T11M

While I’m on the subject of customizing the OS X desktop environment there is another nifty little piece of software that can do great things for you.  Tinker tool is simply a graphical user interface (GUI) that allows access to a wide variety of neat customizations not available through the standard OS X GUI.  Tinker Tool is completely safe because it does not modify the OS in any way.  It simply accesses the the apple .plist files (preference files) and modifies the defaults.  The functionality is already built in, Apple just has not made it available to the general user.  The same functionality that is made available through Tinker Tool is also accessible using .plist changes from the Terminal – very doable, but if there is a GUI why mess around?

I’ve used Tinker Tool for quite some time now and have found a few customizations that I really hate to function without.  My favorite customization by far is in Finder and causes the selected items path to be displayed in the title bar of the Finder window.  Another great customization deals with sheets – the dialogues that pop up when you click print or save.  Tinker Tool allows you to prefer expanded save sheets and expanded print sheets, which saves me the extra click needed to expand the sheet so I can save to the location of my choice.  A couple of changes that make Leopard slightly less annoying are the ability to remove the “always in foreground” preference that is default with the Help dialogue box and the ability to keep Time Machine from always asking if you want to use a newly connected drive for backups.  One last change that I make is adding the Develop menu to the menu bar in Safari (the Develop menu is where you find the console for debugging in Safari – a must for web development).

If you like the sounds of it, Tinker Tool is available from Marcel Bresink’s site.