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Curing Washed Out Display Problems
Yesterday I reported on my debugging exercise to fix my washed out display. I thought it was the result of an HP Scanner install or a Photoshop CS3 upgrade. Turns out it was neither. It was me.
I use an application called Quicksilver. Some people call it a launcher, but it’s much more than that. In fact, it does so much and is so useful that it’s hard to describe. The Quicksilver site describes it as a “unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” If you’re interested, here’s a roundup of Quicksilver tutorials and screencasts.
Here’s how Quicksilver plays into this little drama. Quicksilver lets you set up triggers—keystrokes or mouse gestures—that control applications. I’d set up a trigger that used Apple-Option-Control-. to play iTunes (and Apple-Option-Control-/ to pause it). In OS X’s Universal Access, it uses Apple-Option-Control-. to increase screen contrast. Apparently it captures the keystroke in addition to Quicksilver and I was doing it to myself. Any single increase wasn’t enough to notice, but over a few days it built up until my screen was unreadable.
I apologize for unfairly maligning HP and Adobe. I wish there was some way to just turn all the Universal Access keystrokes off, but I can’t see an easy way to do that. There’s probably an XML file somewhere you can edit to disable them, but a cursory google didn’t reveal them to me. So, I just changed my trigger.
Here’s a story of another Mac user who had “screen problems” that turned out to be a barely engaged zoom in Universal Access. Ugh.
Posted by windley on June 11, 2007 4:12 PM
Comment from Amit Patel at June 21, 2007 2:33 PM
I too had the washed out screen problem. I use Quicksilver, and have Apple-Control-. assigned to bring up the web browser. Little did I know that a similar key would change contrast. Nor did I realize that the contrast was wrong; I thought the display was failing. I took it to the Apple Store to have the Genius look at it, and he tried several things, including creating a new user account, and the display was fine with the new user. So we learned it was a software problem, not the screen, but didn't know what setting it was. Many hours later I discovered it was the contrast.
Search only works when you know the right words. In my case I didn't know that it was contrast, so I never searched for it.
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