Setting up Mac for ease of use

It’s always a though call to install all the necessary (and preferably free) apps on your mac to have a pleasant experience at all times. Fortunately, due to crappy Apple HDD drives, I’ve been going though this quite a lot. Thus, I’ll show you what nice apps you should install right after you start up your mac (if you haven’t done it yet) – they are so worth it…

Secrets

This is the ultimate improvement to your system. This small preference pane let’s you customize tons of features in you Mac OS X system, and frankly, it makes this system perfect. You can find it at their homepage. We will use it in the consecutive tips for Mac, so you’d better download them. But be sure to be careful with these options, as they can mess up your system real good (but can make it perfect as well!).

Perian

Start off with Perian, a universal video codec that will enable you to play virtually enything within QuickTime – that’s actually a huge thing, if you’re using FrontRow, because it integrates with that too!

Optimize Dock

Ok, I admit it – I hate the native dock display. I really put some effort to make it more usable and readable. And frankly nicer. Here are the results:

You can grab this dock design at Dockulicious. It makes the dock way clearer, and works best with an auto-hidden dock :) To get the best experience available, you should consider using Dock Drawers, a set of icons that when you set their names with a whitespace in the beginning, will overlay all the contents of your dock stack folders – looks awesome! The original link for the icons changes constantly, so monitor it on the XD blog.

Continuing dock enhancements, it’s good if you set it to highlight the stack items you overlay with mouse, otherwise it’s really difficult to say what you are currently on – but that’s easy – use the Secrets preference pane, navigate to Highlight stack items on hover and turn it on. And see the change :)

Finder enhancements

You should be careful messing with the Finder, as it’s the core of you system soul, but you could still make it better. What I like to do is to display a full path in the title bar (again, using Secrets, navigate to Finder > Show path in title bar, and turn it on) and also, get rid of the ridiculous shadow on the screencaptures that you get with the built-in features (for the reminder, you can grab a screen using Apple+Shift+3, there goes a screenshot, or you can get a piece with Apple+Shift+4, or finally, you can get a window grab if you use Apple+Shift+4 and hit Space!). To disable shadows go to Grab in Secrets and make sure Show shadows on captured windows is disabled.

Conclusions

These small tips sound like nothing, but they really make a change. Soon, I will show you how I deal with the top-right icons in Leopard, because frankly, too much applications are eager to put stuff there. And actually, I manage to go with just Adium and Mail Unread Menu (this helps my hidden dock), nothing more is necessary. But the best part is, I’ll show you how to get rid of the uneccesary system icons and features there, so you will have a perfect clear and usuable menu :) Look forward to the next installment of Setting up a Mac :)