SwitchRes is an utility built around a Control Panel and an Extension. It will allow you to control and automate the resolutions of all your monitors. It is distributed with a Control Strip Module and a Contextual Menu Item, so that it’s always available everywhere.
SwitchRes is completely configurable. You can define which resolutions are really accessible, and which will require a confirmation. A new option allows you to redirect a resolution on an other, in all applications.
You can save the position of the icons on your desktop, independently from one resolution to the other, unlike the Finder. The position of the icons is restored at startup.
You can also create ‘display sets’ which will allow you to change the resolution, the depth and position of all your monitors, and to use an AppleScript with one click, or one key.
You can assign a specific Set to an application, so that every time you use this application, your Mac will automatically switch to predefined resolutions.
Configuration
SwitchRes will require a Mac with at least MacOS 8. SwitchRes is fully compatible with MacOS 8.5 (and 8.6) and will use all its features (Navigation Services, theme–switchable Appearance, PowerPC version of the Control Strip Module, Location Manager Module…)
Shareware
SwitchRes is distributed as a $15 shareware. This version is an evaluation version. You can use it for 10 days. After that, the preferences saving and restoring will be deactivated. To unlock SwitchRes, you will have to register. You can use the included ‘Register’ application.
Don’t forget to write your address or eMail address, so that you can get the key to register.
Previous users of SwitchRes 1.x can upgrade for a special price. Please contact the author or take a look at the ‘Register’ application for more information.
Installation
First, you’ll need to remove all previous version of SwitchRes extension in the Extensions folder.
Then, just drag and drop the ‘SwitchRes’ Extension and the ‘SwitchRes Control’ Control Panel on your system folder.
If you want to use the Control Strip Module, the Contextual Menu Item or the Location Manager module, drag them onto your System Folder too.
Then you have to restart your computer to use SwitchRes.
Note: Only the Extension is required to be in the System Folder. The Control Panel may be stored anywhere on your disk.
User interface – the menus
First menu
After restart, you have access to the SwitchRes menu in one of the following locations:
– in the menu bar
– in the Control Strip
– in the Contextual Menu when clicking on the desktop
This menu will look like this:
if you have more than one display, then the display–specific options are grouped into hierarchical submenus:
You can choose the resolution and the depth of the all monitors.
The resolutions in italic (like 640 x 480, 120Hz) will require the traditional confirmation box. This dialog will be displayed for 5 seconds.
All options shown in this menu are completely configurable. You can choose to only show some options, independently from one menu to the other.
Secondary menu
The secondary menu will be displayed in the Control Strip by clicking on the SwitchRes icon while holding down the ‘’ key:
This menu allows you to open the Control Panel. The Control Panel can also be opened on the Finder with a double-click on its icon.
Settings – The SwitchRes Control Panel
The Control Panel is divided in 6 parts, each represented by a button on the upper side of the dialog.
Preferences are saved when quitting the Control Panel or closing the dialog. All settings are applied immediately.
First part: General Preferences
The buttons shown in this part of the dialog allow you to define startup settings:
• Allow or forbid all resolutions changes during the startup process. Try this option if you have an AppleVision or ColorSync ADB–driven monitor.
• Show or hide the SwitchRes icon at startup
• Set the resolution of every monitor attached after restart, let the Location Manager apply the
correct settings, or use a specific Display Set.
You can also change more SwitchRes’ general settings:
• Use the Navigation Services in the Control Panel
• Use a System–wide key shortcut for opening the Control Panel
• Add the Monitor number after its name
• Always activate SwitchRes. If you want SwitchRes to stay in memory, it will use some memory more, but it will be more sensitive, especially when saving icons. If you don’t use these features frequently, you can tell SwitchRes to release its used memory when not active.
• Define the delay SwitchRes will use when testing a new resolution. That delay allows you to validate the use of this resolution, by clicking on an alert displayed on screen (that obviously you could not see if the resolution is not valid).
• Activate the advanced user mode. In this mode, you won’t see any alert any more. Use this only if you know what you are doing.
