Are you tired of accidentally opening spotlight by pressing command + space? With this simple Terminal "hack," you can rid your precious menu bar of Spotlight for once and all. Just open Terminal.app (located in /Applications/Utilities/) and type the following command:

sudo chmod 0 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

You will be required to authenticate as an administrator, then the command will run. While you are still in the Terminal, type "killall Spotlight" to turn off the spotlight service right then. Spotlight will suddenly dissappear from your menu bar. To get Spotlight back, just type the following command back into Terminal:

sudo chmod 775 /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app

After a few seconds, Spotlight will reappear in your menu bar. Note that this does not remove Spotlight from Finder windows, only from the menu bar.


Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's Mac 101 and Terminal Tips sections.

Have you ever wanted to quickly verify today's date, but didn't want to open iCal? Well, you could click on the clock in the menu to get the month/day/year. However, you can also change the layout of the clock to include the extra information such as month/day/year.

To do this, open System Preferences and go to the "International" system preference pane. Once there, click on the "Formats" tab and then click the customize button in the dates section. Select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. You should see the data change in the text box below the drop-down menu. Click inside the box, select all the text (Command + A), and then copy the text (Command + C). Once you've copied the text, click cancel.

Click on the customize button in the times section. Select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. Then place the cursor just before the time and paste (Command + V) the date that you just copied. You might want to add several spaces (or some sort of separator) between the date and time. Once you are finished, click OK. The changes will now show up in the menu bar.

Update: To remove the custom formatting from the menu bar, go to System Preferences > International > Formats. Click the "Customize" button in the times section and select "Medium" from the drop-down menu. Delete the additional text that you add and click "OK." Now click the customize button under the "Times" section again and select "Short" from the drop-down menu. Click "OK," and your system should return to normal.


More tips and tricks like these can be found at the TUAW Tips and Mac 101 sections of TUAW.

If you're using a keyboard without an eject key, say a non-Apple keyboard, an older Apple keyboard or (in my case) a really old Apple keyboard, you're probably missing that eject button. Sure, you can launch iTunes and select "Eject Disk" from the Controls menu, but there's a much easier way.

Navigate to the CoreServices folder, which lives in your system's Library. There, you'll find "Eject.menu" in the Menu Extras folder. Simply double-click that sucker and presto! An eject button is now in your menu bar.

To remove it, simply click it and drag it onto the desktop while holding down the Command key. You can also re-arrange menu bar items by dragging with the Command key depressed.

[Via MacSupport]

Spotlight is great for searching your computer and networked Macs from the menu bar, but what if you want to search the internet also? Well, here comes Google Buddy, which allows you to search Google using the menu bar. There are multiple ways to search using Google Buddy:

1. Simple Search - this presents a spotlight-esque menu item that allows you to search for any web page using Google
   
2. Advanced Search - this allows you to use the advanced features that Google offers, such as searching using modifiers (all, exactly, any, none) or searching a specific site
   
3. Image Search - just as the name hints, it allows you to search Google images
4. Advanced Video Search - this allows you to search Google Video (however, since Google now owns YouTube, they should have included a YouTube search feature as well)
5. Advanced News Search - allows you to search Google's News archive
6. Special Searches - this feature allows you to search for movies, weather, links, and phone numbers

While using this application, the one disadvantage that I found was the auto-completion. While auto-completion is good, Google Buddy's auto-complete seemed to be "too-fast," so fast in fact that I ended up searching for wrong items. Luckily, there is an option in the preferences to turn this off ("Show search suggestions" check box). This looks like an excellent piece of software for the Mac, and it now has a permanent home in my menu bar! Google Buddy is available from Recurring Dream for the small price of $11.95; there is also a demo available.

I haven't watched the keynote yet, and I've been spending most of my time looking through the other new features of Mac OS X Leopard. After I found that non-transparent menubar mod for Leopard, however, I can't get over how hideous that new menubar really is. I also hate to say it, but Apple's secrecy with this UI change until now screams 'Cupertino borrowed one of Redmond's photocopiers' (the new Windows Vista, for those who haven't seen it, contains what many - including myself - consider to be a literally dizzying overabundance of transparent window borders and menus).

Seriously: what is Apple thinking by turning the menubar nearly invisible, but keeping the 'just slightly' translucent aspect and white color of previous menus? I think this looks absolutely dreadful, as it doesn't even look like the menubar and the menus have anything to do with each other anymore, and I'll be damned if Apple takes the actual menus this translucent as well. In fact, if they went that over the edge, I could comfortably say that I wouldn't buy a copy of Leopard until someone developed a modification that switches the menubar and menu back from the brink of "hey look, Vista went transparent!"-ness (of course, a simple Apple-provided checkbox in System Preferences would do just fine as well).

Given Peter Maurer's mod and disinterest in this change surfacing from others, I can only hope that more voice their opinion - whether they do or don't like it - and that Apple listens if it the consensus on this menubar change turns out to be a thumbs down. After all, Leopard still is a developer-only beta, and October is still a long way away.

Menulicious is a utility like Delibar that allows you to access your del.icio.us bookmarks right from your menubar. One nice option of Menulicious is that it can display a bookmark count for each of your tags. An annoying quirk, however, is that your tags are listed under a "Tags >" menu; not directly under the utility itself.

Regardless, Menulicious is a Universal Binary, so it'll run a little faster on your Intel Mac. Menulicious is free and available either from Versiontracker or Kainjow's iPod-like website - surf to Software > Freebies > Menulicious.

Menuet, the menu bar add-on that lets you control iTunes, view album art and more, has been updated to version 1.0.1. The update includes several new "iPod" skins in six colors. I registered a copy soon after Scott found it at Macworld in January and now I use it every day. Other changes in 1.0.1 are:

• Improved Growl song information bezel
• Fixes for the high-resolution album art grabber
• Fixes to and improvements for the registration and demo process
• Various squashed bugs

Plus, this version is a universal binary. Menuet requires Mac OS 10.4 and a single license will cost you a worthwhile $12.95.

Sure, there are digg widgets for Dashboard, but for all the menu bar nuts out there, it doesn't get much better than DiggUpdate, a free menu bar app that provides instant access and update notifications for new digg front page stories. When new stories pop up that you haven't seen yet, the icon's lamp turns yellow. Clicking the icon offers a drop down list (pictured) of the most recent front page stories, along with a brief description. Pretty handy for those of you (TUAW traitors!) who just need that digg fix.

DiggUpdate is free and distributed under the GNU GPL (General Public License).

[via digg]

This time around the "What would you change" topic I thought I'd forgo an actual app and post on a part of OS X; the menu bar, in fact. While I really dig the menu bar and how it works, it leaves much to be desired in the customizability department. For example: I don't know of a way to increase its width or the font size, and it would be great if there was some kind of a power-user option to make it easier to hide the menu bar altogether, instead of only some apps (like Photoshop) being able to do it. Or how about the image I have here: a comparison to XP's system tray, which includes a crude icon management system of hiding 'inactive' system tray icons. Fellow TUAW blogger Scott is quick to point out, however, that this hiding of inactive icons on XP is a great way of allowing all sorts of unwanted software to install itself and run right under your nose. Nevertheless, if you have a lot of icons up in the menu bar, it would be great to have some way of managing all the clutter besides simply dragging them around manually with the command key.

So what say you, TUAW readers? Since we can't even get Macworld press passes I'd say it's a safe bet that Apple won't be taking notes, but a good UI conversation might be a nice way to pass the slow-news holidays.