The appearance of the new Dock changed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard which has caused somewhat of an uproar in the Mac community, some of whom even claim it looks like it belongs in Windows Vista. That change stuck around in later versions of OS X as well.

If you’re totally insulted by the new 3D dock, or if you just prefer the old Dock appearance, it’s very easy to change and you don’t need to be a super Mac genius to figure it out.

Simply launch your terminal and type the following commands:

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Quick Look is a nice feature in Mac OS X for quickly previewing documents, images, and other file data before opening it into a designated application. I use Quick Look often for glancing at the content of various documents and it certainly beats launching an application when you just need to take a quick peak at something, whether it’s to confirm contents or verify you’re working with the proper file. If you’re an avid command line user though, you may be browsing through a directories contents and wondering just what is that JPG or DOC file.

Wonder no more, because you can easily use Quick Look from the command line of Mac OS to open Quick Look previews right from the Terminal application.

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Here’s a really cool Firefox tip that was just passed along to me that allows you to instantly search on page text.

Here’s how this works: You can instantly search for any text on a web page by hitting the forward slash and typing that word.

So for example, you want to find “Firefox” on this page, you would type /firefox – that’s it!
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Many of us who converted from a Windows PC to a Mac may long for the amazing artistic capabilities allowed within Microsoft Paint. Ok so maybe that’s a bit dramatic, and we all know that Microsoft Paint is pretty crappy in a weirdly lovable way, but that’s also why it was fun. So, if you came to the Mac you may miss mspaint, right?

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Did you know you can navigate Mac OS with only the keyboard? If you’re an avid typer it can be annoying to have to interrupt your flow, lift your hand(s) from the keyboard, simply to use the mouse and navigate around Mac OS X. Instead of dealing with that frustration, try using exclusively the keyboard in Mac OS, which can be used to access a lot of common things you would otherwise do with the mouse. No list is perfect, but here are fifteen useful keyboard commands and tips that I use on a regular basis that let you navigate through Mac OS X using only the keyboard.

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It’s that time of the year again Mac users! The holiday season is now here in full force, and part of the fun is customizing your Mac to be with the season. Here’s our three favorite apps so you can deck out your Mac desktop in the holiday spirit.

Snowfall – a beautiful falling snow screensaver for Mac OS X

SnowFall is as good as it gets in terms of holiday screensavers – it’s what Apple uses in the Apple Stores during the holidays! Screenshots do not do this justice, download yourself and see.
Download SnowFall now

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Many of us intel Mac OS X users installed Boot Camp partitions so we could run Windows or Linux on the same machine as our Mac. Boot Camp is great, but it’s annoying when you have to reboot just to access the other operating system, which is why something like VMWare is so useful.

If you’ve been using Boot Camp for a while though, you probably don’t want to lose what you’ve been working on within that partition. That’s where this comes in, you can convert a boot camp partition (well, technically any Linux or Windows partition!) to a VMWare virtual machine, so that it can run inside the virtualization software.

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Have you ever wished you could see the complete file system path in the titlebar of a Finder file system window? Well you can use a secret setting in Mac OS X to display the path in the titlebars of windows. The geekier Mac users amongst us and those familiar with the unix world should really appreciate this, but really it’s useful for anyone who just likes to know where they are currently located within the file system.

To change the Finder window titlebars to display the full directory path, you’ll need to use a defaults command string entered into the Terminal.
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The appearance of Mac OS X has slowly been drifting away from the old aqua style to a more modern and refined look that closely resembles iTunes. The change in this direction was really made obvious within Leopard with the introduction of the coverflow style finder and the removal of the brushed metal windows. For some reason, Apple ignored the scrollbars though, and we still have Aqua-styled candy looking scrollbars when everything else resembles iTunes. So you had to figure it was only a matter of time before a crafty Mac user would change that, and here we have it. Installation is very easy, but I would backup the .rsrc file before you replace it with this new version.

Download now
Source and discussion: MacThemes2.net
Click here for a full size screenshot

Update: The usage of third party tools for NTFS support is no longer necessary, as Mac OS X includes NTFS read & write support natively, here’s how to enable it. While newer versions of the Mac operating system support NTFS without any third party add-ons, older versions of OS X may still find value in MacFUSE. Keep in mind that if you’re in OS X 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 or newer – this is not necessary, and thus this article is really only relevant for much older versions of Mac OS X before 10.5.

I recently came across a great utility called MacFUSE which allows Mac OS X users to read and write to NTFS partitions, amongst other things. This is extremely useful if you have an external storage device you use on both a Mac and PC, and you want to avoid the limitations of FAT32.