Second part:
You can see the resolution list of every monitor. This list shows all resolutions your video card is capable of. Warning: your monitor may not support all these resolutions. I’m not responsible of any damage caused to your monitor.
Moreover, your video card does not necessarily handle these resolutions. In this case, no resolution change occurs.
From left to right, in the list, you can see:
• The name of the resolution itself, which is generally composed of the size of the screen and the vertical refresh rate of this resolution
• If this resolution is allowed or not (red icon in the column if resolution is forbidden). With a control-click on this column, you can define the redirection of this resolution to an other one. This will allow you to play games in 640x480, 120Hz when they would normally change the resolution to 640x480, 67Hz. Your eyes will like that!
• If this resolution is displayed in the menu or not, or if it requires a confirmation alert box
• If this resolution owns an icon setting
By clicking on the resolution name itself, you can change the name of the resolution (to add some particular info, for example “– on TV screen”), or you can try the resolution to make it available in SwitchRes’ menu.
Next to this list, three options allow you to:
• Configure the display by:
– displaying the refresh rate in the menu (Example: “640 x 480” or “640 x 480, 120Hz”)
– displaying a custom monitor name (Example: “Multiscan monitor”, “21” Multiscan monitor” or whatever you want)
– displaying a custom monitor name (Example: “Multiscan monitor”, “21” Multiscan monitor” or whatever you want)
– specifying to keep the same depth or to use the deepest available when switching in a new resolution.
– exporting all the changes you make into a 3DFX Voodoo3ModePrefs file, for Voodoo3 video cards owners. This option is useful to synchronize your 3DFX preferences with the SwitchRes preferences.
– adding additional information in the resolutions name (like “Simulscan” for example)
• Import an other screen preferences: SwitchRes presents you a dialog, where you can select a display. The choices proposed are displays that you previously connected to your Mac. This allows you to use older preferences without having to redefine them entirely.
• Use the Setup Wizard: it is a quick–and–easy way to configure your monitor: imagine you have to plug your PowerBook on a unknown external monitor, for a presentation. You just can select this tool and you’ll quickly have SwitchRes correctly configured for the right resolution.
You can give the wizard some clues about the physical characteristics of your monitor. These can be found in your monitor’s manual. SwitchRes will then activate only the resolutions that fall into these characteristics and will ask you to confirm that these resolutions are really visible.
Note that you can launch the Setup Wizard automatically at startup, by pressing the ‘S’ key during the restart. SwitchRes will play a little sound, telling you that your order has been taken into consideration, and will present you the standard testing dialog. This will allow a configuration of a monitor where you cannot see the screen at startup.
Third part:
In this part, you define the Display Sets.
Display Sets are SwitchRes’ most useful feature. Their possibilities are far more advanced than only applying some resolution or depth changes. In fact, with AppleScript, they allow you to do almost everything, easily.
A Display Set contains the settings of all your monitors. This includes monitor resolution, color depth and even monitor position in a multiple display environment. Moreover, they can contain an AppleScript that will allow you to execute some actions when the set will be selected.
The Display Sets are activated either by a Key Shortcut, a selection in one menu, when an application starts, or brought to the front, and even at startup.
For each of these events, the Set will be applied. This goes far beyond a simple resolution change, because with just one key you might want to tell SwitchRes to open an application and automatically use the correct display settings.
Moreover, SwitchRes is smart enough to remember the display settings of monitors that are not attached permanently. That allows you to use the same Set on your PowerBook, whether the computer is used with the internal screen or with a second display attached.
SwitchRes allows you to put the Display Sets in its menus. You can define individually if a Display Set will appear in the menus. Last, the order in which Display Sets are shown in a menus is user–configurable. Just drag the Display Set’s name where you want it to appear, and all will be drawn consequently.
Fourth part:
In this part, you define the application settings. You can define settings that will be used for every application, and other settings that will be used for certain applications only, when the application is launched or brought to the front.
