Customizing Program Switcher

Program Switcher’s control panel allows you to customize several aspects of Program Switcher’s operation.

First, you may assign Program Switcher’s activator and switching keys. This feature is helpful if you use an application that has assigned a meaning already to a particular keystroke that Program Switcher may use. To set your keys, use the pop-up menus under the Control Keys heading in the control panel.

Second, you may set Program Switcher to automatically hide any applications you may have open in the background after you have switched to your chosen application. This convenient feature eliminates the repetitive task of having to select the “Hide Others” item in the application menu each time you switch to a new application. To enable the feature, check the Hide Other Applications box in the control panel. If you want to hide your background applications every time you switch to a new one, regardless of whether or not you use Program Switcher to perform the switch, check the Always box next to Hide Other Applications.

Next, if you use an application to perform a background task and know that you will rarely want to switch to it, e.g., an application based screen saver, you may have Program Switcher exclude it from the switching list displayed by Program Switcher. To do this, check the Exclude Certain Applications box in the control panel and click on the Set Applications… button. Program Switcher will display a dialog in which you may add the application to the list of applications you wish to exclude.

The next two buttons, Set Advanced Options… and Set Power Keys…, allow you to configure some of Program Switcher’s more advanced features. See the sections entitled Advanced Options and Power Keys below for more information.

Finally, at the bottom of the Program Switcher control panel is a button entitled Register Program Switcher. After you have paid your shareware fee using the Register program included in the Program Switcher archive, you will receive registration information that will include your name, customer number, and password. Once you receive it, click on the Register Program Switcher button and enter the information into the dialog, which will appear like this:

NOTE: Be sure to enter the information exactly as it is sent to you, or your registration will fail. This includes the spelling and capitalization of your name. Once you have entered the proper information, click on the Register button to fully register your copy of Program Switcher. Be sure to save your registration information, as you will need to re-enter it if you change computers or rebuild your system folder.

Advanced Options

Program Switcher has several advanced options that you may set to further customize the appearance of its display window and aspects of its switching operations. To set them, click on the Set Advanced Options… button in the Program Switcher control panel. The following dialog will appear:

Under the Display Window Options heading, you may select the font and font size of the display window’s text and choose the type of window you want displayed by using the pop-up menus. You also may select the window’s background color by clicking on the Set Window Color... button. 

If you want the currently selected application highlighted in the display window using the system highlight color (as set in the Colors control panel) and bound by a black frame, check the Use System Hilite Color box. Please note that this option is not available if the “Original” switching method is selected (see Switching Options below). 

If you have Kaleidoscope™ version 1.5 or later installed, Program Switcher is able to use the current color scheme for its display window. If you would like Program Switcher to honor the current Kaleidoscope™ color scheme, check the Use Kaleidoscope Color Scheme box.

If you want the display window to appear under or near the current location of your mouse’s pointer, check the Place Under Mouse box. If this option is not selected, by default, the window will appear centered near the top of your screen.

Under the Switching Options header, there is a pop-up menu that will allow you to choose the switching, or display, method you would like Program Switcher to use. There are six different switching methods. The first is the “Original” method. This method contains the name and icon of only one application at a time in the display window, which looks like this:

The second method is called the “Large Icon List.” It shows you a horizontal list of the running applications’ icons with a box drawn around the currently selected application’s icon. Below the icons, the name of selected application will appear. The “Large Icon List” display window looks like this:

The third method is called the “Small Icon List.” It is the same as the “Large Icon List” method, except the icons in the horizontal list are smaller, and the selected application’s large icon will appear next to its name at the bottom of the window. The “Small Icon List” display window looks like this:

The fourth method is called the “Small Vertical List.” It allows you to see both the icons and names of all the running applications at once by displaying them in a vertical list. Each application’s small icon will appear next to its name with a box drawn around the currently selected application. The “Small Vertical List” display window looks like this:

The fifth method is called the “Large Vertical List.” It is the same as the “Small Vertical List” method, except each application’s large icon is used. The “Large Vertical List” display window looks like this:

The sixth and seventh methods are called the “Small Memory Usage List” and “Large Memory Usage List.” These method is very similar to the “Vertical List” methods, but they also includes information on the current memory usage of each running application. In addityion to the application name, these mthods provide a number indicating the current memory partition for that application. The bar next to the partition number indicates how much of that partition is already used up by the application. The “Large Memory Usage List” looks like this (with Kaleidoscope's "Apple Grayscale" color theme active):

And the “Small Memory Usage List” looks like this (with Kaleidoscope's "Onyx" color theme active):

