Author: Craig Grannell

The Dock pane within System Preferences provides options to change many aspects of the Dock’s appearance and behavior. For example, you can adjust its size, edge position (left, bottom, right) and magnification level when you hover the cursor over icons. Additionally, there are two minimization effects to choose from, and settings for toggling the app-launch bounce, Dock auto-hide, and active application indicators.

But System Preferences doesn’t tell the whole story, because Apple hides a number of extra options from the user interface. Even so, you can access them by using Terminal, found in /Applications/Utilities. This command-line tool enables you to write to the Dock’s preferences file, turning on (or off) hidden preferences, and further changing the nature of your Dock. Terminal is one of those apps that tends to scare newcomers, but playing around with the Dock is a good introduction to using the tool. 

You should find any apprehension disappear as you successfully enter a command or two and see the changes to your Dock. If you don’t like what you end up with, the process is also entirely reversible. You can merely turn off everything you’ve turned on, but a quicker way to revert the Dock is to replace its preferences file with a back-up, which we’ll also show you how to do in this tutorial.

Backup Your Dock First

1. Copy the Preferences

Before editing your Dock, make a copy of its preferences file. In Finder, hold Option and click Go in the top bar. From the drop-down menu, select Library to open the hidden user Library folder. Within, open the Preferences folder and find com.apple.dock.plist. Now hold Option and drag the file to the Desktop, thereby making a copy of it. Store this in a folder elsewhere that also includes the date the copy was made.

2. Restore Preferences

To restore your backed-up preferences, copy the file you saved out in Step 1 to your Library’s Preferences folder. For Mountain Lion, entering killall Dock in Terminal restarts old settings. Mavericks has more aggressive caching, so type defaults read in Terminal and drag the file com.apple.dock.plist from the Library to it. Hit Enter, then killall Dock to restart the Dock with your settings.

3. Go Nuclear

Reverting the Dock to default depends on the OS that you are running on your Mac. In Mountain Lion, simply trash com.apple.dock.plist from the Preferences folder and use killall Dock in Terminal. For Mavericks, delete the file using Terminal: type defaults delete com.apple.dock; killall Dock. Or, reset the Dock to run apps with defaults write com.apple.dock static-only -bool true; killall Dock.

How to Redesign Your Dock

1. Pin the Dock

The Dock can be pinned to a corner. Type defaults write com.apple.dock pinning start; killall Dock and it moves to the left or top. Use end instead of start to move the Dock to the right/bottom; middle is the default.

2. Adjust Dock Transparency

Bring back Mountain Lion’s transparency by typing defaults write com.apple.dock hide-mirror -bool true; killall Dock into Terminal. To make hidden apps’ icons semi-transparent, use defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true; killall Dock. In both cases, switching true for false reverts to default settings.

3. Activate Single-app Mode

OS X has a single-app mode, which means if you click a Dock icon, every other app is hidden. Activate using defaults write com.apple.dock single-app -bool true; killall Dock. Again, replacing true with false reverts this setting to OS X’s default.

4. Change the Hiding Delay

Remove the show/hide animation by typing defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0; killall Dock. Revert by using defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 1; killall Dock, or adjust “1” to experiment with different animation speeds — for example, 0.5 is faster (half the time) and 2 is slower (twice the time).

5. Add App Spacers

Invisible spacers can be added to group apps. Each time you use this command, a new spacer is added: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘{tile-data={}; tile-type=”spacer-tile”;}’; killall Dock. Replace persistent-apps with persistent-others to place a spacer on the right-hand side of the Dock. To get rid of one, right-click it and select Remove from Dock, or simply drag it out of the Dock onto your desktop.

6. Define Custom Dock Stacks

Stacks are folders added to the right side of the Dock. OS X has hidden custom stacks for recent items. Each time you input defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{“tile-data” = {“list-type” = 1;}; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”;}’; killall Dock, a stack is added. Right-click to show documents, servers, or favorite volumes/items.

7. Take a Shortcut

The idea of this tutorial is to update the Dock while learning a bit about the Terminal. However, if you want Dock changes but don’t fancy doing any of that pesky typing, you can install TinkerTool (http://bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html) and use the various options found within its Dock section. Should you later decide you want to revert all changes, TinkerTool has a Reset option (to pre-TinkerTool state or defaults), but you should also follow the back-up advice before using the app, just in case.

Quick Look is an under-appreciated OS X gem. Before its arrival, you had to laboriously open a document to see what it contained, often after first launching the app it was created in. Imagine! But in the last few versions of OS X, you merely select the file in Finder and tap the space bar to get a preview.

This much you’re probably familiar with, but Quick Look has a slew of hidden tips that can power up previews on your Mac. Keyboard shortcuts can provide fast access to functions and hidden information, and Quick Look’s extensibility means that if it can’t properly preview a file, chances are someone’s written a plug-in to get around that problem.

