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This works for all Cocoa apps:
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html

But the Finder isn't Cocoa. You can set Desktop and folder font size in the Finder's view settings, but if you want to change the font size in the menu, you'll need to wait for 10.5 or play with the following -- It can change the scaling of any application, including the Finder:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060 119152725322&query=Quartz%2Bdebug%2Bmenu

Finder: No right-click > open command prompt here (well, neither does Windows, but easy to add with a Powertoy).

This contextual menu module for the Finder is exactly what you need. I use it all the time.
http://www.pyehouse.com/lynn/termopen.php


Finder: Can't easily know the size of the contents of a directory (without "get info"), or the total size of more than one selected item (even "get info" doesn't help there). Windows Explorer is superior here.

In list view mode, you can see the sizes of all folders by checking the "Calculate all sizes" option in the "View Options", available in the View menu. To see the total size of multiple selected item, hold down the option key (also known as alt) and choose "Show Inspector" from the File menu, or just press option-command-I.


Marking text and then attempting to drag the selected text elsewhere - sometimes works, sometimes doesn't (the drag operation simply selects some more text).

You just need to hold down the mouse button for a brief while (equal to your double-click recognition period, IIRC).


Finder pollutes write-enabled SMB shares it accesses with garbage files like .DS_Store and perhaps others. I don't want these files on my Windows machine!

There are many utilities available that help with this problem, for example TinkerTool.
http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html


StuffIt expander will choke on RAR files containing Hebrew file names. Says "Invalid File Format".

Have you tried using the free command-line utilities available from RAR Lab?
http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm

Tried Temperature Monitor by Marcel Bresink? I think he's got Core Duo compatibility. It's updated often enough.

http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html

I'm interested in whether these new Macs are indeed cooler, to go along with their ace performance. (Lap heating early PowerBook G4 user speaking!)

The Mac OS X utility Hardware Monitor can play a tune on the G5's power supply by controlling the amount of load on the processors. Apparently the power supply makes different sounds depending on the load on it.

http://www.bresink.de/osx/HardwareMonitor.html

As for the scroll arrows, it's actually a legitimate preference that they decided they didn't like enough to expose in the GUI. Tinkertool is a utility that gives you quick access to that and a few other things.

There's actually a reason for the "only one resizer" thing. Say a window gets stuck off-screen because of a change in resolution or some other random reason (I've had it happen in windows, and I think on an old mac once or twice), and you can only see the bottom of a side. On windows, there isn't much you can do from what you can see... you can resize it, but you still can't access any controls. On old mac windows, you can drag the window back onto your workspace.

Unfortunately, you kind of lost that in the "we don't like window edges anymore... except for when we do" craziness of the current incarnation of aqua. So I don't really know.

you can make Finder's hidden Quit menu entry (A.K.A. Command-Q) visible again, by turning it on with TinkerTool for example - note that it does not patch nor modify any executable... it's just a setting in the Finder's preference file (which any Unixy person might like to edit in emacs :-)

Well, I can't help with the focus follows mouse problem but there are a few good applications that I can recommend that might prove useful for you. Witch (http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=witch&sp rache=english) will allow you to maximise from the dock and to switch between open windows. Making use of a good launcher like Butler (http://www.petermaurer.de/nasi.php?thema=butler&s prache=english&kopf=labor), LaunchBar (http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/) or Quicksilver (http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/) to quickly open applications or documents. Another interesting application is GeekTool (http://projects.tynsoe.org/en/geektool/) which lets you display text files (i.e. logs), terminal output, or images on your desktop. Finally I recommend that you try out TinkerTool (http://www.bresink.de/osx/TinkerTool.html) for changing some of OS X's less apparent settings.

That's the paradigm: application-centric. The application is controlled by the menu, the document by the window. That way I can close all windows and start up a new doc without having to restart the app. Some apps break this, because they're console-like apps with only one window.

Having to select the application window before I can quit it using the application menu.

Command (apple key)-Tab, keep thumb on command key and tab until your application comes up, twitch thumb slightly to command-Q... simple, very fast, mouseless.

Love the dock.

Must be a switcher :-) I still miss the Control Strip from OS 9 -- I had it tricked out as a Dock, and then some.

Most of the file system is hidden from you

Only if you want it to be. TinkerTool gives you GUI access to various advanced Finder settings.

I've had trouble running OS X on Blue and White G3's, so well done. Wait 'til you try it on a G5 with Quartz Extreme.

Control-Click (or right-click with a 3rd party mouse) on the application you want to tinker with. A contextual menu with "Show Package Contents" should appear for most OS X applications. This opens a Finder window that allows to examine the app's internal support files that are contained in the app's "bundle."

