Mac OS X Hacks

How This Book Is Organized

Mac OS X is remarkable enough to bring together, on one desktop, longtime Mac devotees and Unix hackers of old. It does so by rebuilding the renowned Mac look-and-feel on the shoulders of a best-of-breed Unix operating system. OS X’s flexibility, customizability, and extensibility mean there’s just about nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it. This book goes beyond the simple tips and tricks, click here and drag there, to the more interesting hacks — bite-sized bits of truly useful functionality you can manage in just a few minutes with the help of a trusty friend. The book is divided into several chapters:

Chapter 1, Files

The Mac OS X filesystem is a blend of powerful, ancient Unix underpinnings and the candy-coated shell known as the Macintosh Finder. The hacks in this section poke and prod at the seams, revealing some useful techniques for backing up your system, tweaking files and folders, bending aliases to your will, and understanding how it all fits together — even dumpster diving in the Trash a little.

Chapter 2, Startup

At startup, there’s an awful lot going on behind the scenes to bring your Mac to life. This section takes a peek beneath the surface at just what’s making all that noise. We’ll show you how to boot from another device, turn your Mac into a FireWire hard drive, get OS X running on that old Power Mac in your closet, and lock up your Mac good and tight.

Chapter 3, Multimedia and the iApps

Apple has positioned the Mac ...