Browsing through the Help system helped me get over being cheesed off with the extra delay that Apple has inserted on the second click when renaming items in the new Finder.
All you need to do is to hit the Return key, and you're instantly in edit mode on the file name.
I believe I saw this one on the MacFixIt forums today. If you like some of the images that are loaded by the screensaver application, you can also use them as desktop pictures. Navigate in the GUI (use the terminal if you wish, but these are GUI instructions) to:
/System/Library/Screen Savers/
There are four screen savers with images (Abstract, Beach, Cosmos, and Forest). Control-click on any one of those four, and pick Show Package Contents. When the new window opens, navigate to Contents/Resources/Images, and you'll see a list of images (and their previews, if you switch to column view).
To use the images as desktop pictures, just copy the one(s) you are interested in to a destination in a new finder window. You can now tell Desktop Preferences to use these images as desktops!
[Editor's note: Although this probably has no side effects, always be cautious when messing around with system-created folders! The thought of having one desktop in both mode is certainly appealing!]
I was sick of having two different desktop folders in Mac OS 9 and OS X, so I decided to combine them into one. Here's how I did it
I fired up the terminal app and found out where everything lived:
OS 9 desktop folder = /Desktop Folder/
OS X desktop folder = /Users/username/Desktop
I deleted the folder from /Users/username/Desktop with an rm -R Desktop
I logged in as root and did a ln -s /Desktop Folder/ Users/username/Desktop
After logging out and logging back in, OS 9 and OS X now share the same desktop folder!
The finder's desktop preferences let you snap the desktop icons to a grid, yet somehow the icons always get randomly rearranged. The easy Classic-like fix is to turn on the 'arrange by' desktop view option (which I belive is currently hidden). I did this with prefedit (or any xmlproperty editor) in the following property:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder
Look in the DesktopViewOptions property for ArrangeBy which you can set to "dnam" for sort by name or "kind" for sort by kind. Save your changes...
Now log out and log back in and your desktop is sorted. I found a desktop sorted by kind with the trash can on the desktop and a couple of good aliases ("Home", "Print Center", MacOS 9 Apps, MacOS X Apps, etc...) makes the desktop suddenly look very much like Classic.
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hope this helps
[Editor's note: John K. submitted this writeup a few days ago, and I managed to lose it in my inbox for a bit. My apologies for the delays in getting this posted, John!]
John writes:
My OS X install does not work well with netatalk, the unix AFP file server. When I log in as guest and mount a share, it displays correctly, but the following problems occur:
Copies do not work at all. I get an error -43.
Changes to the directories don't get displayed, and attempts to use the directory after a change can cause OS X to crash.
I cannot authenticate myself anymore. I think this is probably because I have a vanilla RedHat 7 and am missing some kind of library necessary to do secure authentication.
This was all a real bummer, because I backed up my disk to this server. If you're using netatalk, it's a good idea to move the data to an Apple server before upgrading.
If you're stuck (like I am), there's a utility, megatron, that can make macbinary files which can be ftp'd or copied via NFS, and then unmacbin'd by Stuffit Expander. I'm working on a tool to run megatron on a large number of files, so it won't be so difficult to recover from this snafu. I'll post the link here when it's done.
Most people know by now that you can hold down the command key and drag around a background window without bringing the window to the front. However, I also discovered that you can hold down the command key and do just about anything in a background window that belongs to a Cocoa application without bringing the window forward. You can resize the window, move scrollbars, click buttons, and pop up menus, among other things.
You can't, however, click buttons that are in customizable toolbars. This is because you can command-drag a toolbar button to a different position in the toolbar, or off of the toolbar completely, regardless of whether the window is is front or not.
If you normally leave the dock visible, it sometimes gets in the way when apps (especially Classic apps) take over the whole screen. It's a pain to mouse to the dock, switch the setting to autohide, do what you want, and switch it back to always show.
A much easier method is to hit Command-Option-D, and the dock will hide. Do what you need to do, and hit Command-Option-D again, and the dock will show itself.
Caught this one on the MacFixIt boards tonight...of course, from comment #1, I should have 'caught' it by just looking at the Apple menu! Oh well, it was a long day!
If you edit the com.apple.dock.plist in your preferences folder, it will allow you to turn on many features (such as those which can be accessed using GUI appls like TinkerTool). But it will also let you turn on the QuitFinder boolean. This will add a quit option for the finder. I don't know who this would be of much use to, mabye those with only 128 RAM would find it useful in some processor-intense apps.
[NOTE: On my machine, editing the dock.plist file in either the terminal or the dev tools' property list editor, I do not see this boolean! I have no idea why, and reidab sent me a screenshot showing that his version does have it ... odd! I could just add it, I suppose...]
The look of the dock is created by 3 PDF files, called 'left.pdf', 'middle.pdf', and 'right.pdf'. These files can be opened in Photoshop and modified, to make the dock look however you'd like it to.
If you'd like more information on customizing your dock, read the rest of this article, and check out the original over on ResExcellence.
Toolbar tricks Mar 30, '01 06:42:31PM • Contributed by: Anonymous
If you have a folder in your Finder toolbar, hold option and click to open that folder in a new window and close the old window. Clicking without option simply opens that folder in the existing window. Strangely, it seems to switch to icon view regardless of the view mode from which you click [editor - not on my machine; it seems random!]. If you command-click the folder, it opens in a new window without closing the old one.
Application icons that have been added to the toolbar can be used to switch to the given app, saving you a bit of time and mousing down to the dock to switch. Drag-and-drop apps (such as Stuffit Expander) can have things dropped on them on the toolbar.
