But, as it turns out, I was wrong. The folks at ZURB created an awesome looking sliding vinyl demo using CSS 3, which I happened upon the other day while idly reading my RSS feeds in Socialite. Lo and behold, there it was. In the <h1>, Myriad Pro in all of it’s glory, with a CSS gradient mask and text-shadow to boot. What a nice surprise! They must have known 99.99% of their visitors would not have seen the font, rendering in Helvetica instead — maybe they just liked the way it looked in their own browsers? In any case, it made me smile.

The moral of the story is: having extra fonts on your computer makes almost no difference at all, and if you aren’t the type of person who would be made happy by a pretty font (i.e., if you aren’t a typography nerd, i.e., if you can’t tell the difference between Arial and Helvetica), then I would advise against it, as having too many fonts slows down your computer. Moving on.

As it turns out, there are a whole host of fonts that, for the above reason, are available to certain applications on Mac OS X, but not actually installed into the system-wide font library. I discovered this while looking for Palatino, which I knew was installed somewhere, but couldn’t find in my system fonts. I opened up Terminal.app, ran a simple locate -i palatino, and found exactly what I was looking for. This, however, opened up a whole new dimension to my search: hidden fonts in Mac OS X.

These little treats are literally littered all around the OS. To install them (as with all font files), you just double click on the icons, and Font Book will open up, with a dialogue asking you if you to confirm the installation.

If you have iWork installed, then in /Library/Application Support/Apple/Fonts/iWork, you will find lots of cool fonts that aren’t normally available to the rest of the OS. These include:

• Academy Engraved LET Fonts
• Bank Gothic
• Blackmoor LET Fonts
• BlairMdITC TT-Medium
• Bodoni Ornaments ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo OS ITC TT
• Bodoni SvtyTwo SC ITC TT
• Bordeaux Roman Bold LET Fonts
• Bradley Hand ITC TT-Bold
• Capitals
• Jazz LET Fonts
• Mona Lisa Solid ITC TT
• Palatino
• Party LET Fonts
• PortagoITC TT
• Princetown LET Fonts
• Santa Fe LET Fonts
• Savoye LET Fonts
• SchoolHouse Cursive B
• SchoolHouse Printed A
• Snell Roundhand
• Stone Sans ITC TT
• Synchro LET Fonts
• Type Embellishments One LET

Isn't this what they always use on college sweatshirts? Or is it sports uniforms?

Similarly, if you have iLife installed, there are a bunch of fonts that come with iDVD, not available to the rest of the system. These are in /Applications/iDVD.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts (Ctrl-Click on iDVD.app and select “Show Package Contents” to get there).

• Academy Engraved LET Fonts
• Algerian Condensed LET Fonts
• Bank Gothic
• BlairMdITC TT-Medium
• Bodoni SvtyTwo SC ITC TT
• Bradley Hand ITC TT-Bold
• Cracked
• Gadget
• Handwriting – Dakota
• Humana Serif ITC TT
• Machine ITC TT
• Palatino
• PortagoITC TT
• Santa Fe LET Fonts
• Savoye LET Fonts
• Snell Roundhand
• Stone Sans ITC TT
• Textile
• Wanted LET Fonts

Eight different versions of Lucida come with your standard installation of Java, but can only be found by going to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home/lib/fonts/ (again, with the “Show Package Contents” trick).

• LucidaBrightDemiBold
• LucidaBrightDemiItalic
• LucidaBrightItalic
• LucidaBrightRegular
• LucidaSansDemiBold
• LucidaSansRegular
• LucidaTypewriterBold
• LucidaTypewriterRegular

A font called Matrix Ticker is available in the ESPN widget, which is installed by default. It’s at /Library/Widgets/ESPN.wdgt/ESPNTicker.dfont.

Another two widget fonts, found inside the Unit Converter widget, are at /Library/Widgets/Unit Converter.wdgt/DB LCD Temp-Black.ttf and/Library/Widgets/Unit Converter.wdgt/UC-LCD.ttf. These are pretty cool, mimicking the look of a seven-segment display.

That’s all I have for now. Let me know in the comments if there are others you have discovered. The more fonts, the better! (Hey, if I’m going to have a mindless consumer attitude towards something, it might as well be something that takes up no physical space and uses no natural resources, right?)

How do you fail that hard? As one of the biggest software companies in the world? I won’t go on a rant about it, but I laughed out loud when I saw this, I thought I might as well share it with the world.

Download ACLr8 here.
Update: ACLr8 now has its own page here.

Finder File Menu: Return = Open

Sometimes I find myself very frustrated with even the smallest of UI annoyances, and with this little trick I discovered, I just fix them.

Requirements:

1. A computer running Mac OS X

2. A copy of the Apple Developer Tools (XCode, etc.)

3. Some inclination as to what the hell you are doing.

All you really have to do is open an Application’s folder (by ctrl-clicking on it and selecting “Show Package Contents”, navigate to Contents -> Resources,  find the appropriate .nib file, and open it with Interface Builder.app. Once that’s done, edit the file to your needs and save. Isn’t that easy?

As an example, I’ll go through the process of giving the Finder’s ‘Open’ menu item the Return keyboard shortcut. Normally this would be possible just by creating a new entry in System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts, but unfortunately Apple doesn’t let us use a single-key as a shortcut, (although something like cmd-Return would work).

Let’s start by finding the Finder in /System/Library/CoreServices/. Control-click on Finder.app and select Show Package Contents, giving you a new Finder window.

Now open Contents then Resources. Since my computer is in English, I opened English.lproj (sometimes called en.lproj in other apps). Then find the item Menus.nib. Although on a normal application we could just open it, since the Finder is located in /System we’ll have to copy it somewhere else, edit it there, and then copy it back. So drag Menus.nib to your desktop, and then open it. (You might want to duplicate the .nib before editing it, just to have a backup somewhere.)

Click the File menu item you’ll see (in the Tiger menu bar style), and select ‘Open’. Bring up the Attributes Inspector (cmd-1 or through the Window menu). From there you can edit or clear the keyboard equivalent, just select the box and press Return!

Now save it, drag the Menus.nib file from your Desktop back into the English.lproj folder, authenticate with an administrator username and password, and Relaunch the Finder. Congratulations, you now have your own custom Finder.app.

Feel free to play around with this trick as much as you like, and let me know if you do anything cool with it. I have been for a while, and nothing terrible has happened to me yet. That having been said, I take no responsibility for any unknown dark powers you may evoke whilst exploring the unfathomable inner depths of your computer. Watch out for Balrogs.