![]() ![]() In Snow Leopard and before, I always checked “Place both scroll arrow buttons of any scroll bar at both ends of the bar,” giving me both an up arrow and a down arrow at each end of the scroll bar. For example, I always check the option listed here as “Disable the three-dimensional glass effect of the Dock” this allows me to keep the Dock at the bottom of the screen while using the more compact, pleasing appearance that it automatically takes on when it’s at one side of the screen. You can get a sense of what TinkerTool might be able to do for you by looking at the online list of TinkerTool’s options in 10.6 Snow Leopard and 10.7 Lion. And, like TidBITS, it takes a conservative stance its only options are those that have been determined to be safe and useful. It customizes itself automatically to the particular system and version you’re using, so the options you’ll see are always the right options. TinkerTool is a brilliant one-window application that presents itself as a series of panes, rather like System Preferences, each pane providing checkboxes or other interface for toggling undocumented under-the-hood switches in your system and in some Apple-provided software, such as the Finder and Safari. If that’s how you feel, you can’t do better than to download Marcel Bresink’s freeware TinkerTool. I don’t want to go wild and hack my system I just want to know what’s well-tested and safe that I can tweak, even though Apple doesn’t provide an interface in System Preferences to let me do so. And if I don’t like a change I’ve made, I want a simple way to undo it immediately. Don’t make me type directly into Terminal I’m afraid I might mess something up accidentally. When it comes to undocumented system tweaks, what most users want, I think, is two things: You, Adam immediately told you how to show it again (“ Dealing with Lion’s Hidden Library,” 20 July 2011). And when 10.7 Lion deviously hid your user Library from Apple later saw the error of its own ways (for once!) and provided an official interface for doing the same thing, which remains to this day. ![]() For example, when Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard introduced the transparent menu bar, I couldn’t get any work done, and rejoiced the moment a trick was discovered for making it opaque again (“ Transparent Menu Bar, Die Die Die!,” 16 November 2007). Sometimes, however, Apple backs us into a corner, producing a system that does something so blatantly annoying or even downright moronic that we can’t resist advising you to fix it by giving some mystical and unsupported incantation at the command line. Also, undocumented tweaks are undocumented this means that Apple could withdraw their effectiveness at any time (and has indeed sometimes done so see, for example, “ Leopard Screen Sharing Loses Hidden Features,” 29 September 2008). ![]() You wouldn’t want to break it accidentally, and we wouldn’t want to give you any advice that might cause you to do so. It’s responsible for running your whole computer. When it comes to undocumented system tweaks, we at TidBITS tend to take a fairly conservative stance. #1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announced.1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura.#1657: A deep dive into the innovative Arc Web browser. ![]()
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