Snow Leopard: Modifications

By Francine Schwieder

Modifications

Thus far I've only found one major new modification for Snow Leopard that I have implemented, and one minor plist alteration, plus there is one minor modification that carried over from my Leopard install when I upgraded. This section would be pretty sparse if that's all I discussed, so I'm going to start with some minor modifications Apple made to Snow Leopard that haven't been pointed out in the previous sections.

Apple's Own

Counting

Does the above sequence of numbers look familiar? If you've bought RAM chips it should. Those are the powers of two, which is how binary counting works. You may also know that computers deep down know two numbers: 0 and 1. Something is on or off, the state is represented by either 0 or 1. Thus computers work with a binary number system, everything is based on 2. In our ordinary lives we use a decimal system that is based on 10 and powers of 10, no doubt because we have 10 fingers to count on. Generally, a kilobyte has been taken to mean 2 to the 10th power, that is 2 multiplied by 2 multiplied by 2, and so on, until you get to 2 to the 10th power, which is 1024. However, kilobyte used in this way is something of a bastard term, since the kilo prefix is not binary but decimal, and means 1000. Drive manufacturers prefer to use the number 1000, since it makes the drives have nice familiar round numbers like 250 or 500, and also makes them sound bigger.

The result of this is that people buy a drive, and on the box it says that it is, say, 250GBs, but when they format it on their Mac the size is listed as 232GBs, and they think somehow 18GBs that they paid for has somehow vanished. It hasn't, the difference is that the drive manufacturer is using decimal, and Apple's Disk Utility is using binary. To avoid this confusion Apple decided to change the way all this stuff is counted and go with the decimal count. A 250GB drive will now show a capacity of 250, rather than 232. So if you do an upgrade install to Snow Leopard and then look at how much space is available you may think you got a lot more free space back than you did. Before the upgrade the free space was measured the binary way, afterwards it is reported the decimal way. You did indeed recover some free space, just not as much as it superficially appears. And yes there are people who don't like the change and want to go back to binary. Thus far no one knows a way to do that.

More on Icons

Earlier I mentioned the transition to bigger icons in the Finder, and also mentioned changes in the Dock and in the way Stacks in the Dock work. Apple sort of combined these two things, and the icons in the Stacks are now bigger. Many think they are rather too much of good thing, and want to make them smaller. Unfortunately right now there is no way known that will do this. You are going to have really large pretty icons in your Stack, so you'll have to learn to love them, and get skillful at spotting that nearly invisible slider.

Evidently there are quite a few people who merrily change every icon they can see anywhere, and have discovered that the usual method no longer works for things like the Safari or iTunes application icons. Since those things don't belong to you, Apple has enforced the rule that you can't change them at all, not even their icon. The only way is change their permissions or give yourself root powers and then change them. Since Apple has also instituted code signing all over the place I'm not going to mess about with things like that, and certainly not going to recommend any one else do so either. But if you want to live dangerously, take a look at this procedure over at MacOSXHints. Be sure to read the comments! Proceed at your own risk.

A Missing Icon

For as long as I've been using a Mac the startup drive icon has been in the upper right corner, just below the menu bar. This changed ever so slightly in Leopard: you could arrange your Desktop icons any way you pleased, including the drive icons, and they would stay wherever you put them when you restarted. This was a bit disconcerting to people who made a clone of their startup drive and booted from the clone, because the icon for the clone drive did NOT displace the icon for the original in that upper right corner spot, so they couldn't tell at a glance which drive they were booted on.

Since I upgraded a working Leopard installation I didn't know that something even more dramatic had happened: Apple had changed the default behavior of this time hallowed behavior of the drive icon being on the Desktop. They turned it off! So if you do an installation of Snow Leopard to a bare drive, when you boot up there will be no drive icon on the Desktop. Just go to Finder's Prefences, click the General icon in the toolbar, and put a check in the box for Hard disks. You may have to do the same for the Sidebar.

Unauthorized Changes: Or the Do It Yourself Mods

Defaults Write

One of the commonest and least intrusive ways to modify the way your Mac behaves is to use a defaults write command in the Terminal. What this does is to add an entry to a plist file for some option that is actually present, but access to it has not been made available in the GUI (the Graphical User Interface) by Apple. Thus I prefer my Dock to be on the right side of the monitor rather than the bottom, since there is more screen real estate over there, and pinned to the bottom so that the Trash is in the lower right corner where it belongs, and it doesn't move around as things are added and removed from the Dock. The preference to have it on the right is readily available, you just go to System Preferences, the Dock pane, and click the button in front of screen position. When you do this the plist for the Dock is changed to record your preference. The file that is altered is here:

/Users/yourname/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

The option to have it pinned to the bottom is not present in the Dock's preference pane, but it does exist in the Dock application itself. But in order to access this preference, and set it as you wish, you have to use the defaults write command in Terminal. There is nothing hard about this, and if you somehow mess up you can simply throw away the Dock's plist and reset your preferences the normal way.

To add this preference to the Dock's plist you launch Terminal from your Utilities folder and type (or copy and paste) this command:

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning -string end;killall Dock

Press the Return key and your Dock will be pinned. The "killall Dock" part quits and restarts the Dock so that your modification will take effect. The other options, instead of end (which pins the Dock on the right) are start and the default, which is middle.

