ベン・ギルド (Ben Guild)


My favorite Mac OS X hacks and tips

My PowerBook G4 just came back from AppleCare after almost a month-long delay due to a parts shortage. — Usually it's back in just 1 or 2 days! 😟

Anyway, today I've been getting it set back up the way that I like it, and wanted to share a few tips. Some of these I just learned about myself, but some are options that are easily overlooked!

Auto-arrange folders and show more information

When browsing folders using the Finder, by default the items aren't arranged and can appear scattered or misaligned. Let's auto-arrange them! — In addition, there's an option to show how many items are within them, and this is totally useful! 👍🏻

  1. To enable these settings by default, first open a new Finder window and press “Command (⌘) + J” on your keyboard to bring up the “View Options” dialog for the current folder.
  2. Set these options:
    • ☑️ “Show Item Info
    • ☑️ Keep Arranged By: “Name
    • Label Position: “Right(optional)
  3. Then, back at the top of the screen, select: “All Windows” to see this configuration everywhere.

… Here's a quick preview of what this looks like:

Preview of these Finder “View Options” in a folder Preview of these Finder “View Options” on the Desktop
These options look particularly great on the Desktop, in my opinion!

… Neat, huh? 😉

Make “Hidden” applications' icons partially transparent on the Dock

Normally, there's no way to tell the difference between a hidden and visible application from the Dock alone, but this trick will “ghost” the ones that you've made invisible:

The “iChat” icon when the app has been hidden after this trick is enabled.
The “iChat” icon when the app has been hidden after this trick is enabled.

… To enable this hidden feature, open the Terminal application located inside of your “Utilities” folder, and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true

… You can then see the results right away by rebooting the Dock with this command:

killall Dock

Ta-da! — If you'd like to turn this off, run both commands again, but change the “true” at the end of the first one to “false” instead

Put those iTunes arrows to better use

The arrows within iTunes can take you to the actual content that they represent within your own library instead of to the iTunes Store by running this Terminal command: (see the second tip above for relevant instructions)

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES

…Make sure that you do this while iTunes is not open! — You can change the “YES” to a “NO” instead and run this again to restore the original functionality.

Enable the hidden “Debug Menu” in Safari

There's a lot of great extra functionality hidden in Apple's Safari web browser… but you have to enable the “Debug” menu to get it:

A glimpse of the hidden “Debug” menu in Safari
My favorite feature is the “User-Agent” sub menu that lets you trick web pages into thinking you're using a different browser, such as Internet Explorer on Windows.

To display this hidden menu, quit Safari and run this Terminal command: (see the second tip above for relevant instructions)

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

… You can change the “1” to a “0” and re-run the command above if you ever want to hide the menu again, but I'm assuming that you probably won't. 😄