Apple's made some strange changes to the App Store lately. While the reviews change was a good one, this latest update is just confusing: they removed all of the "See all" links from the sidebar of the main App Store page, including the much-visited "All Free Apps" that many of our readers used to browse the new free stuff in there.

Now, all that's there is a bunch of category links. You can still search for apps, obviously, and you can click on the Top Paid and Free apps to see those, and you can even click on the "See all" near "New," "What's Hot" and "Staff Favorites." But if you want to browse all the new Free apps in the store completely unfiltered, you're out of luck.

Why would this be? Depends on who's guessing -- if you're angry at Apple (perhaps one of many developers who haven't seen their apps in the store yet), you might claim that it's because Apple wants to keep a firm grip on just what new free apps get seen on the homepage. If you're so-so on the issue, it might be because you think Apple wanted to streamline the process and keep you from the hassle of browsing all the free trash yourself. And if you're what our kind commenters call a "fanboy," you might claim that Apple is just having problems with their store, or that they're actually trying to help developers by raising app prices.

Personally, I'm going for option D: someone working on the iTunes page didn't realize how popular the link was, and after a little outcry, it'll be back soon. In the meantime, there are still a few RSS feeds around that will help you keep tabs on what's showing up in the store.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

RogueAmoeba just linked to Mark Johns' easy little app called Cursorceror. He loves the Ctrl/scroll wheel trick, just as I do (holding Ctrl and using the scroll wheel allows you to zoom in on any part of your desktop-- especially useful for watching Flash movies fullscreen very quickly), and he wanted to get the cursor out of the way quickly, so he wrote Cursorceror to attach hiding the cursor to a hotkey-- make it appear and disappear at will.

The only problem is that he didn't have to do all of that. Turns out that when you're zoomed in (in most applications, including the major browsers), hitting any key at all will automatically hide the cursor for you. So if all you want to do is watch Flash videos fullscreen, just zoom in, tap a key, and watch your videos cursor-free.

Johns' wittily-named app didn't completely go to waste though-- while hiding the cursor is easy most of the time, the keystrokes you hit will still be received by whatever program has focus, and so handing off the task to Cursorceror will keep you from making any mistakes while keying. Also, not all programs will apparently let the keystrokes through (I couldn't get the cursor to hide in iTunes or GraphicConverter in my quick tests), so Cursorceror will come in handly if you want instant hiding no matter what app has focus. It will also hide the cursor after a set time limit, which, as far as I know, OS X won't normally do.

In a couple of recent posts, I showed you how to how to hide drives using Finder preferences and selectively show some of them using aliases. I received a number of emails looking for more elegant solutions i.e. avoiding the look of aliases and their won't-sort-properly-like-a-real-drive behavior. A few readers also asked how to hide their iDisks, which didn't respond to the preferences the same way that hard drives did.

First let me note that iDisks aren't seen by Finder as normal hard drive volumes or, as you might expect, as connected servers. Instead, iDisks are controlled by the CDs, DVDs, and iPods preference--the same preference that shows and hides attached thumb drives and memory card readers.

As for the more elegant volume-by-volume solution, that lies in the realm of Terminal and the command-line developer tool SetFile. You can join the Apple Developer Connection and gain access to the developer tools with a Free ADC Online Membership. After installing the dev tools, you'll find SetFile in the /Developer/Tools folder.

To hide a volume, use the -a V flag with SetFile and then restart Finder. This will hide the iDisk, even in Sync mode

% /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a V /Volumes/iDisk/
% killall "Finder"
%

To bring the volume back, use -a v instead. (Notice the lower case "v".)

% /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v /Volumes/iDisk/
% killall "Finder"
%

I like a relatively neat Desktop. I keep out just those items I need to access right away for my day-to-day work. It's so easy to clutter Finder, especially when you use multiple hard drives and partitions, an iPod, a memory card reader and the odd CD or DVD. An often-overlooked Finder preference can come to the rescue.

To hide volumes on your Desktop, choose Finder -> Preferences (or just type Command-, when Finder is active). In the General tab, choose which items you want to show on your Desktop. Place a check next items you want to see or clear the checkboxes to hide items. You can always bring hidden items back by updating your preferences later.

And don't forget: whether you hide disks or CDs on your desktop, they're always there on the side drawer of your Finder windows where you'll find all hard drives, servers, removable media and so forth.

We've found easy methods for hiding the icons of running apps in the Dock, but you typically have to get your hands dirty with editing files inside the app package itself. For users who prefer a more simple drag and drop operation, there's always Dock Dodger. From the same FoggyNoggin Software that brought us Desktopple Pro, Dock Dodger handles the dirty work of ensuring your app never shows its icon on your Dock; simply quit the app if it's running, drop it on Dock Dodger and restart it for the ultimate in 'what am I going to do with all this open space in my Dock?' experiences. While Dock Dodger performs the same editing of app files that you can do yourself, we'll still echo their recommendation of duplicating the original app first so you have a backup just in case.

Dock Dodger is available as donationware from FoggyNoggin Software.

Users of the fantastic TextExpander who are also fond of the cmd+opt+d shortcut for hiding/showing the Dock might have noticed a weird behavior with this shortcut as of late. To be specific: the shortcut doesn't quite work anymore, even in 10.4.8; pressing it will cause the Dock to hide (or un-hide), but the Dock quickly reverses the behavior as soon as you let go of the shortcut. I know I thought it was a mere illusion brought on by sleep deprivation when I first stumbled across this, but occasional attempts at troubleshooting revealed not only that I was seeing just fine, but that a solution or even the culprit were seemingly nowhere to be found.

Fortunately, watching the latest MacBreak #63 in which Leo Laporte and Merlin Mann cover TextExpander taught me not one but two useful things about this typing tool (three, if you count that I now know that Merlin has a mind-boggling 700+ text snippets). First is a handy way to control where your cursor is positioned once a snippet is expanded. All you need to do is include a specific string - %| - in your snippet to dictate where you cursor is inserted after your snippet unfolds itself. This is great for creating snippets in which you still need to include something specific on the fly that can't be snipped, such as creating [a href] links.

Once Merlin covered this hint, however, I was inspired to open TextExpander's Help file to see if there were any other hidden gems. While perusing their FAQs, I discovered an explanation to this aforementioned bizarre Dock hiding behavior (it's towards the bottom of the FAQ page if you're curious). As it turns out, the specific way TextExpander is designed to hook into Mac OS X has uncovered an alleged bug in the OS that causes this unfortunate drawback. SmileOnMyMac is pretty sure this is a bug in Mac OS X rather than TextExpander, and I hope they have alerted Apple, in which case we could hope to see a fix possibly in 10.4.9. For now, the easiest way to get around this quirk and hide/show the Dock is probably to right-click the Dock divider (the line between Applications and the Trash/docs/files sections) and use that contextual menu.