Chapter 17. Hacking Mac OS X Section shows you how to customize your desktop picture, error beep, and screen saver. But if you're sneaky, creative, or just different, you can perform more dramatic visual and behavioral surgery on your copy of Mac OS X | Chapter 17. Hacking Mac OS X Section shows you how to customize your desktop picture error beep and screen saver. But if you re sneaky creative or just different you can perform more dramatic visual and behavioral surgery on your copy of Mac OS X from changing the start up screen image to replacing the poof that appears when you drag something off the Dock with a new animation of your own. All you need is a few of Mac OS X s less obvious tools or some free downloadable customizing software and a few recipes like the ones in this chapter. Some of these tricks are frivolous. Some are functional and useful. And although Apple sanctions not a one all are perfectly safe. . TinkerTool Customization 101 If you poke around the Mac OS X Web sites and news groups 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 . But 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 17-1 . Figure 17-1. TinkerTool is a doubleclickable program that makes changes only to your account .
