Make Your Macbook into a SMACKBOOK!

I suppose that just about everyone has seen this video by now. It’s a clever way to take advantage of multiple desktops and the motion sensor in many of the new Mac laptops. I saw it a couple weeks ago, tried to install it and failed because it was too complex for me. But, I revisited the original site again today and saw that there were a ton of new comments. After a while of reading here and following links there, I was finally able to download Smackbook,  install and use it on my MacBook Pro. I thought I’d take the time to write it as simple as possible for the next guy that comes along and tries to do it. If there are steps that seem too simple, remember that there are others that may need it explained.

Obviously, much credit goes to the commenters on the original post.

Here are the steps:

1. Download the patched DesktopManager here. (This was originally supplied by simplylinux.org, but put a copy on our server in case theirs goes down.)
2. Download Smackbook’s  zip folder of patches from the original site (direct link)
3. Download amstracker from this page.

There, now you have everything downloaded that you’ll need. On your desktop, you should have a folder called “smackbook“, a Desktop Manager application, and a gray square called AMSTracker. Now that you have the parts, let’s get it activated.

1. Put “AMSTracker” into the “smackbook” folder.
2. Start up “Desktop Manager” by double clicking on it.
3. Start the application called “Terminal”. use Spotlight to find it or look in your Utilities Folder, which will be in your Applications folder.
4. When started, the bottom line will end with a $ and a grey box. Right before the $ is your user name. The gray box is where your typing will go. From here type “cd /Users/username/Desktop/smackbook”. Don’t put in the quotation marks and be sure to write your actual username instead of the word “username”
5. Press Return. You should now see “~/Desktop/smackbook username$” and a gray box.
6. Now, where the gray box is you should type “perl smack.pl” without the quotation marks.
7. Press Return and you will see “AMS hardware present and initialized”

That’s it. Tap the bottom right hand corner of your screen. Start off soft and get a little harder each time so you know how hard to hit it. If you are giving it a good tap and it’s not working, don’t start pounding it. Go thru the steps again and see if you missed anything. You can write questions in these comments if you’d like. I’ll try to answer the ones that I can.

Now, your goal is to show off to your friends, but not so much that they want to tap your computer every time they walk by and keep you from working.