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Filed under: Terminal Tips

Terminal Tip: Disabling Leopard's Dock spring windows

by Erica Sadun (RSS feed) on Sep 17th, 2008

I seriously hate the way that Leopard's spring-loaded download pane works. So this morning, I asked our team if there were a way to get around it. "Of course," said Brett, and he pointed me to this Mac OS X Hints page, warning me that it was a kludge.

Kludge it may be, but it was a kludge that worked just fine. I didn't quite follow the directions in that post, though, and I thought I'd share my approach because it worked a lot more easily for me.

First, I opened Terminal and changed directories to ~/Library/Preferences. I made a backup copy of com.apple.dock.plist (probably completely unnecessary, in retrospect) and converted the original version to XML from binary: plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.dock.plist.

Next, I opened the preferences property list in TextEdit and did a global search/replace on directory-tile, changing all instances to directory. I saved and then did a killall Dock.

When my dock returned, it returned with the normal, happy, uncomplicated folders you see here. When clicked, they open normal, happy, uncomplicated file browsers. Yay. Thanks, Brett, and thanks Mac OS X Hints.

Also thanks to TUAW readers Brandon, who points out that you can Command-click the folder and Rich who suggests adding folder aliases rather than the folder itself.

Tags: Dock, Leopard, mac-os-x-hints, plist, terminal

Filed under: Software, Hacks, Odds and ends, Apple

Keynote '08 Picture Frames hack

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Aug 8th, 2007

Brian sent us (thanks!) what is probably the very first Keynote '08 hack. He found that there's a new stroke option in the program called Picture Frames, which are various types of framing graphics to put around a slide. The standard choice screen lets you choose from 12, but Brian opened up the Keynote files, and found that there were actually 72-- apparently Apple included Frames for its own Themes, but didn't allow the user to use them separately.

Fortunately, all it takes to show the extra frames is their names in an xml (actually a .plist) file inside the Keynote .app folder, so Brian cracked it open, and added all the names. Turns out, also, that no matter how much you stretch it, the Picture Frames choose can only show 50 at a time, so Brian even created a customized .plist file that shows his 50 favorites-- all you have to do is download it from him, put it inside your Keynote .app file, restart Keynote, and you've got access to almost all the Picture Frames that Apple does.

It's pretty clear why Apple didn't want people playing around with custom frames too much (opening a Keynote file with a custom frame requires that you have it installed, apparently, so sending a Keynote file to your friend without the custom frame could lead to trouble), but who knows why they didn't at least give you the option of using all the frames everyone has. Thanks to Brian's superfast hack, now you can.

Update: Just to make it clear, it's fine to use these hidden frames, since everyone has them installed. The problem with sharing frames comes when you send someone a slide with a frame you created-- they don't have that frame installed, and so they won't see it.

Tags: hacks, iwork, keynote, keynote08, keynoteuser.com, pictureframes, plist, themes, xml

Filed under: OS, Software, Hacks, Productivity

Selectively hide the dock and menubar in some apps

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on Jan 25th, 2007

Yet another slick tip I found while parsing my Mac OS X Hints feed is a fairly simple hack for setting the dock and menubar to auto-hide based on which app is in the foreground. This can come in very handy if you usually like to see these elements, but often work in screen-hungry apps that can't auto-hide them on their own. I'm even interested in trying this on Photoshop, which can hide the dock and menubar, but only when in full screen mode (which I don't often like to use).

The tip essentially involves using something like the Property List Editor (a free app included in Apple's Developer Tools) or Pref Setter to copy and paste two short lines of code into an application's info.plist file. The hint contains everything you need to hack away, including a hint from The Rob himself which I'd like to echo: definitely make a backup of the app, or at least the info.plist file, before you copy and paste your way into a problem. That said, enjoy having the best of both worlds.

Tags: dock, hack, hacks, mac os x hints, MacOsXHints, menubar, plist

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