TinkerTool opens up a can of useful features

By Victor Agreda Jr

Laurie mentioned this briefly in her article on getting music off your iPod, but I had to try it myself. TinkerTool was back in the reccesses of my mind... I believe I first heard about it when I tried to squeeze a little more performance out of my aging (but still operational) 500 MHz G3 iBook. The simple app opens up a slew of system prefs that Apple never intended you to see. I think OS X should have an "advanced" user mode, one that you can enable after using the machine for a couple of days. Sort of the opposite of Simple Finder. Well TinkerTool anticipates this idea by going ahead and letting you control all this crazy GUI business and a whole lot more.

Some of the things you can do with TinkerTool:

  • Display the Dock with a shadow   
  • Control how the Finder scales the Desktop background image   
  • Enable extended options for conversion of disk images   
  • Set the maximum number of entries stored in the history list of Safari   
  • Enable the "Quit" menu item of the Finder   
  • Switch off font-smoothing in general   

There's lots more for those of you who can't be satisfied with that "average" OS X experience...
 

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