(Let me preface this post with a warning that tweaking unpublished settings can break your system and applications.)

While I am a fan of the Terminal, sometimes remembering (or Googling for) the proper “defaults write ...” undocumented setting to tweak a feature on a new build or a friend’s machine gets a bit annoying (mostly due to my increasingly old age…Hey! You, kids! Get off my lawn!). If you ever wanted the opportunity to really muck things up across your system and installed applications, then head on over to the “Secret” BlackTree page (yes, the makers of the awesomeness that is QuickSilver) and grab a copy of their preference pane.

Truth be told, I actually needed to change out the text on the login window on my Mac (for work) and did not remember the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist file or key for it and just happened to come across the Secrets update today. I was impressed at the extent of its database of settings for all sorts of apps and the fact that it figured out which apps I had installed (so it only showed relevant settings options).

An example of the non-deadly, application-usefulness of Secrets comes from its Twitterrific preferences pane:

which provides access to some of the tweaks you can make that are published by the author but not available in the actual application preferences.

You can see feedback from others in the discussion group, tinker with the source code on your own and even submit your own l33t secrets to BlackTree.

If you know of any cool, hidden preferences or have feedback on Secrets that TAB readers should know, definitely drop a note in the comments.

Apple screen savers are pretty much just Quartz Compositions (graphics created via Quartz Composer, a node based visual programming language), and, while there are some nice ones that come pre-installed, they get old rather quickly. You could opt to dedicate those idle CPU cycles to an altruistic effort (or just put your system to sleep and save energy). However, if you are looking to add some glitz and glamor to your workstation you need go no further than your own system.

Apple has squirreled away some gems right on on your own hard drive and the first place you should look is /System/Library/Compositions (in the Finder, hit Command-Shift-G and paste that path in & hit return). With that folder open, go to System Preferences and select Desktop & Screen Saver and select the Screen Saver tab. Now, you can test each one by dragging a .qtz file right onto the test panel in the Preferences window and either wait a bit or click Test. Notable ones include Defocus.qtz, Stix.qtz and Travelator.qtz. Some may require you to select a base image (click Options… to see if any of the Composers have options you can tweak).

Things get really interesting if you head on over (in the Finder) to /Developer/Examples/Quartz Composer/Compositions (which only exists if you install the Developer Tools from the Leopard Install DVD). You have to dig into folders, but you’ll find Image TV.qtz under Conceptual which mimics various Apple ads and the Apple TV intro quite nicely. There’s even a token Screen Savers directory where you’ll find a Quartz Composer that uses motion-detection called Security.qtz (it may not be the best choice for a screen saver if there isn’t a great deal of motion around your system).

Screen Savers DIY

If you do install the Developer Tools, definitely head on over to /Developer/Applications and startup Quartz Composer. Apple made it pretty easy to create your own visual delights. It’s as simple as dragging nodes around, taking input and specifying how data should be processed.

You can open up any of the examples to use as a starting point.

If you do give it a try, drop a note in the comments and share your creation with the world!

[via Mac Tips & Tricks]

Magnetk – makers of SftpDrive for Windows – have brought their secure, remote filesystem magic to OS X with version 1.0 of ExpanDrive.

If you have a blog/site hosted on any flavor of Linux or BSD (including OS X) or do any amount of cross-platform management or development then you know how useful ssh is for speedy & secure command-line access from the Terminal. The advent of MacFUSE on OS X brought sshfs to the Mac application landscape, though it can be slow and cryptic to setup for the average user.

ExpanDrive simplifies access to these remote filesystems via an unobtrusive menubar icon and straightforward user interface. Simply open up the ExpanDrive Manager:

and enter in your connection info. You can leave the password field blank if you already have ssh public/private keys defined and configured your servers appropriately. A simple double-click of the drive in the list view mounts the filesystem and it behaves just like any AFP, SMB or attached disk.

