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Changes and ModificationsBy Francine Schwieder |
1. A Small Stack Replacement Strategy: or how to have a hierarchical folder you can navigate in for your applications. I used to keep a folder of application aliases in my Dock, it was even organized with sub-folders, thus I had one folder inside for Games, another for Classic applications, and so on. Well, with stacks you can't navigate those sub-folders. Then it finally occurred to me: I used to use the AppleMenu for this sort of thing, because you could put whatever you wanted in there, back in the Old Days. You can't do that anymore, and by now it is clear that functionality is never going to be ours again. But having the stuff in the menu bar was pretty handy. However I don't trust anything that hacks the menu bar.....but wait! Apple has an Apple approved menu extra that I have always used, to wit, Scripts! It accesses various Script folders, and you launch Applescript applications from it. So I dropped my AppAlias folder into /Library/Scripts (and added a space to the front of the AppAlias name so it would appear at the top). To activate the Script menu you go to /Applications/AppleScript and run the Applescript Utility and turn on "Show Script menu in menu bar" and check show scripts at the bottom. Et voila'! I can access all my application aliases and launch my apps from the menu bar!
One thing to bear in mind before rejoicing is a possible “gotcha” if what you want to do is to be able to navigate your entire computer, as you could by dropping the hard drive in the Tiger Dock. In Apple's Classic Pref pane you could display a menu bar item that included the old Apple Menu, and you could put whatever you wanted in it. I put aliases to a couple of drives in it and thought how lovely that I could now navigate wherever I wanted from the menu bar. But all those hierarchical menus, sub-menus and sub-sub-menus quickly caused a problem with either SystemUIServer (which is responsible for everything in that part of the menu bar) and/or Finder. It's been a couple of years since I tried it so I don't remember the details, but it wasn't good.
But as long as you confine yourself to just a few folders with aliases to a few dozen items it should work without problems. Anyway, I've been using it for weeks now and have not had any problems at all.
2. The Stripes: Some people love the new stripes in the Finder windows. I'm not one of them. If you aren't either, and consider them an eyesore, you can abolish them in the Finder's List view with a default write command:
defaults write com.apple.finder FXListViewStripes -bool FALSE;killall Finder
They still show up in other list views, for instance in Save and Open dialog boxes, but you no longer have to see them in regular Finder windows.
3. Transparency: You can also kill the transparent menu bar (but not, unfortunately, the transparent menus) with another simple Terminal command:
sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' -dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE' 1
You can vary the brightness by changing the number at the end of the command, I settled on .63 as being a nice polite gray. Would that there were a global preference for transparency! Apple ran amok, putting transparency everywhere, no matter how horribly inappropriate it is from a usability perspective, just because they could.
4. The Screaming Sidebar Headers: The new Sidebar, like Cover Flow, was borrowed from the iTunes interface. I don't like it much, it is now far too intrusive, and why the headers have to be in CAPITAL LETTERS, well, good grief! Actually, I don't know why we have to have them at all, I thought the little lines separating the sections in Tiger worked perfectly well. Anyway, one can at least do away with the screaming caps.
First you want to copy this file to your Desktop:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/LocalizableCore.strings
To open the Finder.app, just control click and select "Show Package Contents," then continue navigating. Simply dragging it to the Desktop will copy it. Rename your copy to something like OriginalLocalizableCore.strings, open it with TextEdit and resave it with the correct name. With this version still open do a search for "SD5"--you'll be taken to a spot that has the names as they appear in the Sidebar for DEVICES, SHARED, SEARCH and PLACES. Retype them in as Devices, Shared, and so on. Save the file. Now drag it back into the English.lproj folder. You'll be asked if you want to replace the one there, which you do, and that you need to authenticate. So give your password and relaunch the Finder to enjoy your less strident Sidebar.
As long as I was there I decided to see what was in the Localizable.strings file, and found the entry for "untitled folder" which I've also always disliked. It is item N2, and I changed mine to noname. Takes me back to my ResEdit days, that was a change I always made. You might find other things that have always bugged you which you can change, such as the unexpected error message (A28)--as opposed to what? An expected error?
The permissions on your replacement files will be incorrect. You can either fix them by hand or just run Repair Permissions from Disk Utility and have it fix them for you.
For those of you were used to putting your home directory in the Dock, and being able to navigate anywhere with a single click, be sure to check out Rainer Brockerhoff's Quay. It brings back the functionality you were used to. You do have to retrain yourself, if you had a multi-button mouse, to use a single left click instead of a right click, but it works great. To have more than one folder you will have to pay the shareware fee, about 10 bucks. I've used other little programs by him, and they have never caused a problem and always worked as advertised.
As I expected, there are already several home brew QuickLook plugins available. I tried two from xdd and taiyo, Folder QuickLook and also their Zip QuickLook generator. You just unzip the files and put the qlgenerators into the /Library/QuickLook folder, don't even need to restart anything, they are immediately available. The result is that when you hit the spacebar with either a folder or a zip file selected you see the contents listed in the QuickLook window.
Very nice, and free.