Advanced Mac OS X Tips

Mac OS X has a very easy-to-be-understood interface for new users (and experienced users, ); lots of stuffs could be done within a few drags and clicks. Over the last year, I have introduced some useful techniques on Mac OS X, here are some examples:

1. Snow Leopard Tips: Symbol and Text Substitution
2. Customize login window background on Snow Leopard
3. Hide/Show your system disk icon on Snow Leopard

However, in order to let Mac serve you better, you will just need to know some more advanced tips make it happen.

Most of the tips will need to get involved with Terminal, if you are not very familiar with it, I suggest you copy and past down the command line into Terminal. Mind as well, I don’t guarantee all the code will be working for you, but I personally have tested almost all of them. Yet, it is worth a try, isn’t it?

1. Change .icns to other picture format

The command line is as following:

sips -s format png Dictionary.icns --out ~/Desktop/Dictionary_icon.png

“~/Desktop/Dictionary_icon.png” is the path of your destination picture, make sure you change it. If you would like to change .icns to other formats like .jpg, .gif, .bmp, .tiff, you will need to change the png in the code to the extension you are going to use.

2. Watch 720P HD movie theatrical trailers in Front Row

If you don’t already know what’s Front Row, you should hold the “Command” key by the space bar and then hit “esc” key on the top left of your keyboard; or you can find it in “Applications” folder.

When you launch Front Row, you could view the movies on your Mac Disk or you could watch theatrical trailers. Yet the default quality on Front Row is set to be low for faster trailers download; if you believe your internet speed is good, you can try to set the quality to be high definition quality for better enjoyment.

The command line is as following:

defaults write com.apple.frontrow TrailerBypass http://www.apple.com/trailers/home/xml/current_720p.xml && killall "Front Row"

If you don’t think this is good for you or if you think the trailers load too slow, you can use the following command line to restore to Apple default setting:

defaults delete com.apple.frontrow TrailerBypass && killall "Front Row"

3. Screenshot without the shadow

Apple has a very useful built-in screenshot application called “Grab”, I have introduced the shortcut usage in my previous post “Change the format from screenshot picture from Grab on Mac“. If you are careful enough, you might notice that Grab will also screen shot the shadow of the window. Here is one example shot:

Did you see the shadow at the bottom and on the right side? If you just want the window itself, you can easily crop it out with Preview; but if you don’t need the shadow all the time, it is a better idea to set to not have grab that shadow. Here is the command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

Or if you change your mind, simply restore it back with the following command:

defaults delete com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow

Note: After typing the command line, you will need to log off and log back in to see it in effect.

4. Change Grab default path

I have introduced how to change the file format of Grab, and today I am going to introduced how to change the default saving directory. The default directory for Grab is your desktop; to change the path you can use the following command line:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder

Just a special note here: the “Full/Path/To/Folder” really means the FULL path, even though “~/folder” and “/User/username/folder” might be the same in same ways, but Grab will only take the second one as a valid path. If you don’t do that, unexpected errors might happen. Also, you will need to log out and log back in for this command line to take effect.

5. Take advantages of Remote Disk on non-Macbook Air Macintosh

Macbook Air doesn’t have built-in Super Drive so that the thinness is possible. You could purchase an external Super Drive or you could use Remote Disc and read the disc from another Macintosh under the same network. Remote Disc is built for Macbook Air, but we could also enable it on other Macintosh. Here is the code:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

If you would like to disable it again, just launch your Terminal again and change the “true” at the back of the lines to “false” and type them in Terminal again.

6. Disable auto wake up from sleep mode while Macbook lid is open

If you Macbook/Macbook Air/ Macbook Pro enters sleep mode while the lid is closed and when you open it up, the machine will wake up from sleep mode. However, some of the users might want to disable this and let the machine wake up only when they hit the keyboard. Here is the code:

sudo pmset -a lidwake 0

“0″ in this line is same as “false”, if you want to restore it to default, just change it to “1″ or “true”. You will need to type in your administrator’s password so that this command could be accepted by Terminal.