Now that we’ve had Leopard in our hands for about two weeks, the users have come up with some ingenious ways to taking Leopard and changing it to a system that’s 100% to their liking. Here are some great tips for everyone to start with, and hopefully Taming Leopard will be getting newer posts as time goes on.
Image modified from “Universe” Wallpaper.
Authorize the space Time Machine can use. Let’s say that you’ve just bought a wonderful 500GB external HD for your Mac — chances are that you would like to use it for more than just Time Machine, right? Case in point, especially if your main HD is smaller than that. Well, unfortunately Time Machine snares up the whole drive for its use in a greedy fashion without allowing you to set up some space limitations. As mentioned in a past post, the fix is quite easy: just partition the external drive. Set up one partition to give Time Machine the amount of hard drive space to think should use, and you should be left with a second partition for your personal use. The best partitioning results can be achieved with Leopard’s Disk Utility — that is, if you have no data in the HD, since the process will erase all of its contents.
Paint over the transparent menu bar. If you like the new menu bar, leave it as it is. If not, your best bet to bring back the solid menu bar is by downloading a simple app called OpaqueMenuBar, which does just that.
Change the new Dock’s appearance. By changing a few files around your Library directory, it has been proven that you don’t have to be conformed with the new Leopard Dock. Head over to the Dockulicious website, follow the instructions, and download a design that you find appealing!
Add a permanent Stacks icon. This one is a great idea: a permanent Stacks icons that do not block the original icon organization befitting of the Stack. Think of it as a differentiation icon for those who have more than one Stacks folder in their Dock. You can download the icons and view the instructions how to use them by clicking here.
Add new iChat video effects. There’s no better conversation starter than a new iChat effect your pal hasn’t seen. The two most popular ones of the moment are the Invisible Effect and the Star Wars Hologram Effect. The instructions for how to install each effect can be found in their respective pages. For the future, there’s even a new, small, online community devoting their time to new iChat effects: QuartzFX.
UPDATE 18-Nov-2007 - Changed Dockulicious link.