I’m fairly mobile, moving from AT&T 3G to Wi-Fi to Ethernet throughout the day and I’ve been able to keep ExpanDrive filesystems mounted across all these transitions without the dreaded “spinning death ball” that is usually associated with the Finder and network mounts. While some Mac apps – TextWrangler and ImageWell being two that I use – have native support for SFTP, ExpanDrive provides for universal access across all applications and makes it simple to reliably integrate remote storage operations into your workflow.

If you poke around the application bundle (you do poke around application bundles, right?), you’ll find that ExpanDrive was developed with Python as a foundation, fully demonstrating that you do not need to be an Objective-C maven to create great Mac software.

ExpanDrive has an introductory price of $29.00USD, is a Universal application and runs on OS X 10.4.1 (Tiger) or higher.

If you give it a try, drop a note in the forum or comments, especially if you are using it with any type of high-speed NAS configuration.

Tags: expandrive, macfuse, python, sftp, Software Reviews, ssh, sshfs

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I have a confession to make: I have not always been a Mac person. For the period of time between the retirement of System 9 and Panther (yes, it took Apple showing a real commitment to Unix for me to give them a shot again), I abandoned our fine operating system for greener pastures, well, green screen at least. Work drove me into Windows (as it has for about 90% of the workers out there) but my real outlet was anything Linux, BSD or Solaris-related. There was nary a distro that did not cross my hard drive (virtual or otherwise) and I was very happy programming, scripting and living life on the command line, with an occasional, lingering trip into X11 when necessary.

OS X changed all that, since Apple managed to make Unix look very good while keeping all of the real power that lies beneath the GUI.Now, one may be able to argue the aesthetics of  Leopard (hey, Panic should be happy, it took Leopard to finally drive me into purchasing CandyBar), but none can dispute the gems that await those who dare to invoke the Terminal, and I’ll be taking the opportunity over some of the coming posts to dwell on the nuggets that bear a deeper look. For those that are not as comfortable with the more textual side of their systems, I’ll be making these trips as painless as possible (you may not need to delve into the Utilities folder to find the Terminal icon at all).

The first stop is a little utility called opensnoop. Leopard ships with something called DTrace that gives developers and administrators the ability to take a peek at what all running code is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. Giving DTrace the coverage it deserves is beyond a simple blog post, but there are some smaller utilities - like opensnoop - that take advantage of the power of DTrace, but on a more targeted scale which are worthy of a minor exposition.The main purpose of the opensnoop utility is to provide a report of file opens as they occur. Curious as to what really happens when Safari opens a web page? Want to see what files are accessed from that latest program you downloaded? You can find the answers with opensnoop.

If you can get to a terminal prompt, the simplest way to see what this utility does is to just type:

sudo opensnoop 

Non-Terminal folks can just run the OpenSnoop.app application from the OpenSnoop App Archive (354KB ZIP file). (Either way, you’ll be asked to enter your password since opensnoop requires higher-level privileges to run.)

Output will look something like the following, though your listing contents should be very different:

UID    PID COMM            FD PATH 
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
501    218 Finder          11 /.vol/234881026/571978
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf
0      110 WindowServer     4 /var/log/windowserver.log 
0      110 WindowServer     4 /var/log/windowserver.log 
501    286 SystemUIServer  17 /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/Spaces.menu/Contents/Resources/SpacesBackground.pdf

For each line:

• UID is the numerical ID of the owner of program that has the file opened.
• PID is the process ID of the program that has the file open
• COMM is the actual name of the process (this is something we care about)
• FD is the numerical file descriptor (ID) of the file being accessed
• PATH is the full OS X path to the file being accessed (this is also something we care about)

The sample output is what occurred when I switched to/from Spaces 1 & 3. Just that simple case shows how interesting opensnoop can be since we see that the SystemUIServer and WindowServer were both invoked when I worked just a little bit with Spaces and that SpacesBackground.pdf was loaded from one of the Spaces app bundles.

While this is useful in-and-of itself, we can use opensnoop for more targeted and detailed inspection. The following command:

sudo opensnoop -avgn Safari

(Non-Terminal users can run the SnoopSafari.app from the archive)

Produces the following output when I tell it to go to google.com:

TIME           STRTIME                UID    PID  FD ERR PATH                 ARGS
8071248908     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  17   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db-journal Safari\0
8071249029     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari Safari\0
8071249636     2008 Jan 10 21:33:13   501   1153  24   0 /var/tmp/etilqs_rjFUOz2TEh7AaoG Safari\0
8075981916     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist Safari\0
8075982865     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/http:%2F%2Fgoogle.com%2F.webhistory Safari\0
8075983663     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/http:%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F.webhistory Safari\0
8075984521     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Caches/Metadata/Safari/History/.tracked filenames.plist Safari\0
8075980917     2008 Jan 10 21:33:18   501   1153  18   0 /.vol/234881026/713654 Safari\0
8077969298     2008 Jan 10 21:33:19   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.dat0481.441 Safari\0
8077966383     2008 Jan 10 21:33:19   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.dat0481.440 Safari\0
8080982146     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/.dat0481.442 Safari\0
8080983115     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/details.plist Safari\0
8081191826     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock/details.plist Safari\0
8081192743     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/lock Safari\0
8081193635     2008 Jan 10 21:33:23   501   1153  18   0 /Users/bob/Library/Safari/.de0481.443 Safari\0

The extra fields are the Unix-coded time, the translated timestamp, the error code (if any) and the file being accessed. This is a more verbose listing, but we will not see any file data from application other than Safari. You can substitute “Adium” or “Finder”, etc for “Safari” on the command line and I’ve included SnoopAdium.app, SnoopFinder.app and SnoopFirefox.app within the archive.

Hopefully, you are beginning to see the power of this small utility.While there are many options for you to explore within opensnoop, one of the more interesting ones is the “-x” flag, which only displays the failed opens (I’ve included SnoopFailed.app in the archive as well). It’s always good to peek at what applications are looking for but cannot find, especially if you are having trouble with your system or a particular application.I’m working on a more generic GUI front-end to opensnoop and will let you know when I have something worth sharing.

These apps were all built with the extremely useful Platypus tool (which is in my developer folder once again post-Leopard install). If there’s a particular “snoop” app you’d like me to whip up, drop a note in the comments and I’ll do my best to crank’em out (I’ll post the other apps either on my .Mac iDisk or my personal site).

So, as indicated, I finally switched to Leopard (went from 10.4.11 to 10.5.1 to be precise). As with previous operating system installs, I also took the opportunity to upgrade the internal drive in my MacBook Pro, this time kicking it up to 320GB with the new WD Scorpio WD3200BEVT (it has turned out to be a great drive). A defense of this process includes:

• Get the latest, highest-capacity 2.5″ drive available (score!)
• Do not have to “waste” time backing up the old system (and I can boot into 10.4.11 when needed)
• No worries about upgrade hassles (i.e. the Logitech debacle)

The biggest benefit has been an early spring cleaning for my system. The plethora of excellent third-party software available for OS X makes it really easy to gather many little (and not-so-little) utilities and applications, most of which are used quite infrequently. The other bit of cruft that tends to accumulate is a host of installer downloads, PDFs, other documents and various source archives, most of which can (and should) be archived (that *is* why I bought the 1TB NAS drive, right?). This time around, I took a more tactical approach to re-building my system: load only those programs and files that generate a “Doh! I need that!” reaction over the course of the next seven days. (While I tried to stick to that “one week” rule, I wound up going into week number two.)

Given that the new year is finally upon us and we are all resolute to start afresh, I thought it would be interesting for me to post what wound up being “must haves” for my core Leopard workstation and encourage TAB readers to shout out theirs in the comments. Some elements will obviously be the same, but it should be an illuminating exercise, especially if it winds up unveiling a cool, niche app that has received little coverage.
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