Customizing Your Mac Using Simple Leopard Tweaks
Monday, February 18th, 2008
The release of Leopard OS X has brought forth many features that have been for the most part, welcomed within the Mac community. Some users however, prefer to have an old-school look to Leopard while maintaining all of the features that they enjoy from the new operating system. No problem, AppletizeMe is here to help! Simply follow this quick guide to perform some very small tweaks to Leopard that will help your Mac look, feel, and behave the way you want it to.
Dock Changes
Kill The Dock Reflection
Some people don’t like the new dock reflection. If you are one of those people, this is a pretty easy fix. Simply open up terminal and input these two commands to shut off reflection:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
$ killall Dock
The first command turns off the reflective look and the second command reloads your dock. (Don’t type the $ in terminal). If you miss your old shiny dock after you take off the reflection and want to revert back to the default, simply replace –boolean YES with –boolean NO on the first command and proceed to reload the dock with the second.
Black Triangles instead of Blue Dots
Leopard uses little blue dots to indicate open application on the dock. If you liked Tiger’s black triangles instead, you can easily revert back to them following this tutorial over at Silver Mac.
Quick Look Add-ons
Having the power to preview images, documents, and other files with a tap of the spacebar is an excellent tool to have. If you want to use this nifty feature with even more file extensions, simply follow the steps below.
Previewing ZIP archives
To have the ability to preview contents of ZIP archives by tapping your space bar simply install the free Zip Quick Look plug-in. Step by step directions are available at that site.
Preview Folder Contents
You can also add the ability to preview folders by tapping your space bar by adding yet another easy to install plug-in. Here are simple instructions on how to set-up Quick look to view folder contents.
Other Useful Tweaks
Customizing Time Machine’s Backup Schedule
Simply download the free TimeMachineScheduler and install it. It will allow you to set your default backup time from 1 to 12 hours apart instead of getting stuck with Time Machine’s default one-hour backups.
Turning ON your firewall
Some of you might not know that Leopard’s built in firewall is turned off by default. If you would like to enable it, proceed to System Preferences’ Security area and choose either “Allow only essential services” or set explicit exceptions for services that can communicate through the firewall by selecting the “Set access for specific services and applications”.
I hope these tweaks where useful for you and made Leopard a bit more personal. Make sure to subscribe so you can get all of our future tweaks and optimization guides, there will be plenty of them.