The technology is also dotted around OS X, providing the means to save you time. For example, you cannot open items in the Trash—OS X first wants you to drag them elsewhere. But if you just want to check that you’re about to destroy the right thing, you can use Quick Look. And in Mail, attachments can be previewed using the Quick Look button, but you can also hover the cursor near any link and then click the little arrow that appears to get a preview of the associated web page. The remainder of this tutorial shows many more hints and tips to make the most of Quick Look.

1. Preview Images

Drag a large photo to Finder and use Quick Look to preview it. The cursor keys can be used to navigate the Finder window in the background, to view other images. Hold Option in OS X Mavericks to zoom the image to full-size. Use two-finger drags to scroll the zoomed photo.

2. Check Multi-Page Docs

Preview multi-page docs, such as a PDF of Mac|Life or a Pages file, to read and two-finger swipe between pages. Or, click a thumbnail to go to a page. On the keyboard, this works with Page Up/Down keys (fn + up/down on keyboards without a number pad).

3. Try to Preview a Zip

Although Apple has added support for lots of file types, Quick Look doesn’t accommodate them all. Try previewing a Zip archive in Quick Look and you’ll only see a massive icon, the file name, the archive’s size, and its modification date.

4. Install a Plug-In

Quick Look plug-ins are here to help. Go to http://bit.ly/ML_BZQLgen and download the plug-in. In ~/Library (Option-click Go in Finder to access it), create a folder called “QuickLook” (no space) and copy the plug-in to it. Zip previews now display more.

5. Find More Plug-Ins

Many plug-ins are available. Some you pay for, such as Code Line’s Art View (http://bit.ly/ML_CLartview) for Adobe Creative Cloud, but many are free (see www.qlplugins.com). To remove one, delete it from the QuickLook folder. To install one for every user, put it in /Library/QuickLook.

6. Text Copying

Quick Look is read-only, but you can use Terminal to allow you to copy. Open the Terminal window, then type this:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -boolean true

Then type the following to reset the Finder:

killall Finder

You will now see the selection bar when you hover over text in a previewed item. Type the same statement into Terminal but ending with “false” instead of “true” to revert back to read-only mode.

7. Preview from Spotlight

Hover over a Spotlight results list item to get a Quick Look preview. This isn’t as full as the standard one, but you can still navigate multi-page documents by swiping. Hover over the preview and hold Command and Option to display the path to the document.

8. Use the Trackpad

You can use the Trackpad, with any modern Mac, to bring up Quick Look. Go to System Preferences and click Trackpad. In the Point & Click tab, note the gesture for Look up. Return to Finder, perform that action on a file, and Quick Look activates!

Things didn’t look good when, upon launch, 9 Elefants bumped us immediately to Facebook in order for it to nose about in our friends list and news feed. We quit and restarted, in case this was a mistake. It wasn’t. Suitably grumpy, we then entered the game proper: a reasonably stylish and cartoonish take on Paris, draped over a game that thinks it’s a cousin to Nintendo’s Professor Layton series — but has bafflingly omitted panache, imagination, and fun.

The plot involves meandering about unlocked locations, having drawn-out conversations with irritating characters who seem to be in on a massive practical joke. Your father, a professor, has vanished; but rather than help you, Paris’s inhabitants instead demand you solve puzzles, in return for them drip-feeding vital information. And, yes, we know — this is a video game! Lighten up! But it’s hard to get into a fun frame of mind, for two very good reasons: first, the aforementioned conversations require a maddening number of taps to plow through, and secondly, the puzzles just aren’t very good.

Layton’s fairly breezy and varied approach to puzzles isn’t really in evidence here. 9 Elefants instead appears to have wrenched half of its content from the kind of thing a 12-year-old would battle away at in an exam hall. You’re therefore quizzed about the heights of mountains and lengths of avenues (and in at least two cases, we questioned the game’s accuracy regarding the answers), or presented with math puzzles where the question is worded just badly enough for you to sometimes trip up and get things wrong. Occasionally, 9 Elefants almost redeems itself with puzzles that are more about untangling wordplay trickery, whereupon it smugly points out there weren’t calculations to do, but this is rare.

Some of the puzzles are, mercifully, more tactile in nature, but they’re no more imaginative. Instead, you get variations on tried, tested, and dusty combination-cracking and line-untangling tasks, as well as sliding puzzles and tetronimo boxes, repeating alongside the school-oriented fare until your brain goes numb. And because puzzles are fixed rather than dynamic, the game has to stop you from just retrying them over and over with different answers.

Its solution: “time films,” which can be captured in a dull mini-game in which you watch some portals, see the film emerge from one, and tap the screen. A few captured films usually buys you another go at a puzzle, or a small pile can be used to skip a puzzle entirely. Surprisingly, there’s no in-app purchase for buying time films — which, if you’re feeling generous, could be considered a redeeming feature of the game.

