To see what’s here, type ls and press Return. This same path should hold true for most any OS X program-you’ll find the binary in the MacOS folder, within the Contents folder inside the application bundle. This will set the working directory to the location of the iTunes 8 binary. Open Terminal, and type cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS, then press Return. To do that, you need to find the actual program code. So the first step in hunting for hidden preferences is to dump the program’s text strings into a file. There is, however, a Unix command named strings that will pull all the actual text out of binary file. That’s because programs are stored as binary data, and binary data doesn’t do well when opened in a text editor. But if you try to open the iTunes application (the actual program file, not the application bundle see below) in TextWrangler, you’ll see nothing but gibberish, as seen in the screen at right. The first thing to realize about hidden preferences is that in order to work, they must be coded in the program’s actual code-so we’re going to look for hidden preferences by finding all the actual text within a given program’s code, then start digging through that text looking for clues. (The following is lengthy, but that’s mainly because I’m trying to explain each step in some detail it’s really not as hard as it may appear.) I’m going to use iTunes 8 as my example, but the general methods apply to pretty much any OS X program, so you can easily use this technique on other programs. Note that I’ve never permanently messed up an application by experimenting with preferences at worst, I’ve had to trash the preferences file.Īssuming you meet all the prerequisites, and you understand the risks involved, here’s how to go about finding and testing hidden preferences for a given program. This isn’t really required, but it’s definitely the safest way to experiment. Ideally, you’ll have another system-whether that’s a version of OS X installed on a FireWire drive or partition, or a completely separate Mac, is really up to you. To go digging for hidden preferences in applications, there are a few prerequisites. While relatively simple, the Terminal commands to control these “hidden” preferences aren’t documented anywhere, so I’m often asked “just how do you find these things?” The answer, as with the Wizard of Oz (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”) is that things that appear magical may actually be quite simple, once you know how they’re done. ITunes 8-including the ability to toggle the iTunes Store link arrows on and off, for instance. Recent Mac OS X Hints blog, I explained how you can use Terminal to control a number of features that Apple removed from
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