The principal settings are the Display Set and the sound level. That will allow you to launch a game with a correct sound level, and with the correct screen size. Of course, the older settings can be restored when the application quits.
Other interesting options in this section are:
• Automatically hiding the Control Strip and the other Applications
• Restoring the older settings when the application quits
• Applying again the defined settings when the application is brought to front
The last application definable option is the ability to forbid every resolution change coming from the application itself. Only SwitchRes will be able to change the resolution. This is useful for games that will change your monitor to an hard–coded resolution.
Fifth part:
This part lets you define what you want to see in the 3 SwitchRes menus: the Control Strip Menu, the Menu in the Menu bar and the Contextual Menu.
Here you can also activate or deactivate the menu in the menu bar of each application:
Note: to activate or deactivate this menu, you don’t have to reboot, unless you press Option when enabling or disabling it. If this menu is disabled by pressing option on it, then at next reboot, SwitchRes won’t even load the resources associated to this menu. This will frees some memory, and in case of conflict with an other tool, will solve the conflict.
Try everything to choose what you like the most…!
Sixth part:
This part let you define more precisely how SwitchRes will save and restore the position of all icons and the Finder windows
• You can allow SwitchRes to reposition the icons/windows after a specific delay after starting your Mac. You can change the delay, in order to wait for external hard drives to mount on the desktop.
• Automatically save the positions of the icons/windows of the desktop when a switch occurs. The button on the left or the last command of the menu is devoted to do this manually. Remember this can be time saving if you don’t change your icons frequently.
• Anchor your icons on their parent screen: when you move a display, the icons/windows can stay at their original position, or move along with the display. It’s up to you to decide which option is better.
• Tell SwitchRes to store only icons, or only windows, or even both when rearranging the desktop
• You can allow SwitchRes to place your icons at their exact position, or let it choose to place them on an invisible grid, so that icons are correctly aligned. The grid spacing can be changed.
If you enable this option, a new command in the menus will be added, which allows you to rearrange your desktop when you want, without having to save/restore the icons.
Various
Comments
For all comments, you can email me at:
stephane@madrau.com
Thanks to…
David Nine, Tobias Jachmann, Mike Gerenser, Michael Kummer, Norbert M. Doerner, Kiran Wagle, John Moreno, John Zetlaoui, Sylvain-Pierre Dobrzynski, Lindsey Dubb, Franck Trommenschlager and Carsten Friehe for beta testing;
Christoph Sahm for the German localisation, Joris Provoost for the Dutch one and Stefano Ghielmi for the Italian one;
Ammon Skdimore for his help and some code exchange.
Andreas Bauer for all the beautiful 32 bit icons.
History
New in version 2.5
• Adds the ability to personalize the resolutions name. This is useful if you want to distinguish between lots of similar resolutions, like all the 800x600, 60Hz on a PowerBook (one is for the LCD internal, one for the SVHS output in NTSC, one for the VGA output, and one is simulscan…). You can specify whatever you want as a resolution name, and SwitchRes will use that name in the menus. This is a so useful feature that I don’t know why I didn’t put it before…
• In multiple users under MacOS 9.x, the main-user preferences are used if no prefs for this user were found.
• SwitchRes can now enable/disable its main menu completely (requires a reboot). This option is to solve conflicts with other tools that put their menu in the menu bar.
• SwitchRes doesn’t activate itself under Classic now: sorry, but SwitchRes is not compatible with Classic yet, at least it doesn’t crash Classic any more
• Changed some internal calculation in the Setup Wizard
• If you have lots of icons on your desktop created at the same time, then SwitchRes can now correctly replace them
• Corrects a bug that prevented SwitchRes to show some DDC resolutions on the ATI Radeon cards.
• Corrects a bug that sometimes prevented SwitchRes to select the correct resolution (example: you choose 800x600, and it selects 640x480…)
• Really corrected a bug with MacOS 9.1 and the registration window (this was claimed to be solved in 2.4.3, but in fact it was not)
• Coherency among the user interface was rechecked
