilities to a minimum. But I guess a system without APE just is inherently less prone to those instabilities.

So: I'd try looking on macupdate.com and versiontracker.com for APE-less replacements for the tasks you're achieving with APE modules, currently. Maybe in order to put things right about those metallified apps, you'll first have to activate it again and turn it off correctly for the apps you've applied it to.

I've personally had good results with theme changers _other_ than ShapeShifter (APE) and metallifier (APE). Then again, Mac OS X updates regularly overwrite the installed themes, and replacing the original theme _is_ kinda like open heart surgery, so I've moved away from it in the past two years. Now I live with Apple's choices and only grumble sometimes about them. I'm hoping that with Mac OS X 10.5, we'll see the different looks _gone_ and the OS move to an improved version of the unified look.
 
Mikuro said:
I don't think there's anything inherently unstable about APE. It's that anything that uses it has the potential to screw things up. There are other things, like SIMBL, that can be used to accomplish many of the same tasks — but their plugins come with stability risks, as well. (I'm also not aware of any SIMBL-based answers to your particular need, although there might be some out there.)

There are also more direct OS hacks, like Iridium and Shapeshifter (neither of which I've ever used at length, so I can't vouch for them). But IMO the risk is even greater with that kind of approach, since they don't try to provide isolation like APE and SIMBL do.
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I'm not sure I know enough to follow you, but I think I get the general idea. Iridium, however, looks interesting, though I'll have to check it out later. Thank you. I might try it and see if it makes anything unstable, as you say the risk is higher. Only, just looking at their site, it seems to be the white-ish look only? Still, all white is better than all mingled i guess. Sure wish they'd settle on Smooth.
 
WonderFool said:
Come to think of it, there were some occasions trying to call up the dock (I have it on the option that it pops up when you put the mouse down there), it would fail to come up for a really long time. No response, like there was no dock.
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This sounds perfectly like the Dock crashed and took a while to be automatically restarted.
 
Thinking back about the problems I've helped people with, I've seen far more problems with people that have upgraded their systems, that is from 10.2 to 10.3, 10.3 to 10.4. People that reformat the drive before installing a new system (myself included) don't seem to have nearly as many problems.
 
Guess I was pretty lucky, as I had no other option but to Upgrade to Tiger on my ancient BondiMac. The only things I lost were my CandyBar icons and some 3rd party settings and registrations... also LabelsX had to be relaunched like a zillion times before it became active.

I think a lot of the problems some users experience with APE has to do with where they have the modules installed. Unsanity gives you the choice Install for This User Only or Install for All Users; it is possible to end up with conflicting APEs in different libraries. Once I resolved this issue on my own Mac all of my Unsanity modules worked okay. There is just one problem though with some ShapeShifter themes not behaving too well, especially in Tiger. Not only do they take a longer time to initialize, but they can slow down apps such as Safari and really mess up the menubar. Fortunately for me, my favorite SS theme, X-Metal, still works quite well. It has a matte metal appearance with burnished buttons and the only flaw I have found in it so far is that it kinda jumbles the minimized iTunes. But simply putting iTunes in SS's Exclude list solved that problem. Here's a little screen shot in case any one else might be interested in this classy, smooth theme.
 

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fryke said:
This sounds perfectly like the Dock crashed and took a while to be automatically restarted.
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Sometimes I think that's what it is. Other times it lags on its way to appear or to hide, even though the machine actually isn't busy (it can do it with no apps open). I haven't seen it too often recently though. Just wondered if that kind of thing is common?
 
bobw said:
Thinking back about the problems I've helped people with, I've seen far more problems with people that have upgraded their systems, that is from 10.2 to 10.3, 10.3 to 10.4. People that reformat the drive before installing a new system (myself included) don't seem to have nearly as many problems.
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Thanks, that sounds like something I should do. But, reformatting the drive would wipe out my data, right? I should save up for an external hard drive to copy everything before upgrading... or does it work differently? It sounds like a lot of things may be involved in my original problem. I do repair disk permissions every now and then, but that's about it....
 
Mikuro said:
There are also more direct OS hacks, like Iridium and Shapeshifter (neither of which I've ever used at length, so I can't vouch for them). But IMO the risk is even greater with that kind of approach, since they don't try to provide isolation like APE and SIMBL do.
Click to expand...

Okay, I tried Iridium. So far, so good. It isn't quite the iTunes 5 smooth look, but it's close enough for me. Unfortunately, I think the iWork 06 look was the same as the iTunes 5 look, so Iridium wasn't welcome on Pages and Keynote, but hey, I'm satisfied since it's pretty close (the biggest con being that it killed the aqua stripes)...so long as this doesn't cause foul-ups. (I do think Apple will move all the consumer level apps to be the smooth look in 10.5, although maybe they'll surprise everybody by providing other choices...)

As for Shapeshifter, I'm going to try Transparent Dock and see how that works. If it works well enough, I want to get rid of APE entirely, and I'm not all that into full-fledged theming, especially when most of the themes deviate from the neutral colors.

Thanks everyone! I think my problem is mostly solved, if Transparent Dock works OK.
 
WonderFool said:
Sometimes I think that's what it is. Other times it lags on its way to appear or to hide, even though the machine actually isn't busy (it can do it with no apps open). I haven't seen it too often recently though. Just wondered if that kind of thing is common?
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It was very common for me before I upgraded my RAM. It took about 30 seconds to appear or hide most of the time, because any application that was active between then and the last time I showed/hid it forced it to page its showing/hiding routine out of memory. It was the same with Dashboard. After half an hour or so of typical use, these things would need to load almost entirely from disk again. Pain in the rear, let me tell you. I haven't experienced this since upgrading from 256MB to 1GB, though. If you have 512MB, I wouldn't be surprised if it happened every now and then, although I wouldn't expect it to be as common or severe as I described.

WonderFool said:
Thanks, that sounds like something I should do. But, reformatting the drive would wipe out my data, right? I should save up for an external hard drive to copy everything before upgrading... or does it work differently?
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Yes, it would wipe out your data, so you'd need to do a MAJOR back-up first. You'd also probably want to come back with a clean OS installation, meaning you'd need to reinstall all sorts of third-party things and spend some time importing your old personal settings and files, which can be a hassle.

IMO, it's not worth going to the trouble of reformatting your drive if you intend to just dump your old system right back. It would probably help performance, but it would probably NOT fix any real bugs in the system. So I'd either reformat AND do a clean install or just leave it as is.
 
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