December 2003
Beginner to intermediate
776 pages
45h 2m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 17. Hacking Mac OS X
Chapter 8 shows you how to customize your desktop picture, error beep, and screen saver. But beyond those simple modifications, Mac OS X offers only a subset of the tweakable features found in other operating systems. You can’t record sounds, change the fonts used in the Finder, adjust the colors of your scroll bars, and so on.
If you’re sneaky, creative, or just different, however, you can indeed perform more dramatic visual and behavioral surgery on your copy of Mac OS X—from changing the startup screen image to replacing the “poof " that appears when you drag something off the Dock with a new animation of your own. All you need is a few of Mac OS X’s less obvious tools, or some free downloadable customizing software, and a few recipes like the ones in this chapter.
Some of these tricks are frivolous. Some are actually functional and useful. And although Apple sanctions not a one, all are perfectly safe.
Note
History has shown that Apple considers Mac OS X a work in progress. A huge number of the fun little hacks that worked in Mac OS X 10.1 stopped working in 10.2. All of the tricks in this chapter work in 10.3, but may well “break” in subsequent versions of Mac OS X. The Errata page for this book at http://www.missingmanuals.com will keep you up to date.
TinkerTool: Customization 101
If you poke around the Mac OS X Web sites and newsgroups long enough, you’ll find little bits of Unix code being passed around. One of them purports to let you change the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.