If you are wondering how one finds these hidden preferences, Rob Griffiths, the founder of MacOSXHints (an excellent place to search for all things to do to modify your Mac and its programs) wrote an article explaining how it is done. You can read it HERE. This is obviously not something most people would like to do, it's far easier to just reap the benefits by reading MacOSXHints. Unfortunately some of the changes Apple made in Snow Leopard make this all rather more problematic, and some of the other changes killed preferences that used to work, such as eliminating the stripes in List view or making the Help window behave itself. It may take awhile to get any more of these useful little changes, since it is now even more of a technical challenge to find them.

Of course, there are those who are up to the challenge, and one new defaults write command that has been found brings back mouseover highlights of items in Stacks:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -boolean yes;killall Dock

The highlighting is actually pretty cool looking. I suppose it is just more of that "core animation pixie dust" but I rather like it.

Brute Force Edit of the Plist

Since the plist is just a file, it can be edited. The easy way is to use Apple's own Property List Editor, available if you have Developer Tools installed. Below is a screenshot of what you see when you open a plist in the Property List Editor. I chose the plist for the Dock in this example, as it is relatively small and simple, compared to something like the Finder's plist.

I've clicked the disclosure triangle for Root, to show what all is in the plist, and selected the entry for pinning, then clicked on the variable to select it for editing. I could change it here from end to start or middle, and then save, and the Dock, when forced to consult its plist by a restart, would then follow the changed preference. The pinning entry has been added to this plist by the defaults write method, but I could have also added it by clicking the New Sibling button, and then filling out each of those entries in the correct way, adding in pinning, selecting String from the drop down menu, and typing end. One can also delete something with the Delete button at the top: just select a line and then click Delete.

You used to be able to also edit plist files with a simple text editor, TextEdit would do nicely. However very nearly all plists are now in a different sort of format, and that is no longer possible. It was never exactly easy to read and edit using that method anyway, but TextWrangler will still work.

I mention all of this because an extremely dedicated and alert member of MacOSXHints managed to figure out how to turn on the disabled Sizes column in the Search window results List view. The enterprising hacker did so by actually going thru and reading evidently ALL the entries in the Finder's plist, and found one for SearchViewSettings, which had been set to Visible=No. Change that No to Yes and the Size column appears in the Search results window. You can not only see the sizes, but even sort by size and it can work, though not quite as reliably as one would wish.

To the left is a small section of the Finder's plist, open in Property List Editor, with the relevant setting selected. I've already changed that No to a Yes. In this case you cannot use the defaults write command, because the item is buried several levels deep in the hierarchy, you need to use the Editor to change it. Above is a screen shot of a Search window, showing the result of a search by size, with the items actually arranged by size.

There is of course a reason why Apple disabled this by default. As I mentioned earlier, I think something is wrong with the Finder's relationship to the information about sizes in the file system. I believe as a result of this fault, whatever it may be, this feature in search could not be made to work correctly and reliably in all circumstances. In the example shown above, where I was in a folder and looking for certain files in that folder, it worked splendidly: it listed the files over 30MBs, and clicking on the Size header sorted the files correctly with no problem.

My experience so far is that while it does work for files, there are occasions when you may have to click another column first, then click back to Size, and click it a second time to reverse the sort, then again to get back to the sort order you originally had in mind, before the files are actually arranged in the order you want. Thus to get a group of images arranged in descending size (largest at top, smallest at the bottom) I have had to click on the Size column header three times, AFTER the results are complete. So if the Name column is active, you click the Size header, the results are scrambled, click Size a second time and the result list is somewhat reversed but still scrambled, third click will USUALLY result in an ordered list. This seems to be the case if you don't have lots of results, and you are searching in a limited area (say your home folder), and the items being returned are simple files. If you search This Mac and have several drives, and get hundreds of results, you may have to click and click and click to get the proper sort. And if the search results include things other than simple files you may never get them to sort properly. So it works...but only sorta.

Xray Folders

This modification is a bit hard to describe, and I still haven't decided whether it actually has any practical value, nor whether I really like it or not. It is yet another hidden feature you can enable with a defaults write command, which was discovered by freaktheclown and published at MacOSXHints.

What it does is turn on a function in QuickLook which makes a folder semi-transparent, then does an animation of the folder's contents. The animation appears in both the regular QuickLook window and also in the GetInfo window for a folder. The screen capture movie shows two different folders, one has a GetInfo window open for it, with the Preview displaying an animation of the contents, the other folder is selected with the QuickLook window running its animation.

To turn on the feature you use this command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

You'll probably need to quit and then restart the Finder to get it to reread the plist and start using the feature. To turn this off just re-run the command, but change the 1 to a 0.

I used QuickTime Player X to make the screen capture, then edited it in iMovie 09. I did succeed to cropping it, although I crashed iMovie with my first attempt. I really don't think it should be possible for a naive user to crash an application by simply clicking on one thing and then clicking on something else. Even if the two things don't work together, you should simply get an error message or else nothing whatsoever should happen.

Also, on my machine it is playing with the QuickTime 7 plugin in Safari, not QuickTimeX, and I have absolutely no idea why. I also don't know what it will do on machines that don't have QT7 installed. Will it play? Will you simply get a QT icon with a Question mark? If I double click the file on my hard drive it opens and plays in QTX, not QT7. I haven't a clue why it all behaves the way it does.