Mac OS X Hacks

Foreword

From one perspective, Mac OS X is heresy. It’s an Apple operating system with a command line. It doesn’t hide its innards from tinkerers and hackers. It’s not a closed box with a sticker that says, “NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE,” like all previous Mac operating systems.

In short, it’s a shocking and flagrant violation of everything the Mac has ever stood for.

As it turns out, nobody much cares. Newbies plug along, clicking Dock icons and dragging things to the Trash, without ever suspecting that only a thin shell of shiny pixels separates them from the seething, thrashing Unix engine beneath.

And power users are on Cloud 9.

So here they come, out of the woodwork: a nation of once marginalized Unix geeks, embracing the Mac, hailing Apple as the world’s largest manufacturer of Unix boxes. These people are the pure of heart, the superusers who cluster at computer conferences with their PowerBook G4s and shoot bits of code at each other over the wireless network. Apple may have lost the battle for the corporate desktop, but with Mac OS X, it’s picked up a new constituency of its own.

Part of the pleasure of reading this book comes from the hacks themselves: controlling iTunes with Perl scripts, using a Bluetooth cellphone as a wireless modem for your laptop, downloading files from the command line, and other preposterous stunts.

But much of the pleasure, too, comes from the pure, geeky fun the authors seem to be having. These are not serious adult males at the peaks of their ...