MacTricksAndTips.com

This is a neat little trick. Like quite a few things on your Mac the cool features are hidden away. Although this tricks is rather simple it is fun to do. As well as this there is quite a lot of detail to be had by looking through the files (which I think are written in some form of C).

The first step is to open up Terminal. No hidden feature would be without good old Terminal.

The Mac system, as you might well know is built on Unix. As a result there is a lot of Unix folders in the root system. This post is going to explain for people new the the Mac system a general understanding of what each folder does. This is designed to be a simple guide for new users, so experienced Unix and Mac developers probably know a lot more than me. You have to learn from somewhere.

Did you know that your hard drive is full of hidden files. All of them are hidden to keep your computer running smoothly. But every so often you may want to view those files to see if your computer is acting out of the ordinary or you have mistakingly names something starting with a dot (.) and want to find the file again. There are three ways you can do this. Through an application, through a preference pane, or good old command line. Each have there pros and cons.

This tip comes from messing around with my system and general clues about how screen savers work from various forums. The basic idea behind this trick is to install some cool screen savers that are not in the most obvious positions. Its quick and simple to do. As well as this there are some really cool effects that should really be installed by default. There are two sets, the black and white version included on every system and some really amazing screen savers found only on your Leopard disk. These could be found in Tiger you would have to look your self.

This really isn’t a hidden feature, hence the speech marks, but it is a cool feature of the dictionary application that not many people know about. If you load up dictionary from applications you can access the front and back covers. If you haven’t ever picked up a dictionary before these contain some tables of elements, US presidents, abbreviations and other cool things such as how to use the dictionary.

This I think is a real trick that could save you some time . The aim of this trick is to install two hand preference panes in System Preferences (Applications > System Preferences). It is designed as a quick short cut to enable you to access some settings that you may need, also it is really cool to show off to your Mac friends. It is really simple to do and doesn’t involve anything complex. The two that will be installed are Archives and Disk Images, not the most used applications in the world, but cool none the less.

Did you know that an Application is actually a folder, so is a widget and many other files on you Mac. But how do you access the hidden files and what can you do with them. The results are very interesting and you can learn a lot about how the operating system works.