Getting MacFUSE to work in OS X 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 is not the easiest process in the world, and it takes some knowledge and patience to get functioning properly. Thankfully, LifeHack.org has a pretty decent walkthrough on setting up MacFUSE, so check that out if you’d like some guidance.

• Get MacFUSE from the dev source
• Read the Lifehack guide on getting it to work

Again, this is for older versions of OS X like 10.4 Tiger, 10.5 Leopard, and 10.6 Snow Leopard. remember that new versions of OS X do not need to use MacFUSE to read and write to NTFS! You can follow this simple guide to enable NTFS in OS X Mavericks, Lion, Mountain Lion, and newer.

People seem to either love or hate the dock in Mac OS X Leopard. Maybe it’s the appearance, the reflection, or something else.

If you’re not a fan of the default ‘swoosh’ reflective Dock, there are many options available, and a site has popped up catering to nothing but Leopard Docks.

Yes indeed, customized Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard docks, so you can change the appearance to suit your preferences a bit.

Aptly named LeopardDocks.com is dedicated to nothing but customizing your Leopard dock, with everything from shiny wood surfaces to grass.

Check out LeopardDocks.com for more

You’ll need to make a few modifications to install the custom Docks, but it shouldn’t be a huge hurdle to anyone who has an urge to tinker with their Mac system.

If you’re a Mac user and you installed the Adobe CS suite for graphic work or web development, you probably aren’t too interested in Adobe SoundBooth, which is fine because you don’t have to install it. Well, I didn’t install Adobe SoundBooth and I discovered that Adobe still decided to install 5GB of SoundBooth bloated files into my home directories Library folder. I have no idea what the purpose of this stuff is, but if you don’t use SoundBooth (I don’t even know what SoundBooth is) you don’t need it, and 5GB is a lot of disk space for something I don’t use. So here’s how to get rid of it:

Free up 5GB of disk space by deleting Adobe CS bloat

Step 1) Navigate to /home/Library/Application Support/Adobe/SoundBooth/

Step 2) Delete anything inside the SoundBooth folder (only do this if you don’t use or need SoundBooth, obviously)

Step 3) Enjoy 5GB of extra disk space!

Earlier today Microsoft released the second beta of their Remote Desktop Connection application. This new version introduces an updated user interface (not sure if its worse or better), Universal binary support, Vista support, dynamic window resizing and quite a bit more. It is good to see Microsoft update this utility as it is a crucial part of my workflow. The previous version of the Remote Desktop Connection was a PowerPC only application that was quickly becoming dated. I was able to verify that this new version works flawlessly in OS X Leopard. Read on for a complete list of new features and a screenshot.
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If you’re a Mac OS X Leopard user, you might have noticed that the Dock no longer uses little triangles to emphasize what applications are open.

Instead, little subtle lights glow underneath open applications, which look nice but aren’t the most obvious.

Apparently I’m not the only one that was annoyed with the little glowing light app indicators of the Leopard dock, but SilverMac has a solution for us on how to restore the old triangle dock indicators.

If you feel so inclined, head on over to SilverMac to learn how to muck around with the Dock and get a Leopard dock with black triangles.

Customizing a Mac can be fun like this, but it does involve modifying system level stuff, so be sure you back up and know what you’re doing.

Matt Gemmell provides a great list of API’s that have been changed in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. This should be of interest to all Cocoa developers out there, or anyone who’s curious about some of the underpinnings of OS X application development. Take a look:

Get rid of your code with Leopard

Adding a user is something easily accomplished using the built in GUI tools that ship with OS X, however any power user can appreciate the possible efficiency gained from using the command line. So in the spirit of efficiency here are the steps necessary to add a user to your Mac OS X system all with our good friend, Terminal.app.
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Recently while using the OS X Terminal I noticed that the “Page Up” and “Page Down” keys do not send an actual page up sequence to an active Terminal session. This was discovered with the irssi app, but it actually pertains to the Terminal in general.

Instead, it seems that the default behavior is to manipulate the Terminal.app’s built in buffer. This works well for every day use in the Terminal, but if you are using a program like irssi, which has its own buffer, this can be an annoyance.

The solution is simple and can be solved with a simple key combination modifiers to page up and page down within Terminal applications, and not their app buffers.

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Welcome to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard! This was my first experience since installing the 10.5 upgrade, let’s hope that was a fluke. I’m super excited for Leopard! – Paul H.