Leopard tamers: 9 terrific interface tweaks

by Ryan Faas

May 14, 2008 —

When Apple
Inc. shipped Mac
OS X 10.5 "Leopard" in October, Macintosh
users were divided about some of the interface changes Apple had made from prior
Mac OS X releases. Chief among these love 'em or hate 'em changes were the newly
translucent menu bar and the 3-D, shelf-like Dock, as well as the new Stacks
feature, which, when you mouse over a folder in the Dock, displays the folder's
contents as a column of icons or a rectangular grid.

It didn't take long for power users and shareware developers to find ways to
tweak the new user interface. At first, modifying Leopard required a level of
comfort and experience using the Mac OS X command line and/or modifying system
files. Over the past six months, however, the options for tweaking Leopard have
become more sophisticated and easier to manage.

Today, most changes can be done easily by any Mac user without trepidation.
Here, we'll highlight ways to make Leopard more Tiger-like, customize its look
and feel to reflect your personality, and show you how to improve certain Leopard
features.

Get back the look of Tiger

Apple's response to complaints about the translucent menu bar came with February's
10.5.2
update, which allows you to turn off the translucent look. If you preferred
the look of the menu bar in Tiger, just uncheck the Translucent Menu Bar option
in the Desktop & Screensaver preference pane.

You can go even further with a free tool from MD Softworks called LeoColorBar,
which performs a handful of tweaking functions, including restoring the familiar
rounded edges to the menu bar -- another subtle change in Leopard. It also lets
you choose a color besides Apple's familiar brushed-metal gray for the menu
bar, a nifty tweak in its own right.

The Leopard 10.5.2 update did not address complaints about the 3-D look of
the Dock when it is positioned at the bottom of the screen. (When placed on
the right or left of the screen, Leopard's Dock reverts to a 2-D style.)

LeoColorBar comes in handy here as well -- it can restore a 2-D look to the
3-D Dock. For those who like the Tiger look, this tool is a must.

Replace the glowing Dock indicators

While LeoColorBar can give you a 2-D Dock, it doesn't change the indicators
for running applications. In Leopard, these indicators were changed from simple
black triangles to glowing dots.

If you want to get the triangles back, a free tool called Dock
Delight allows you to do so with just a couple of clicks. Again, it's a
great tool for anyone who preferred the pre-Leopard Dock.

If you don't want the glowing dots but weren't crazy about the triangles either,
you can customize your Dock with an indicator icon of your choice by replacing
the default images the Leopard uses to create the indicators. Though not difficult
to accomplish, this does require some minor changes to the Leopard system files,
as detailed at the Silver
Mac blog. You can even download a handful of free prepackaged
alternate indicators to use.

Really trick out your Dock

So far, I've talked a lot about customizing the Dock to make it look and act
more as it did in earlier Mac OS X versions. But that isn't your only option.
If you like the idea of a 3-D Dock but not the glass-shelf look, check out the
options at LeopardDocks.com
and Dockulicious.
Both of these sites maintain dozens (if not hundreds) of alternate Docks that
you can download and easily install with tools available from either site.

Instead of the glass shelf, you can have an iPhone-inspired Dock, a Dock that
looks like a patch of lawn, one that looks like the icons are sitting atop a
wood-paneled coffee table or even a Dock that looks like a tattered old pirate
map. There are endless options ranging from stylish to whimsical to downright
weird.

If you're not into themed Docks, you can also use DockColor
to simply change the color of the standard 3-D Dock.

Make Stacks look and act consistently

In the Leopard 10.5.2 update, Apple responded to criticism about Stacks by making
the feature optional. Users can now choose to display a folder placed in the
Dock as a hierarchical pop-up menu of the folder's contents (as previous Mac
OS X versions had done) rather than as a stack.

While this choice is an improvement, the update didn't address the major problem
with Stacks: the changeability of their icons in the Dock. By default, the icon
displayed in the Dock for a Stack shows tiny icons for the first few items (documents,
image files, applications, folders, etc.) contained within the folder, stacked
three-dimensionally, one in front of the other. The icons included in a Stack's
representation in the Dock are arranged in alphabetical order of the items inside
the folder.

Apple's intention here seems to be that a Stack icon will always reflect the
contents of the folder that it represents. Unfortunately, this means that every
time you add a new item to a folder represented by a Stack, the Stack's icon
in the Dock may change. As a result, there is no real consistency for folders
whose contents change often.

Even when folders don't have constantly changing contents, it can be difficult
to tell which Stack is which without mousing over them to see their names highlighted.
For example, two of the Stacks in the screenshot above look identical simply
because they both contain folders and Word documents, and both happen to have
folders within them whose filenames are alphabetically listed before any other
items.

Although it doesn't change the overall behavior of Stacks, Stacks
in Da Place is a great donationware tool for solving the problem of making
each Stack look consistent regardless of its contents. It lets you select a
single icon that will be perpetually displayed as the front icon in a Stack
so you'll always know which Stack is which.

A great companion to Stacks in Da Place is one of several series of drawer-style
icons for Stacks by Yasushi Chida (note that the majority of text on this
site is in Japanese) that make your Stacks look like filing cabinet drawers
or bins containing the icons of the items in the folder being displayed.

