Three Ways To Tweak Hidden Settings In OS X

Mac OS X and user-friendliness are two subjects not shy of each other's company. In general, using a Mac OS X computer feels intuitive, natural; everything feels the way you expect, and your screen real-estate isn't wasted on unwanted meta-features and overly bloated interfaces. This allows you to focus on the important things.

When you don't want your computer to work as it would out of the box, you can start playing with the system preferences. This allows you to tweak the settings to adapt your computer to your specific way of use—you make it fit in your office habitat.

It's only when these tweaks are especially specific and low-level—changing the intrinsic behaviour of your operating system and interface components, like the Finder behaviour and Spotlight indexing—you may not find a resolution in the system settings. That doesn't mean there's no solution, though. Using the command line, or one of several third-party tools, you can tweak hidden settings in Mac OS X. We'll go over these below, in growing order of complexity.

1. Mountain Tweaks + Lion Tweaks

If you're using Mac OS X Lion (10.7) or Mountain Lion (10.8), you should take a look at Lion Tweaks and Mountain Tweaks, respectively. These apps provide a more user-friendly way of tweaking your operating system—an easy graphical user interface, rather than using Google and Terminal. Use the app to revert to a 2D-Dock, show the use library folder, disable GateKeeper, remove the new leather interface in the Calendar application, and more.

Mountain Tweak shows three tabs. The first tab—General Tweaks—shows tweaks that can be applied to both Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. The next two tabs outline Lion Tweaks and Mountain Lion Tweaks, respectively. The developer warns that although most Lion Tweaks will work properly on Mountain Lion, the reverse is not true.

One problem with these apps is that it doesn't keep track of the tweaks you apply. This may be trivial in some cases, but may require you to do the accounting in more complicated scenarios. That said, if anything goes wrong you can always go to Restore (the fourth tab), which helps you revert any applied tweaks and restore your computer to it's original state.

For a full review, and a more complete overview of the available tweaks, take a look at Tim Brookes' article on Lion Tweaks and Mountain Lion Tweaks.

2. Deeper

A more advanced and in-depth application comes courtesy of Titanium's Software; the same team developing Onyx. Deeper is one of the best applications to tweak obscure operating system settings of the Finder, Dock, Safari, Spotlight, and more; the specifics of course depend on your operating system version.

Among other things, you can enable the animated desktop, make your version of iTunes less store-reliant, change the specifics of the Finder File menu, and (as in Mountain Tweaks and Lion Tweaks) toggle the 2D dock to improve overall desktop performance.

At the time of writing, you can download Deeper for Mac OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, and a number of older operating system iterations. Check to make sure you're downloading a version of the application corresponding to your operating system. For more information, and a better overview of the available tweaks, check out last year's article on Deeper from Bakari Chavanu.

3. Secrets

The two applications mentioned above both provide an easy way to tweak obscure operating system settings. Most of the time, they provide an interface to low-level settings that are reachable through the command line. Maybe you see where we're going—instead of using one of the aforementioned applications, you can tweak the same (and more) settings using the Terminal. Mind you, if you don't know what you're doing, this is not the place to learn.

On the other hand, if you're not afraid to get your hands dirty, a great place to pick up those obscure operating system commands is at Secrets—a self-proclaimed database of hidden settings for Mac OS X. Browse through the commands to find new gems, or search for something specific. There are sure to be some interesting Terminal commands you don't already know.

Have you ever tweaked hidden settings in Mac OS X? What did you (try to) achieve? Let us know in the comments section below the article!

ComScore: As ‘dumbphones’ fade away, Apple is now the #2 phone manufacturer in the U.S.

We're talking phones here, not just smartphones.

According to the latest comScore MobileLens numbers, Apple passed LG this month to become the second biggest handset vendor by units sold in the US (revenues and profits probably tell a much brighter story).

For the three-month average period ending in October, device manufacturer Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 26.3 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 0.7 percentage points). Apple ranked second for the first time on record with 17.8 percent market share (up 1.5 percentage points), followed by LG with 17.6 percent share, Motorola with 11 percent and HTC with 6 percent.

The climb in rankings was of course helped by the release of the iPhone 5 but also the overall migration trend  away from 'dumbphones', which LG, Samsung, Motorola and others have a vested interest in. Samsung also gained for the period helped by sales of its popular Note 2 and Galaxy S3 smartphones

As far as Mobile Operating Systems, Google and Apple both continue to pull away from the pack (below) with both vendors gaining at the expense of RIM, Microsoft and others.

iFixit iMac teardown reveals dual mics, difficult ram upgrades & glued on LCD

While we had some pictures of a brief teardown earlier this week, iFixit has now completed its ritual teardown of the new 21.5″ iMac that officially went on sale on Friday.

