MacTricksAndTips.com

This post is a proper hacking post. It is designed to go into the core of the Mac OS X operating system and enable you to change some of the strings that control certain parts of text on your system. For example with this post you will be able to change the new folder name, as well as various other parts of your operating system. Once you get the hang of it you will be able to hack and crack your way to a computer system the way you like it.

This isn’t really a hack but a method to change the way program looks. It uses the Interface Builder used in applications to change the way a program looks. It is very simple, but if there is an annoying aspect of a program you just want to change, or to confuse your friends this is a fun way to start. With this trick you can’t hack every program, or every feature of a program. It is fun and a good time waster if you are bored.

A very simple and easy to implement hack that enables high definition videos to be played within front row. Very useful for people with high definition monitors or people with a high speed internet connection and wanting to get the most out of there viewing experience.

Normally to extract an applications icon it involves a long method of view the contents of an application, navigating to the right folder and finding the correct image. You can’t even do that in some circumstances. But there is a very simple method of copy and pasting to get the image you want into a new document. You can then use this image in what ever you want. Very useful.

The games on iPods are, frankly, a bit boring. Thankfully some cleaver people have managed to put a small installation of linux onto an iPod but some top quality games on there. Some games include, doom, poker and a whole manner of other. Great fun if you have an old iPod and don’t mind hacking the software to bits.

It is very simple to make your own dock in Leopard. It involves only changing a couple of files. They don’t take long and the result can look really good. You just need to make sure that the files you change are the correct dimensions and file names. If you change the files and name them incorrectly you dock ends up flying all over the place, with it appearing a disappearing every time you move and hover over a file.

Once as you get to know your Mac and you are more confident in how it works, and what everything does, you may want to starting playing with the system files. Usually I strongly suggest you don’t play with any of them to be on the safe side. But every so often you may need to edit a certain file to achieve a specific task. For example if you are using the web server built into a Mac and you want to edit the httpd.conf file. Normally you would have to give yourself permission to edit the file, and then open up it up. Or you could use vim or pico, a Terminal file editing program. Both of these take a while to learn (especially vim and pico) or take a long time to implement (changing file permissions). What we want is the ability to give TextEdit root powers to edit these files, while still using the GUI of TextEdit. Its rather simple.

This is just a quick tip, but it is really fun. Usually when you open up Terminal you will see the date and time of your last Terminal login. That is a bit boring. As a result there is a cool little command that you can use to give your self a custom welcome message, that is a lot more interesting. This tip using a sudo command so you will have to be careful.