In order for the large icon to appear next to the selected application’s name in the “Original” and “Small Icon List” display windows, the box labeled Show Application Icon, under the Switching Method option, must be checked. If it is not checked, Program Switcher will not display the currently selected application’s large icon for these two methods. This option does not affect the “Large Icon List” method since that method does not display the selected application’s icon next to its name. The “Small Icon List” display window will look like this if the Show Application Icon box is not checked:

The next option you may set under the Switching Options header is the icon cache size. Every time Program Switcher displays an application’s icon, it must first access the desktop database to obtain it. This causes your hard drive to “chatter” when you switch applications and slows down the switching process. To minimize this slowdown, Program Switcher has an icon cache that will save the icons in RAM after they are obtained from the desktop database. Saving the icons will speed up any future use of that particular icon. The number of icons that Program Switcher will save in RAM is the number that you set for the Icon Cache Size. It should represent the number of different applications that you may use on your Macintosh in one session. Please note that this feature causes your System’s memory heap to increase by about 3K for each icon in the cache. Therefore, you should set this option as low as you find practical. The feature is particularly useful when you are on a PowerBook and are trying to cut down on the number of hard drive accesses.

Fourth under the Switching Options header is the box labeled Enable Auto-Key. It allows you to enable or disable Program Switcher’s auto-key feature. To enable the feature, check the box. Then when you are performing a switch, press and hold down your activator and switching key combo. After a small delay, Program Switcher will automatically step through each of the running applications.

The last option under Switching Options is the box labeled Allow Finder to be Quit. This option allows or prevents Program Switcher to quit the Finder with the 'Q' keystroke (see Advanced Keystrokes for more information).

Finally, you may preview your current configuration of Program Switcher’s display window by clicking on the Try Out… button at the bottom of the Advanced Options dialog.

Power Keys

Program Switcher has a series of timesaving keystrokes that you may use to complete commonly performed actions. The keystrokes are based on the function keys, or F-keys, that appear across the tops of most keyboards. To use the keystrokes, click on the Set Power Keys… button in the Program Switcher control panel. The following dialog will appear:

At the top of the dialog, there are two boxes; the first labeled Enable Power Keys, the second marked Require Command Key. To set and use Program Switcher’s power keys, check the first box. To require that the command key be pressed in conjunction with a specific F-key to perform an action, check the second box. One reason to enable the Require Command Key option may be to make Program Switcher more compatible with other programs that also use the F-keys.

Below the two boxes are a series of pop-up menus. Each menu’s title governs a specific action that you may assign to a specific F-key using the pop-up menus. Specific actions can be turned off individually by setting the pop-up menu to Not Used.

Advanced Keystrokes

Program Switcher has several advanced keystrokes that you may find useful.

First, you may quit an application through Program Switcher’s display window. To do this, press the Q-key or X-key when the application you wish to quit is selected in the window. Program Switcher will “x” out the application’s icon and “tell” the program to quit when you let go of the activator key. To unmark an application marked for quitting, simply press the Q-key or X-key again when the marked application is selected in the window.

You may also hide a selected application in Program Switcher’s display window by pressing the H-key or W-key. When you do so, Program Switcher will dim that application in the switching window, then hide it when let go of the activator key. Note that this feature is only available for MacOS v7.5 or later.

You may change the current setting of the Hide Other Applications option by pressing the space bar when you let go of the activator key.

To cancel a switch, press the switching key and hold it down while letting go of the activator key. (This is the reverse of what you would normally do, i.e., letting go of the switching key first while holding down the activator key.) Program Switcher will ignore the application currently selected and not switch to it. Program Switcher will still quit, however, any applications that you may have marked for quitting.

To step through the application list backwards in the display window, tap the shift key instead of the switching key.

Finally, to make Program Switcher automatically step through the active program list in the display window, press and hold both the switching key and activator key for over one second. To stop the auto-step feature, let go of the switching key. This feature is only available if the box marked Enable Auto-Key is checked in the Advanced Options dialog.

Contextual Menu Support

MacOS 8 provides a new system wide feature for PowerPC based Macintoshes called "Contextual Menus." Program Switcher supports the Contextual Menu Manager through the Contextual Menu Module included with the Program Switcher archive entitled "Program Switcher CMM." To utilize Program Switcher's contextual menus, the Program Switcher CMM must be placed in the Contextual Menu Items folder of the MacOS 8 or greater system folder. Once installed, Program Switcher will add an item entitled "Program Switcher" to every contextual menu. Under this menu item will be a sub-menu which will give you access to many of Program Switcher's features.