My Mac OS X Customized Settings

The time is upon us for Black Friday sales and/or new Macs for Christmas that we’ll be disappointed with when there’s a product announcement in January.

With these new computers, we’ll want to forgo the tedium of initializing settings to remove silly restrictions meant for bumbling peasants. We’ll want to customize Mac OS X to our nerdish liking. Here is how I go about mine.

Finder

• Set View Options in Finder to Arrange by Name
• Turn off Spring-loaded folders in the Finder
• Disable drives from showing up on desktop

Mail

• Configure Rules to designate color coded message lines from family

iTunes

• Dougscripts for iTunes
  • Search AmazonMP3
  • Search Google Images
  • Add/Subtract Play Count
  • “Artist – Name” Corrector
  • Number Song Names by Play Order
  • Put Track Prefix to Track Number
  • Remove n Characters from Front or Back
  • Strip Stuff From Track Names
  • Track Names to Word Caps

System Preferences

• Keyboard & Mouse: Enable right-click on Mighty Mouse, Disable Expose, Dashboard buttons
• Dock: Automatically hide Dock, Disable animate opening applications
• Software Update: Disable automatic checking

Advanced Customization

• Turn off Bluetooth and remove from Menu Bar
• Turn off feedback for Sound controls and unnecessary notifications in iChat and Mail
• Remove the Windows BSOD in Leopard
• Run Terminal commands to disable unnecessary features and animations

  Change Dock to 2D Appearance

  defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

  Disable animations in the Finder

  defaults write com.apple.finder DisableAllAnimations -bool true

  Disable ‘snap to grid’ animation

  defaults Write com.apple.Finder AnimateSnapToGrid -bool FALSE

  Disable Info pane animations

  defaults write com.apple.finder AnimateInfoPanes -bool false

  Increase the speed of the Save dialog box (Default is 0.2)

  defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime .001

  Force Mail.app to display plaintext

  defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE

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