Some people would prefer to retain navigation swipe functionality when enabling the new 3-finger drag. This hidden preference will remap navigation swipes from 3 to 4 fingers, displacing the Application Switcher and Exposé gestures instead of navigation swipes.

Type this in terminal and reboot to refresh the trackpad control panel:

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

For those who don't trust Time Machine, backing up to archives manually can be tricky. First off, as of OS X 10.6.4, the Unix zip and unzip programs that you can start from a terminal shell script do NOT handle resource forks and extended attributes correctly. The zip man file has an apology that this will be implemented soon. (And Automator uses the Unix zip program.)

The tar archiver also does not handle extended attributes correctly. It also saves but does not restore resource forks. So that is not useful either.

It seems that the Archive Utility.app that makes archives for the Finder is ahead of the Unix zip and tar. It DOES handle resource forks and extended attributes correctly.

In the past there have been several published hints on the /usr/sbin/networksetup command. However, until recently (well since 10.6.x) that command was not able to add passkeys to the keychain. I just received 500 new MacBooks to image in my enterprise and these brand new ones will only run 10.6. The rest of our deployment is still on 10.5.8 because we never had the desire to re-image 40 OS X Servers and 8,000 clients with 10.6.

So, I just modified my post image shell script to have a line that does a simple case statement and if it outputs 10.6* it executes this line of code: Where my_ssid is the SSID of your network, my_security is the level of encryption (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc) and my_passkey is your encryption passkey for your wireless network. I've tested this out on my post image shell script on about 10 clients so far after imaging them with 10.6. So far it works pretty well, and is a key step in us not having any post configuration to do by hand after a machine is imaged.

I know this is a bit of an older hint since 10.6 has been out for a while now but I searched it did not find anything on this, then I read the manual page from the Apple Developer site and found that command.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one.]

In Snow Leopard newly created Disk Images, both unencrypted and encrypted, will default to the use of Icon View for display. Changing the View type to List, Cover Flow, or Column View and then closing the window and reopening the window causes the view to revert to Icon View. Ejecting and remounting the image will also lose any changes and revert to Icon View.

Deleting the .DS_Store file on the mounted image does not help, and there is nothing in com.apple.finder.plist that seems to affect this. This is quite vexing, and appears to be present in all revisions of Snow Leopard, at least through 10.6.4.

Fortunately, there is a workaround.

Services are all the rage in 10.6 now. Since Apple let non-developer users make their own Services in Automator, people (like me) have been suggesting many services.

This hint is how to make a shortened URL using a lesser-known service named qgf.in. You can use other services too, as long as they have an API (usually the syntax is 'http://shortener.name/api?url=http://foo.bar').

Credits to all the people in the MacOSXHints Forums who helped with writing of the Perl script.

Here is a way to switch between a remotely shared screen and a local machine without losing the newly added remote control with Command keys, specifically, Command-Tab.

I just finished reading a post on how to bypass (and users weighing in on) the new Screen Sharing feature where commands are passed to the remote machine. I'm split; I do like the increased control over the remote machine with one exception: switching applications, specifically back to the Finder. Command-Tab is now sent to the remote machine, but that is how I used to switch from the shared screen to my local machine. I want both; remote commands but local switching.

Sometimes Services in Snow Leopard stop working for no apparent reason. The menu is missing from the contextual menu items when you do a right-click, and the Services menu in the menu bar shows only 'Building...' Other times, there may be more than one entry for the same service. These problems can always (in my experience) be corrected without logging out or rebooting.

I love Disk Utility, however, it does not directly support the creation of ISO 9660 images. It can create CDR images or CD/DVD master images. Those can be renamed to .iso files and are supported by most software. But that's inconvenient to say the least.

Some searching revealed that you can create ISO images using the Terminal through hdiutil.

In 10.5 and previous versions of the system, Terminal's remote connection dialog (go to the menu item Shell » New Remote Connection...) had a selection for Secure Shell (ssh) that defaulted to 'SSH (Automatic).' In 10.6, this has been changed to default to 'SSH Protocol 1.' None of my servers support SSH-1 (and if yours do, you should fix the security hole and disable it). [crarko adds: Here's a nice little FAQ that describes the SSH-1 and SSH-2 protocols. SSH-2 is newer and more secure.]

Also, Terminal does not remember the state when you change this pull down. Quitting Terminal or changing to another protocol and back will reset the pull down back to SSH-1. Here's a simple way to force it to keep the change.

You all probably know about Exposé's Application Mode (introduced in 10.6 I think). What's interesting is that while you're in it, you can Command+click on other running applications and bring their windows into Exposé as well.

Steps to reproduce:

• Open Application Exposé (click and hold on any running application in the Dock).
• Cmd+click on another running application in the Dock.

What happens is that only the windows of these 2 applications will be shown in Exposé. You can also continue to Cmd+click on other applications and bring their windows into Exposé as well.

I noticed that some windows that are normally ignored by Exposé, appear while doing this.

[crarko adds: I tested this, and it works as described. It's something of an addition to this previous hint.]