cody krieger's blog

Alright. So there have been a lot of people contacting me saying that they don’t like the “d” over the “n” that gfxCardStatus used to show when the NVIDIA GPU was active on 2010 MacBook Pros. If you’re one of those people, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset anyone. Consistency is one of my main goals, and moving toward a standardized icon system is one of the ways I was trying to do just that.

The good news is that you can actually change it back yourselves! Just follow these steps:

• Control click on gfxCardStatus.app and hit “Show Package Contents”
• Go to Contents > Resources
• Delete or rename discrete-3.png and discrete-3-white.png to something else
• Rename nvidia-3.png and nvidia-3-white.png to discrete-3.png and discrete-3-white.png

Now, instead of showing the “d,” gfxCardStatus will proudly show an “n” once again when your discrete GPU is active.

UPDATE: gfxCardStatus user Kevin (in the comments) has created an “a” icon for those with new 2011 MacBook Pros! Grab them here: http://cl.ly/2v3g1q050S3z0f3i1P3I

Thanks for your feedback, everyone!

ck

I’m excited to announce that 2011 MacBook Pros have joined the ranks of systems that are compatible with gfxCardStatus!

As usual, just hit Check for Updates or download manually from the gfxCardStatus website. Also, take a look at the release notes for some important information.

Comments, suggestions and general feedback are always welcome in the comments or via email (cody at codykrieger dot com).

What are you waiting for? Go get it!

ck

So! As you may have noticed, I recently completely overhauled my blog. New design, new backend (GitHub Pages + Jekyll), and new comment system (Disqus). I’m working on migrating comments over from Posterous right now, so those should be back up soon.

Jekyll is a static page generator written in Ruby. It does a fantastic job at making blogging a breeze without the need for something like WordPress or Posterous, and with GitHub Pages, you don’t have to drop a dime on hosting it anywhere. It is very simple, and that leads to what is my only real complaint about it: there is no good way to automagically generate posts. That is, there wasn’t, until I wrote a neat little script to do it for me! Here it is:

Just drop that file in the root of your Jekyll site, and use it like this: “./newpost.rb POST TITLE” (the title may contain any number of spaces and characters as you want - the script utilizes the String#parameterize function from Rails, which will replace spaces and special characters). For example, if you run:

./newpost.rb My Test Post

That will generate a file in your posts folder with a name like “2011-02-11-my-test-post.markdown.” The post is generated based off of a markdown template, called “template.markdown,” in the root of your Jekyll site. Mine looks like this:

If you want to use an HTML or Textile template, just rename “template.markdown” to “template.html_or_textile” and change the TEMPLATE constant in newpost.rb to “template.html_or_textile”.

Happy Jekyll-ing!

ck

My newest endeavor into OS X development! Just submitted to the Mac App Store today, pending review.

Super simple, no-frills JavaScript and CSS minification and obfuscation. That's Compressify! Check out its dedicated page on my website here: http://codykrieger.com/compressify

If you're willing to write an honest review, hit me up via email (cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com), and I'll hook you up with a review copy once Compressify is released!

Until next time, ladies and gents!

ck

Ladies and gentlemen! gfxCardStatus v2.0 has been officially released! Please check out the release notes for the full list of changes (there are a lot). The biggest thing to note is that 9400M/9600M GT users now have power source-based switching! A host of bugfixes were put in place, and I'm also proud to announce that gfxCardStatus is now localized in 11 languages (including English)! Thanks to everyone who has sent in localizations! If you would like to translate gfxCardStatus into another language, get in touch with me (cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com).

Hit "Check for Updates" or go download it manually from the gfxCardStatus website! http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus

As usual, please let me know of any issues that you encounter via email (cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com), or in the comments!

ck

As you may have noticed, my website just got a major overhaul. It's much cleaner and easier on the eyes than it once was. It even looks great in lynx. Please let me know if anyone has any issues with broken links or missing content. General feedback is also welcome at cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com, or via the comments. :) Thanks!

ck

P.S. - The next gfxCardStatus v2.0 beta will be out in the next couple days. Follow me on Twitter (@codykrieger) to see the news when it breaks!

It's available now! Please hit 'Check for updates' in the gfxCardStatus menu or manually download it from its home page at http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/

I'd also encourage you to please view the release notes here, they're important!

Comments and suggestions welcome via comment or email! cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com

ck

What?! Another release already?! You bet. I made a rather stupid mistake that made gfxCardStatus crash upon building the dependency list at times. This update fixes the issue.

Please update at your leisure by hitting 'Check for updates' in the menu, or downloading it manually from my website. Release notes are available here: http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/releasenotes/1.8.1.html

Email and comments are welcome for questions and suggestions! My email address is cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com.

ck

You may have noticed v1.7.5 has been released! Included are some bugfixes (namely the one where the GPU would sometimes switch back to the 330M after all dependent apps had quit while on Intel Only mode), and the ability to have it recall the last mode you used before quitting on startup. A full list of changes is available here.

If you haven't already downloaded it, you can go get it here!

As usual, please leave a comment on this post or drop me a line with any comments, concerns or questions. My email address is cody [at] codykrieger [dot] com.

Thanks!

ck

That's right! v1.7 has been released! Full support for indicating status of 9400M/9600M GT systems (as well as the switching that worked before) is built in to v1.7.

The rest of the users on i5/i7 systems will see three new things: Intel Only mode, NVIDIA Only mode, and Dynamic Switching mode. The first two are obvious, and the latter hands dynamic switching control back to OS X. I have also completely eliminated the delay associated with opening the menu bar item when the dependent process list was being generated, while the 330M was the active GPU. Cool, huh?!

Go get it! Let me know if you run into any issues. I'm aware of the bug where it occasionally switches back to the 330M when you're on Intel Only mode and you quit all apps that would normally use the 330M. This will be fixed in a maintenance release in the future.

Have fun!

ck