Mac Geekery

If you move the Leopard dock to the side of the screen you get a dock with a gray background rather than the glassy surface. If you want that dock on the bottom of the screen as well, simply run the following:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock

This sets a hidden default on the Dock and then forces it to restart.

There are a plethora of hacks to change the translucent menu bar in 10.5. While I doubt the sanity of the UI designers at Apple with this release of the operating system, it is relatively easy to change this behavior without installing third party hacks. There's more »

I went to the GUI feedback session at WWDC last year and in the midst of all the yelling and screaming over the new dock and menu bar there was one guy with a wholly different mission: be able to turn off tooltips. His complaint (a valid one, I feel) is that every time he wants to sit and think about what’s on-screen, a little yellow box comes up where the mouse is, and there’s no real “safe spot” for the mouse that doesn’t do this in most applications.

So, I present a little tip I discovered shortly afterwards and appear to have not written up. I dedicate this to Tooltip Guy, wherever he is.

defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay 99999

You now have 99.999 seconds to think at a given time. Replace -g with the ID of any application to change it in that application.

NetInfo is dead. It’s gone. It’s a part of the past. It’s like that ghost of a bad dream you have in the morning where you can’t quite remember why you’re shaken, but you just remember that you were and that it was horrible.

Leopard ate NetInfo.

In its place is a new native Directory Services store based on folders and XML property list files. Yep, a replacement for flat files that uses … flat files. Kind of. There's more »

I was a bit disappointed that the Nokia E70 wasn’t included in the latest updates to iSync in 10.4.9. Since the E70 is running Symbian OS similar to other Nokia S60 Eseries phones, I was using a hack I found on the Apple iSync discussion group. It worked for what I wanted to do but when I installed Mac OS X 10.4.9, the changes I made were naturally overwritten. Rather than re-do the hack I started actually thinking about it. The E70 is really nothing more than an E62 in a smaller form factor and Apple added support for the E62 in OS X 10.4.9. A idea took root. There's more »

The ATI Displays panel is a tool from ATI that enables users to tweak some OpenGL pixel format and texture options that otherwise couldn’t be touched in OS X. Most importantly, it lets users choose antialiasing and anisotropic filtering options. ATI is pretty bad about not getting new versions out for OEM cards, so poor folks that own Mac Pros with the X1900 XT have been stuck outside. This probably also works for other Intel Macs with X1000 series chips. There's more »

For some time I have been working on a solution for sharing contacts. With LDAP being already supported by most client applications (including Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook) it seems to make perfect sense to store contact information in an LDAP directory. A common problem is getting contact information into an LDAP directory. There are some good web and installed applications which allow the maintenance of an ldap directory. In practice this is a nice solution, although not very practical. Usually one tend to keep contact in ones local Address Book. Many application have the ability to add contact directly to a local Address book, and offering tighter integration, so this is the place where contacts usually end up. The problem is getting them into an ldap directory and keeping them updated. There's more »