Unfortunately iFixit described the process as an "exercise in disappointment," noting the iMac's new thinner design introduces new hurdles for repairability. Most notably, the device's glass and LCD are now glued directly to the iMac's frame, while accessing the RAM, CPU, and hard drive will now mean having to remove the entire logic board:

The late 2012 iMac 21.5″ — code-named EMC 2544 — is an exercise in disappointment for us. We were quite worried when we saw that super-thin bezel during Apple's keynote, and unfortunately we were correct: the glass and LCD are now glued to the iMac's frame with incredibly strong adhesive. Gone are the lovely magnets that held the glass in place in iMacs of yesteryear.

A few things noted in iFixit's highlights: a new rubber housing that "dampens the vibrations from the spinning hard drive," a new fan layout, dual microphones, and an LG made display. Those are some of the highlights of Apple's new design, but iFixit is scoring the new iMac a 3 out of 10 (down from 7 last year) due to the many issues with repairability. Here are just a few:

* Intel Core i5-3330S, clocked at 2.7 GHz
* Nvidia GeForce GT 640M GPU
* Intel E213B384 platform controller hub
* Texas Instruments Stellaris LM4FS1AH5bb microcontroller
* 2x Hynix H5GQ2H24AFR GDDR5 SGRAM
* Broadcom BCM57765A1KMLG
* Intel DSL3510L Thunderbolt controller
* Analog Devices SSM3302 audio amplifier
* Vimicro VC0359 webcam processor
* Intersil ISL6364 multi-phase pulse width modulation (PWM) controller
* Cirrus Logic 4206BCNZ audio controller
* National Semiconductor VM22AC

* To our dismay, we must break out our trusty heat gun and guitar picks to get past the adhesive holding down the glass and LCD.

* We were fairly surprised to see that the new iMac's LCD sports the same model number as last year — LM215WF3 from LG — even though the LCD is 5 mm thinner.

* By switching from a traditional 3.5″ desktop hard drive to a 2.5″ laptop drive, Apple designers were able to free up lot of real estate inside the iMac. Apple turned to HGST — formerly Hitachi, now a Western Digital company — to manage the iMac's spinning storage.

* A rubbery housing is lightly adhered to the edges of the hard drive beneath the upper and lower hard plastic bezels. This design is far different from what we've seen before. Since the internal components are more tightly packed than before, small vibrations may carry through more components. The rubber housing dampens the vibrations from the spinning hard drive so they are not perpetuated throughout the device.

* A new fan layout! Apple is changing things up quite a bit and has moved from multiple small fans to a single centralized fan. "1″ may be the loneliest number, but removing 2/3 of the fans goes a long way towards saving space. Judging by the orientation of the fan, we gather that it draws cool air from the bottom vents, then blows hot air out of the grating in the back of the iMac.

* The webcams in iMacs of yesteryear have always been connected to the logic board with long snaking cables that were relatively fragile; that is no longer the case. A ribbon cable we can only describe as "beefy" keeps the FaceTime HD camera in touch with the logic board.

* The newest iMac features not one, but two microphones. Dual microphone technology has been utilized in mobile devices for years to cut out background noise during phone calls. Now, the same idea is being applied here to improve sound quality during intimate FaceTime chats with your mother.

* The speakers may look simple, but removing them is nerve-wracking. For seemingly no reason other than to push our buttons, Apple has added a notch to the bottom of the speaker assemblies that makes them harder-than-necessary to remove.

* Good news: You can upgrade the iMac's RAM. Bad news: You have to unglue your screen and remove the logic board in order to do so. This is just barely less-terrible than having soldered RAM that's completely non-removable.

* After a short hiatus, Broadcom is back to bring WLAN capabilities to the iMac. A Broadcom BCM4331 single-chip WLAN solution dominates the tiny AirPort card.

* Off comes the honkin' heat sink! And along with it — the CPU??? The new iMac uses a spring-loaded, FCLGA1155 socket to make all those little electrical signals go into, and out of, the CPU: http://bit.ly/QUCPG6

* These logic board traces (red) and hole (orange) make us think Apple's proprietary SSD should reside in this spot:http://bit.ly/VeAeEs Placing the SSD from the 13″ MacBook Pro Retina Display confirms this notion: http://bit.ly/YhEmJuWe purchased the "bargain-basement" version of the iMac. We're assuming that the more-expensive version — one that has the built-to-order Fusion drive option — has this connector soldered onto the board, and a 128GB SSD is placed into said connector.