DragThing Help | Troubleshooting
Here is a list of the most common questions I get asked about DragThing, along with the answers. If you have a question that isn't answered here, please let me know at james.t@kagi.com, and I'll add it to the list!
Questions:
Q: What do the little anchors mean when I drag windows around?
Answers:
Q: What do the little anchors mean when I drag windows around?
A: When you drag a dock window around, it is silently searching out the nearest corner or midpoint on the screen and attaching itself to it for purposes of resolution switching, resizing, and, in the case of the process dock, growing away from. So, for example, if you drag a horizontal process dock to the bottom middle of the screen, when you launch an application, it will stay centered and grow in both directions.
It's also possible to override the anchor setting, so you can attach the dock to a distant corner. You do this by dragging it to the corner, and then shift-dragging it back into place.
Anyway, in previous versions, all this happened behind the scenes as if by magic and people didn't often understand why. So I added the anchor indicator which appears while you are dragging the docks to show you exactly what is going on.
Q: I'm seeing a problem with DragThing not running properly at login under Mac OS X 10.1. It just sits there without opening and I can't kill it. What can I do?
A: This is a bug in Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.1.1 which is now fixed in Mac OS 10.1.2.
Q: When I installed the latest version of DragThing, it said that my preference files are corrupt. They work just fine in 2.6. Is this a bug?
A: When you upgrade, you may get a message saying that your preference files are corrupt and they cannot be opened, yet 2.6 can open them fine. 2.7 added extensive checks for this and will refuse to open any file it finds is corrupt, since most problems people have had with DragThing have eventually been traced to a corrupt preference file.
A nice effect of this is that it will never write over a good backup of the preference file with a corrupt one, which was possible with 2.6 and earlier. Unfortunately, if both the original and backup files are already corrupt from earlier versions, you'll need to delete the preferences file and recreate your docks, but the changes in 2.7 should prevent this from ever happening again in the future.
Q: I'm seeing a problem with DragThing reporting it is out of memory, but I've already increased it a lot. What's going on?
A: Are you running DAVE, the Windows NT networking client software? There was a problem with earlier versions of DAVE 2.1 which could make applications think they were running out of memory. You can get a patch for DAVE 2.1 which corrects the problem on the Thursby Software Systems ftp site.
Q: I'm getting a few Type 2 errors with DragThing, especially when I use the hot spot to bring DragThing to the front. Is this a known problem?
A: Are you using GoMac 2.0, the software which gives you a Windows-like task bar at the bottom of the screen? GoMac 2.0 seems to have a conflict with the hot spot feature of DragThing. GoMac 1.6 works fine however, so I believe it is not a bug in DragThing. You might contact the technical support for GoMac and let them know you think there is a problem.
Q: I just got some email about a new version of DragStrip that is available from Aladdin Systems. Is this the same thing as DragThing? Did you sell out DragThing? It looks very similar!
A: No, DragThing is definitely not the same thing as DragStrip. DragStrip, while also being a similar application launcher with a similar name, is by Aladdin Systems, and is an entirely separate commercial product. Any similarities between the two are entirely coincidental, and the fact that DragStrip can read DragThing preferences files is just because they reverse-engineered my preferences file format without asking!
I would encourage anybody who is interested in an application launcher, to try the two of them, and make a choice based on the quality of the product, not the quality of the PR!
DragThing is still written and supported by one person, me. I have had a number of offers to buy DragThing, but I decided I didn't want it owned by a big company so I could keep control over what happened to it, and keep it affordable! If you want to support shareware authors, please register your copy of DragThing!