Extend Quick Look for folders and archives

Without any tweaking, Leopard's Quick Look feature shows you a full-size preview
of almost any file without opening an application: As you're browsing through
files in the Finder, simply tap the space bar. But there are two free plug-ins
available for Quick Look that extend its functionality and usefulness.

The first is for folders. By default, when you look at a folder with Quick
Look, you see some general information about the folder and its icon.

But with the Folder
Quick Look plug-in, you can also see a list of the folder's contents (optionally
including all hidden files) as well as information about each item such as file
size, creation and modification dates, and file type.

Similarly, Zip
Quick Look Plugin allows you to peer into .zip archives. This makes it easy
to see what files are contained in an archive from the Finder or within an attachment
in Mail. Being able to get a view of the contents of an archive before expanding
it makes it easier to work with compressed files, but it also adds a certain
level of security (particularly when used in Mail) because you can ensure that
the contents are something that you actually want to expand and/or open.

Add canned searches to the Finder sidebar

The Search For section in the Finder's sidebar in Leopard gives you convenient
access to any number of Spotlight searches. Apple packages a handful of these
into the sidebar by default, including searches for all files modified on today's
date or within the past week.

As helpful as these searches may be, adding custom searches to the sidebar
can make this feature even better. Any Spotlight search can be saved to the
Finder's sidebar.

To create a detailed Spotlight search, use the Find command from the Finder's
File menu (or the Command-F keyboard shortcut). You can designate specific locations
to search and whether to search the contents of files or just their file names.

You can also string searches together from a variety of file metadata -- information
that is appended to files by applications, the file system and Spotlight itself.

The most common options to search for, beyond a simple string of text contained
in file names or contents, include the type of file and the date a file was
created or last modified.

Select "Other" in the search criteria pop-up menu to choose from
a treasure trove of additional possibilities, including:

The file label assigned to items in the Finder

The album or artist information assigned in iTunes

Support for specific foreign languages in items

The number of pages in a document

All manner of information included by digital cameras, such as camera model
or whether a flash was used

To build a search that relies on multiple criteria (all image files that were
created in the last month, for example), hold down the Option key as you're
making your selections.

To save a search for later use, click the Save button in the upper-left of
the search window and in the Save dialog, choose to add it to the sidebar.

If you want access to more searches in the sidebar, but don't want to expend
the time and effort to create them yourself, you're in luck. Apple ships a number
of prepackaged Spotlight searches with Leopard that don't appear in the sidebar
by default; these can be added to the sidebar in a few easy steps.

Change the log-in window

Leopard's starscape backdrop for the log-in window is pretty spectacular, but
how about using a picture of the family dog or a favorite vacation memory? Visage
($9.95 from Sanity Software) makes it easy to change not just the background
behind the log-in window, but also to customize the window itself.

For example, you can insert a customized message for you or your family --
or in a business or education environment, an acceptable-use policy or new user
instructions. Another option: Replace the Apple and Mac OS X icons with pictures
of your own.

Visage, which you can try for free for seven days, has some other cool features.
You can set a screensaver as a "desktop effect" that displays continually
in the background while you're working, instead of a static desktop picture
(really great with some of Leopard's
new screensaver options).

Visage also lets you customize the text of a number of system alerts. You can
add your name or favorite phrase, which is a lot of fun if combined with Leopard's
text-to-speech function: Have your Mac read alerts to you when they're displayed.

Add more effects to iChat and PhotoBooth

Leopard introduced the ability to show special effects and custom backgrounds
in an iChat video chat, with the same effects available in Photo Booth. Both
applications make use of Mac OS X's Quartz imaging layer and a series of Quartz
compositions to apply the effects to input from a Mac's iSight
camera.

More
iChat Effects is a package of four-dozen additional Quartz compositions
designed for iChat (though they also work well with Photo Booth), all of which
make chatting and picture-taking fun and crazy. Ever wonder what you'd look
like in a funhouse mirror, with a neon outline or dripping fire? Try it, and
you'll know.

Also check out the QuartzFX.com
site for more cool Quartz compositions -- or try your hand at building some
of your own with Apple's Quartz
Composer.

Create a Recent Apps Stack

Our final Leopard tweak brings us back to customizing the Dock (and requires
limited use of the command line).

This easy trick places any recently launched applications -- the same ones
listed in the Recent Items option from the Apple menu -- conveniently in the
Dock, making a great launcher tool for apps you use frequently.

To add this Stack, launch the Terminal (located in the Applications/Utilities)
and copy and paste (or type) the following, then hit the Return key:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data"
= { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile";
}'

Then restart the Dock process by typing the following and hitting Return:

killall Dock

You can remove the Stack by dragging it out of the Dock as you would any other
Dock item.

Want more?

Can't get enough Leopard tweaks? If you're comfortable using the command line,
there are a number of additional subtle changes you can make to the Dock, Finder,
and other Leopard components. Check out Part
1 and Part
2 of the UsingMac.com series on command-line tweaks for Leopard.

Ryan Faas is a frequent Computerworld contributor specializing in Mac and multiplatform
network issues. You can find more information about him at RyanFaas.com.

Computerworld