Unsanity WindowShade X Icon

I found two OS X solutions, each of which appear to be OS X window manager hacks to let you force a window to float atop all the others: ∞labs Afloat and Unsanity WindowShade X. I installed the latter and can attest that (after a reboot) it will indeed keep a browser window afloat. Just select the window of interest and hit the command key twice (⌘-⌘). The keystroke is configurable.

WindowShade X relies on Unsanity’s Application Enhancer. I was concerned about security vulnerabilities introduced by that thing but since my Google searching didn’t turn up any obvious warnings I went ahead with it.

First off, apparently Software Update does not automatically update the JDK. You have to manually download and run the updates. There are four updates to “Java for Mac OS X 1.5″. Since I couldn’t tell whether they were cumulative or not, I just downloaded and installed each one in sequence:

update 1

update 2

update 3

update 4

Now you’d think you’d be done, but those updates only install JDK 1.6—they don’t make it the default. The way I did that was to change a link in the Framework:

cd /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions
sudo rm -fr CurrentJDK
sudo ln -s 1.6 CurrentJDK

Now I see:

$ java -version
java version "1.6.0_13"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_13-b03-211)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 11.3-b02-83, mixed mode)