For certain OS X apps (usually ports from the OS 9 era) that don't show this menu, you will need to use a "resource editor" like ResEdit or Resourcer. The former only runs in Classic, while the latter is kind of expensive. (But worth the money if you do some kinds of development work.)

Finally, for invisible files, you can use some freeware apps, like TinkerTool, to change a hidden system preference to show invisibles in the Finder. Or you can just use the Terminal to examine such files use standard Unix commands.

From the AlBook itself.

http://www.bresink.de/osx/TemperatureMonitor.html

--Quentin

1. Make it lockable

What does this mean? Using something like TinkerTool (as a convenience interface to writing the preferences) you can anchor it to the left/right edge at the bottom of the screen, so it only grows in one direction...which means applications are always in the same spot, if you anchor it to the left. Is this what you mean by 'lockable'?

2. When icons are dragged off the dock, instead of going *poof* they should be moved to the desktop

This is a poor idea, IMO. The dock is like a favorites list, not a storage location. Items don't get moved 'into' the dock, they just get pointed to from it. What do you want, items dragged out of the dock to create a new alias on the desktop? Ick.

You've had a lot of people say don't bother, which is not that helpful really.

Here's what I recommend

• If you have an original machine with version 1 firmware ROM, be scared. It works perfectly once upgraded, but the install CD itself has problems. Options:
  • Do the install on you disk on a friends newer machine - remember the install parition must be the first one, and under 8 gig, and that you will need a class installation as well, probably on your second or other partition.
  • Upgrade the ROM if you can - then the install will work.
  • With no new hardware...you will find horrible horrible tips on support.apple.com lists, including stripping the machine back to basic hardware, using a single reliable sim, zapping pram, pressing the pci reset switch, installing minimal options and so on, all to try to delay a black screen crashing bug on the jag install CD for long enough to do finish the install. Some people reckon that XPostFacto helps, but it just hindered me.
  • Whatever you do, learn about certain debugging features... CMD-S at startup for single user, CMD-V for verbose booting, CMD-OPT-O-F for boot to open firmware.
• Yes - add RAM. 256M will do.
• Processor speed - you can probably crank up the 266 to 315MHz as I did.
• Add a USB card, you'll need it sooner or later. Don't worry about firewire. You may need a new shiny printer too unless you want to fight with the machine for hours. Apple no longer support serial printers. This is frustrating. The serial interface is still exposed in unix if you want to mess with the barely supported cups and gimpprint stuff.
• I really valued the boost from my new video card with 10.0... but jaguar makes an OK job of using the RageII you have. It depends how much you want to spend. If you stick with onboard video, you want to seek out info on turning off the bells and whistles to speed things up.
• You may find it useful to be able actually to use your floppy drive. This driver was derived from Darwin code.

Regards,

Greg

Spoken by someone who obviously hasn't used OS X or a Mac very much or at all. The whole reason the Mac interface is so good is subtle features and deep use of use (some of which was lost in the move to X, but will return at some point, no doubt).

I disagree (myself being a person who uses OS X a lot; I type these very words on an iBook 800). Indeed, the guy does not capitalize Mac correctly, but his point remains valid. Power users usually require extensive customization of their working environment. They just know what the want and they don't need any wisecrack from Redmond or Cupertino telling them what they can or cannot do. Customization options of a vanilla MacOS X installation are next to nonexistant. Yes, there are some third party hacks like Tinker Tool, but even with them, MacOS X is still less flexible than MS Windows. It's not important for Joe Shmoe, but I can understand the frustration of a power user, who can't even customize a bloody desktop theme. KDE for MacOS X could be a Holy Grail for these people - OS of their choice running on a machine of their choice WITH A DESKTOP ENVIRONMENT OF THEIR CHOICE.

"OSX has had a built in firewall since at least Jaguar...I seem to recall people writing that it's just standard *nix ipfw..."

It is, and it's located in /sbin/. It's a hidden folder on OS X, but can be located either via a utility like TinkerTool, or via the Finder menu; Go->Go to folder...

(tig)
"We do not inherit the land from our ancestors"
"We borrow it from our children"

I've had the same problem myself. One recommendation I can provide is to try mounting the NFS share using the "NFS Manager" program... When using this program, you can tinker with lots of parameters that are normally more difficult to experiment with at the command line. For example, you can adjust some of the timeout parameters that should give you a little more leeway in the event of getting the spinny beach ball of near-death. It's not a complete solution by any means, but it does seem to help some. All of us with this problem should write Apple to have them fix it.

About the only other advice I can provide is to remember that you have a mount active, and then unmount before leaving work (easier said than done, of course).

