Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

18.1. TinkerTool: Customization 101

If you poke around the Mac OS X Web sites and newsgroups long enough, you'll find little bits of Unix code being passed around. One of them purports to let you change the genie animation that you see when you minimize a window to the Dock. Another eliminates the drop shadow behind icon names on your desktop. Yet another lets you change the transparency of the Terminal window (Chapter 16) ”a cool, although not especially practical, effect.

If you really want to fool around with these bits of Unix code, go for it. You can find most of these tidbits at Web sites like www. macosxhints .com.

The truth is, there's no good reason for you to subject yourself to the painstaking effort of typing out Unix commands when easy-to-use, push-button programs are available to do the same thing.

TinkerTool, for example, is a free utility that offers an amazing degree of control over the fonts, desktop, Dock, scroll bar arrows, and other aspects of the Mac OS X environment.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Kill the animations . When you open any icon, expand a Get Info panel, and so on, you see little animated expansion effects. It's nice, but it takes time. TinkerTool can turn them off (see Figure 18-1).

  Figure 18-1. TinkerTool is a double-clickable program that makes changes only to your account settings. (You can download it from this book's "Missing CD" page of www.missingmanuals.com, among other places.)

• Dock . TinkerTool lets you give hidden programs transparent icons on the Dock and specify the Dock's position on the screen ”left, right, bottom, or top ”and even whether it's centered or flush against one side of the screen. TinkerTool also unlocks a third option for the animation of windows collapsing onto the Dock. In addition to the standard Mac OS X choices (Genie and Scale), you also get something called Suck In (no comment).

• Scroll bars . TinkerTool gives you greater control over the placement of Mac OS X's scroll bar arrows ”together at one end of the scroll bar, duplicated at both ends of the scroll bar, and so on.

• Visibility . TinkerTool can make the thousands of invisible Unix files appear as full-blooded icons. (Power users, you know who you are.)

• Fonts . TinkerTool lets you change the fonts for dialog boxes, menus , title bars, help balloons, and so on.

What's terrific about TinkerTool is that it's completely safe. It's nothing more than a front end for a number of perfectly legitimate Unix settings that Apple simply opted to make unavailable in the regular Finder. Furthermore, the changes you make using TinkerTool are stored in your own Home Library folder ”that is, they affect only your account. Whatever changes you make don't affect the Mac experience for anyone else using your machine. And TinkerTool's Reset pane makes it easy to restore everything back to the way it was before you started fooling around.