Mac OS X Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, by Rael Dornfest and Keven Hemenway. Published by O'Reilly and Associates, $24.95. Reviewed by Francine Schwieder

This is a somewhat strange book. The title would lead you to expect that some geeky person like, well, say me for instance, would really like the book, but most normal people wouldn't find much in here to interest them. You would be both right and wrong: there are indeed things in here only a true blue geek would ever think of doing, such as writing a Perl script to control an Apple Script that allows you to have your computer go on the internet to get information, and then, when verbally commanded to do so, tell you, out loud, what the temperature is. I must say doing something like that strikes even me as being a bit strange. Or a similar hack that would allow you to access iTunes on one Mac from another Mac, by way of a web browser, and control what the iTunes Mac is playing. I'm still not sure why someone would put in the effort needed to get this to work, but someone did. Aside from it being kinda cool it seems like it would be easier to walk into the other room and put something you want on the stereo. If you're spending that much time at your computer you really do need to get up every now and again anyway. But then the hacker with the remote control iTunes would undoubtedly never understand why I spent 2 days trying to figure out how to replace the Photoshop splash screen with one of my own design. As my dad used to to tell me, "It's all a matter of taste, said the old lady as she kissed the cow."

But there are many things even a perfectly normal Mac user can love. While the book does contain a few sections of truly geeky hacks, it also has a lot of the hints and tricks, not to mention the tips and tools, promised in the subtitle. Many of these are perfectly straight-forward, and often excellent, introductions to Mac features and programs. I recently spent several days experimenting, and making many false steps along with discovering the correct ones, on a "movie" project. I wanted to take my Italy photos, add a sound track of some original music by a friend of mine, make it all into a movie like Ken Burns does for PBS, and be able to burn it to a CD that anyone could play. Then I started reading this book, and to my amazement discovered a complete, simple, step-by-step set of directions for doing just what I had been trying to do. Along the way there were little mini introductions to iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes and even QuickTime Pro. If only I had read the book first I would have saved myself some time and trouble.

There are also what might be called "Intermediate Tricks" for those who aren't geeks, but are beyond the beginner stage. Thus, if you have a little (and very little at that) experience with using the Terminal you'll find quite a few interesting, and no doubt sometimes useful, things to try. For instance Hack 59 describes how to use the "rsync" command to do incremental, non-destructive folder backups. That is, it very quickly updates files in a backup folder, without removing anything, just adding changes. Of course it took me a little fiddling around before I got it to work as expected, and, as I expected, since it is a UNIX command, it ignored irrelevant (to UNIX) information like creator and type codes, resource forks, and formatting information. So maybe this is an "Intermediate to Advanced" type of trick. I suspect, although I haven't had time to work on it, that you can use other Terminal commands to get it to copy Mac specific stuff as well (the manual page Apple supplies about rysnc is VERY long and all I did was glance at it briefly). But it sure is fast and, to a geek like me, very interesting. Much more workable is the general introduction to using the Terminal, which has not only basic information, but tips that an intermediate user will find helpful. Personally, I knew about using the "history" command in bash, but didn't know the quick way to reuse a previous command (I was using copy/paste).

Perhaps the most useful parts of the book are the descriptions of free or cheap software you can download and use. Not only are there things I was already familiar with, many of which I use (such as TinkerTools), but things I had never heard of--such as the introduction of the common Linux window manager trick of having multiple desktops to the Mac, which is a real boon to those with a single smallish monitor.

Because the various sections are written by different people they are somewhat uneven, some being simple and clear, some more difficult to follow. And I'm still not quite sure just who the intended audience is. There are things just right for me, things that are over my head, and things that are too simple. But there is something here for just about everyone, and the book isn't too pricey. So if you enjoy playing around a bit with your computer and trying out new things you just might find this a very useful book. I wouldn't regret spending $25 on it.

You can sample some of the hacks at the O'Reilly web site: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/mcosxhks/

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