My computer has blue balls!

F

freaky

OSXer
Ah! My computer has blue balls (or ball actually). I ran a few updates and installed Cocktail and Firebird, changed a few of the settings in Cocktail and after I restarted there's this big blue ball on my desktop. I have no idea what it is or what it's doing but I can't get rid of it. I can just move it around and if I click Option then click the ball it makes my desktop darker.

Can somebody tell me what this is and how I can get rid of it? Unless, it's doing some good. :)
 
That's part of expose, the 'blob', a hidden setting that you enabled. Open Cocktail, and disable the change you made to expose, should be 'Show Expose Blob'
 
It puts a blue ball on your desktop :)
But you already know that!
The blob is an on-screen controller for Expose functions. I've never heard any good comments about its usefulness.
Do you like it? leave it, otherwise turn it back off.
 
I turned it off. I couldn't figure out how to do anything with it no matter what I clicked so it seemed to me like it was just taking up extra space for nothing. Kinda strange they don't have any docs on it either.
 
freaky said:
Kinda strange they don't have any docs on it either.
Click to expand...

If Apple has something turned off with no way (no Apple way) of turning it back on, why would you think they would include documentation on it? :confused:

I would think it would be kinda strange if you did find anything on it.
 
I was referring to Cocktail, the app that has the blue ball thingy I was referring to. What good does it do to enable something that only has the word "Expose" and nothing about what it means or what it does? You'd think the creators of Cocktail would say what it did.
 
freaky said:
You'd think the creators of Cocktail would say what it did.
Click to expand...

Cocktail isn't for the faint of heart. What it does is basically hack the system. If you don't know what something is, then you most likely shouldn't be enabling it with Cocktail.

Remember, Cocktail isn't adding anything that wasn't already there to begin with. You just get the ability to activate those items.

It is sort of like the old saying about giving some one enough rope...
 
There's a lot of internal settings in OS X that aren't for the casual user, such as networking settings. You can really screw up your system, and the documentation is not simple.
I have read that expose is related to an earlier feature (not publicly enabled, either) that allowed mini-icons for open apps to be pulled off the dock. Probably too confusing for a lot of users, and the feature probably migrated into expose.
Disk journalling is another feature that showed up as an available option (but not in Apple's software settings outside of the terminal or 3rd party utils) , and is now enabled by default. Apple tests lots of features that are not enabled, but most can be tried out. Some work better than others, the blob is one that's a little questionable...
 
DeltaMac said:
That's part of expose, the 'blob', a hidden setting that you enabled. Open Cocktail, and disable the change you made to expose, should be 'Show Expose Blob'
Click to expand...

I just upgraded a G4 to Panther 10.3.3 via Archive & Install. As I was enabling various utilities I thought I got the BLUE BALL too. In my case it seems I was trying out a newer version of DragThing 5.1. A Blue Ball (spot) with a number appeared on the desktop TRASH can Dragthing installs by option. In the Blue Spot it displays a number, the number of items in the unemptied TRASH. On emptying the TRASH the number and Blue Spot disappeared.

Just you know. Took me a while to figure my Blue Spot out.
 
I turned the Blob off when I first got this thang (G5 iMac) but it reappeared after yesterday's "security update."

How... Microsoftish.. to undo what the User's chosen to set.

I'm annoyed.
 
freaky said:
What does it do by enabling it?
Click to expand...
I had the big blue ball too, found when I clicked it, the windows in the front application would highlight and the rest of the screen would be dark, like pushing F10

Think I used MacHelp Mate to turn it off
 
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