Turbocharge your Mac
- Article 12 of 53
- iCreate, November 2004
Suffer sluggish performance from your Mac no longer. This detailed feature will show you how to make your Mac run faster, how to streamline your OS for top performance and maximum disk space, and reveals some Unix trickery to make your system really fly.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages
“sudo ln -s /Volumes/OtherDisk/Users /Users”
The last and most overlooked aspect of performance boosting is interface customisation. Yes, you might be able to shave a couple of seconds off your Mac’s swap file performance using Terminal hacks and third-party apps. But if it the user interface hides things from you or isn’t arranged in the way you like to work, those couple of seconds will be nothing compared to the time lost each day due to bad usability. It’s why Mac users always turn out to be more productive than Windows users in surveys of working practices: it’s just easier to get things done on a Mac.
The interface is actually a lot more customisable than you might think, from the few options in the Appearance preference pane. Apple’s programmers have often taken executive decisions to hide certain things from us, because the average user won’t need them and would probably be confused by them. One of the default settings of the Finder, for instance, is to hide a whole slew of Unix directories and any files beginning with a full stop. It’s probably a good thing it does, because those directories would confuse the hell out of most people and files beginning with a full stop in Unix typically are quite important or store configuration data: indeed, OS X installs a directory called .DS_Store into any directory the Finder has looked at to maintain preferences on how the directory should be displayed in the Finder – the average user would probably delete any .DS_Store directory they found and then be mystified as to why the folder no longer displays the correct way.
But frequently the programmers leave the features in and just remove the parts of the interface that would have let activate the feature.
Now, virtually every OS X application has a preference file that it stores in the Preferences folders of your Library folders. Their filenames end in “.plist”, short for property list, so they’re easy to spot. Inside the files are lists of settings and their values. Often, you activate hidden features by altering the preference file. For example, if you alter Safari’s plist to include a string property called “IncludeDebugMenu” with value 1, the next time Safari opens, it will have a Debug menu that lets you do all sorts of useful things. To do this, you can use a text editor, such as TextEdit or BBEdit; if you have the Apple developer tools installed, you can double click on the plist file and it will open in an application called Property List Editor especially designed for editing plist files; and Terminal addicts can use the command “defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1”. Tools such as OnyX, Cocktail, Tinkertool and Xupport that provide these features are simply changing the property list files for particular applications through a nice, user-friendly interface.
Plist files, though, are OS X specific. Most Unix preference files have their own formats, from the relatively easy “/etc/ftpusers” file used by the FTP Access daemon that Apple appropriated from standard Unix, to the utterly baffling preference files of Sendmail (so baffling, it actually has two preference files: one you write yourself, and the one Sendmail actually uses which it generates from your file using a separate program).
Programs such as Broadband Optimizer and Cocktail are able to use the Terminal command “sysctl”, which accesses the deeper Unix system preferences (type “sysctl –a” to see them all). They can use this capability to tailor OS X’s networking capabilities to a far greater degree than the standard Network system preference pane can, potentially speeding up OS X’s networking by a considerable amount. But unless you understand have to configure your TCP packets’ memory space, it’s best to stick with the graphical interface than try to use sysctl yourself.
Given the vastness of Unix, not just in terms of what’s installed by default in OS X, but also the tools in the Apple developer toolkit and the thousands of pieces of free software you can download from the Internet, it would be impossible to list all the ways you can tweak and tinker with your Mac to get it running exactly the way you want it to. OS X doesn’t stand still either. There were no hidden hacks to change the way Exposé worked until it arrived on the scene with OS X 10.3, aka Panther, which also updated a considerable portion of the Unix core.
OS X 10.4 aka Tiger should be no different, with Unix enhancements promised aplenty. Since Apple is taking a more leisurely pace getting Tiger out the door than it did with 10.2 or 10.3, there should be more features and more consideration of what aspects of the Mac a user should be able to configure. There will also probably be more utilities to replace the command-line tools power-users have had to fall back on, just as Activity Monitor replaced “top” and “df” and Network Utility replaced “ifconfig”, “ping”, “traceroute” and “whois”. But unless Apple loses the plot and destroys the simplicity of the Mac interface with the multitude of incomprehensible options that plague the Windows and Linux interfaces, there will always be a place for customisation utilities and Terminal hacks in OS X.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages