October 2009
Intermediate to advanced
906 pages
30h 11m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing ManualBecome 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,
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Chapter 17. Hacking Mac OS X
Chapter 9 shows you how to customize your desktop picture, error beep, and screen saver. But if you’re sneaky, creative, or just different, you can 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 functional and useful. And although Apple sanctions not a one, all are perfectly safe.
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 genie animation you see when you minimize a window to the Dock. Another eliminates the drop shadow behind icon names on your desktop. Yet another lets you change the transparency of the Terminal window (Chapter 16)—a cool, although not especially practical, effect.
If you really want to fool around with these bits of Unix code, go for it. You can find most of these tidbits at Web sites like www.macosxhints.com.
But the truth is, there’s no good reason for you to subject yourself to the painstaking effort of typing out Unix commands when easy-to-use, push-button programs are available to do the same thing.
TinkerTool, ...
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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.
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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.