Mac OS X
From ZS64
A personal list of software, configuration and tweaks to make Mac OS X even better.
Contents |
Configuration
Screen Sharing
- The following only applies to Screen Sharing 1.0 (which came with 10.5.0). Unfortunately, apple removed much of this functionality in Screen Sharing 1.1 with the update to 10.5.5. If you saved (or otherwise extracted) Screen Sharing 1.0 from the plain 10.5.0, you could still uses these features. However, Screen Sharing 1.0 crashes on 10.6, so you have to make do with the bundled version 1.1 and it's (lack of) features. TUAW post about this
Screen Sharing is normally hidden in the library folder, so I like to drag it to the Dock for easy access. Use the Finder's Go To command to go to /System/Library/CoreServices and drag Screen Sharing to the Dock, or create an alias to it and put it in Applications.
Also, Screen Sharing has some hidden features that come it quite handy (thanks to this Macworld hint):
Enable a network browser for machines offering Screen Sharing session:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1
Enable a toolbar with additional functions:
defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing \ 'NSToolbar Configuration ControlToolbar' -dict-add 'TB Item Identifiers' \ '(Scale,Control,Share,Curtain,Capture,FullScreen,GetClipboard,SendClipboard,Quality)
Time Machine Frequency
Time Machine runs a backup every hour, or 3600 seconds. With the following command, you can change the frequency to have it run more or less often.
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 3600
If you don't feel like changing system defaults, you can also use TimeMachineEditor or TimeMachineScheduler.
Additional Software
Things I like to add:
- Perian - Additional QuickTime codecs for common formats
- XQuartz - development version of the X11 package included in 10.5, updated by the main Apple developer
- ClickToFlash - A Flash blocker for Safari
- MPlayer OSX Extended
- German Mac-like keyboard layout for Windows, so you can continue to use the Mac key combinations for €, @, {}, etc.
Version Checks
Flash is notorious for it's frequently discovered security problems, so make sure to regularly check for updates at Adobe's Flash info page, which shows you the version of Flash you have installed currently.
