Mac OS X Tips and Tricks

by Peter Jones / March 10, 2009

Hide the Menu On a Per-Application Basis

Use the /Developer/Applications/Utilities/Property List Editor.app to open the Contents/Info.plist file of an application and add a new child to the root node:

Property List Class Value
LSUIPresentationMode Number 4

More information can be found in the Apple developer Runtime Configuration Guidelines.

Seen on macosxhints.com.

DNS Service Discovery and iTunes

You can use the following commands on your local computer to access a remote iTunes (that you have ssh access to):

$ dns-sd -P "any name" _daap._tcp. local 3690 localhost 127.0.0.1 txtvers=1 iTShVersion=131073 Version=196610 &
$ ssh -N user@server.example.com -L 3690:127.0.0.1:3689

Seen on macosxhints.com.

Tune the Spotlight Indexer

Sometimes, the Spotlight indexer (mdsworker) can become greedy and suck down the CPU and hog memory. The following settings make things a bit nicer (pun intended):

$ sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds LowPriorityIO -bool true
$ sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds Nice -int 20
$ sudo plutil -convert xml1 /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

See on newartisans.


Tags: macosx