Thanks! LaunchBar looks like it will solve a bunch of my problems. Though it's annoying to be dealing with shareware again. I'd also suggest TinkerTool for anyone who hasn't tried it. I'd forgotten that the dock could move to the right side without enhancements, because i used TinkerTool to put it *exactly* where I wanted it.

s/Tweaktool/Tinkertool/

i have used this document before to integrate a 20 seat maya lab into an existing IRIX maya envoroment. its really well documented. this is from the guy who writes Tinker Tool, among other things.

TinkerTool will let you show system and hidden files.

Of note, using NIS at the LoginWindow has been broken in 10.2 (it worked in 10.1), but a fix is in the works and expected soon.

Also, he notes that Apple is bring BSD's AMD to OS X (finally!) so that NFS mounting won't be quite as quaint as it has been till now.

(I've been using NFS/NIS on iMacs in our previously Solaris-only lab - worked almost like a champ).

macosxlabs.org is a good site to visit. Several universities are trying this, including the one I work at.

We've got a lab with both XP Pro and OS X computers who have their home directories mounting of a network attached storage device. Account info is pulled from a Samba server for the PCs and an NIS server for the Macs. Marcel Bresink has a nice utility for placing the NFS mount info into Netinfo's database with the right syntax. He also has thorough documentation on getting Mac OS X to speak to an NIS server.

One thing I'd like to see is better documentation for OS X Server 10.2. OS X Server 10.2 is supposed to be do "NFS resharing over AFP" making it easier to have home directories stored on an NAS device. That gets NFS mounted to the OS X Server which looks at that as the home directory location for all the users. That mountpoint then gets shared to users over AFP. It has not been successful and the nice thick server admin guide isn't very clear on the resharing feature except to say that it is there.

As far as NFS goes, there are free utilities (mentioned above) to make this easy to set up. Granted Apple should have included some tool to do a similar thing, but the tool does exist. If you have moral issues with using it, then dig in to the NetInfo man pages, and have fun. Do note that there is a netinfo (3) and a netinfo (8) page. When I need to mount shares I now use the Finder's 'connect to' and enter the url in this form "nfs://host.domain.net/path/to/share/" It mounts just like an SMB of AFP share, making it more Mac-like. I know a lot of people who use NFS mouting and automounting who never have seen any problems, so I think you just need to bear with learning how it works on Mac OS X.

As far as NIS goes, there are tutorials on setting this up (the best being How to integrate Mac OS X in an NIS environment. I have set up NIS on a 10.0.4 system with no hassles (and it survived the 10.1 update fine), so I think you just need to look into it a little more. It is not hard. We still have a Mac OS X system bound to our Sun for testing setups, and it was straightforward to set up. Setting up Mac OS X as an NIS master is a hairy (though possible), if that was what you wanted to do, I would recommend that you just use something else.
Mac OS X's UNIXness has at its core OpenSTEP, which is whhere the way of setting up both NIS and NFS comes from. OpenSTEP used to have a cool NetworkManger.app that made setting up NIS a lot better, though sadly it is gone now. It is a UNIX even if it is a bit weird compared to the rest. To make it behave more normally, you can change lookupd's lookup order to read the FFAgent first, so that all those files in /etc/ will be read instead of NetInfo.

Finally as far as SMB goes, this does not seem to me to be much related to a UNIX thing, since it is a Windows protocol. As far as mounting SMB shares, it is the same as AFP or NFS - use the GUI. I don't use SMB much, but I never saw problems. I expect that if it is broken updates will be coming.

As far as ease of use goes, mounting NFS or SMB share sis really easy, and the rest is not what the typical Mac user would ever deal with. Apple has limited resources, and puts its focus on making core groups happy. I feel it is safe to say that NIS integration is not going to be high on the list.

I do agree that currently on the *NIX side others are more mature, Mac OS X's core hasn't changed a lot since OpenStep 4.2 in a lot of ways, and it certainly needs work. With Jordan Hubbard on board working to get the *NIX side in sync with FreeBSD I think it should mature nicely, and you can always contribute to Darwin if you get a bee in your bonnet, it's open.

"NFS support is severely lacking. You can't even count on a command-line mount of an nfs volume. If I try to mount with "mount server:/local /mnt/local", the "/mnt/local" directory disappears. The mount doesn't and you can't unmount without rebooting. There is a shareware program that makes it possible to use NFS, but c'mon folks. This is a violation of some basic trust. NFS should just work. "

And it does. The Mac OS X machine I am sitting at RIGHT NOW has two NFS exports and 3 NFS imports. It does "just work". I guess your problem is that NFS doesn't use the set up procedure that are used to. This is because OS X using NetInfo for all set ups. Try using NFSManager for easy setup with no learning curve, or "NetInfo Manager", which is infinitely more powerful. Ingorance is okay and can be cured, but I suspect you are nothing more than a troll, since you outright dismissed using "shareware tools" and wanted it to work your way.

OS X has native NFS support. It simply well hiden. For more info, have a look at this site.