Elsewhere, though, things remain decidedly unrosy — and the poor UI is the final nail in the coffin, seemingly cut and pasted from the PC with scant regard for the touchscreen. At the very least, you should be able to drag and drop answers on an iPad, but you’re instead left with awkward multiple taps, which alongside the banal dialog, twee music, and boring puzzles hardly make for the most enthralling gaming experience on iOS.

The bottom line. They say an elephant never forgets. We doubt we’ll forget our experience with 9 Elefants, although not for the right reasons.

If you approach Trials Frontier as a Trials game (capital “T”), then you’re in for disappointment. Although the game broadly echoes its console counterparts, its soul has been ripped out and replaced with the festering guts of a stinking freemium business model, and then spray-painted in mobile-friendly colors and cuteness. Yes, this is still a physics-oriented bike-balancer, set across ludicrously difficult-to-traverse tracks, but it lacks refinement and elegance. Also, it’s now largely about taking on missions from demanding cartoon characters, larger-than-life, over-the-top, hazard-filled courses (with explosions and fire and more explosions), and that encroaching sense that if you don’t spend some money on in-app purchases very soon, the game’s going to slam the door shut in your face, often and repeatedly.

For anyone who’s never gone near a Trials game, this is a trials (small “t”) effort that at first holds up fairly well against existing similar iOS titles that beat the series to the App Store. The controls balance on a knife-edge between irksomely twitchy and reasonably solid (and so are probably quite well suited to the genre), levels are short, and the game has a decent amount of character lurking. Initially, it’s quite good fun—if frustrating—nursing your cartoonish bike to the end of cartoonish courses, in order to appease the cartoonish demands of cartoonish folk lurking in the game’s central hub, a cartoonish saloon.

But even the most enthusiastic newcomers are likely to soon feel ground down by Trials Frontier. Races require fuel, which is initially in plentiful supply but after a couple of hours’ play becomes scarce, unless you’re willing to fill up the tank with acquired gems—or, of course, just buy more gems with real money. Occasional head-to-head races against robotically scripted A.I. require powerful enough bikes, and upgrades cost coins and take time to add. Again, loosening your wallet can alleviate grinding, but a few hours in, the costs become prohibitive to all but the most obsessive players.

Worse, though, is the fact that success in missions requires specific items to be acquired, and these are “won” by way of a spinning wheel at the end of each race. Fundamentally, then, you’re forced into a kind of Groundhog Day scenario, racing the same tracks again and again in order to secure a prize on the basis of pure luck—and not whether you heroically managed to cross the finish line within the tight time limit demanded to win a gold medal. 

Eventually during testing, one of the saloon people cheerily mentioned there was a new object outside to investigate. We had a look and it was a slot machine, adding yet more randomness to the game and coming with its own countdown timer. It was at about this point that we realized Trials Frontier is presumably just a big joke, trolling iOS users en masse. 

The bottom line. If you can deal with the business model, or are happy to waste a few hours before abandoning the game entirely, Trials Frontier is pretty, fairly playable, and reasonably fun. But stick around and the veneer is soon stripped away to reveal endless, soulless grinding to appease cartoon simpletons.

Your challenge is simple: fly a wedge-shaped spaceship around an orange slice of space, collecting circular coins. All you need to do is grab 15, and each successful pick-up increments a circular score indicator at the center of the screen. How hard could that be? The twist is that your actions are cloned and represented on screen by an increasingly large robotic swarm of black ships. Collide with one of your echoes and it’s game over.

Fail at 14 coins and you at least earn a cheekily named achievement, thereby stopping you from yelling at your device about the inhumanity of it all. Actually, that’s fairly unlikely to occur, because 15 Coins on its easiest difficulty isn’t all that tough. With the assistance of freeze squares, you can obliterate temporarily stationary clones; therefore, with some savvy flying and a modicum of arcade smarts, a reasonably adept gamer will have beaten 15 Coins within about 20 minutes.

Two options then remain available: grab the coins more quickly and thereby climb the Game Center leaderboards, or venture towards a tougher difficulty level. At that point, the game starts to unravel. On the fastest speed especially, 15 Coins feels like trying to coax a drunken fly to do your bidding, as the ship jerks around the screen in tiny arcs; neither the touch nor tilt controls felt tight enough for our liking.

With some titles of this ilk, a game throwing down the gauntlet sometimes makes us all the more determined to continue and give it a slap. Here, though, we felt oddly satisfied when we’d collected our 15 coins on the slowest mode and made a decent stab at doing so on the faster ones. It was more a conclusion than a comma. There was also a nagging sense we could be playing other (and better) titles instead: the more varied Don’t Shoot Yourself!, avoid-’em-up classic Bit Pilot, or the wonderful and demanding trio that is Super Hexagon, Impossible Road, and Boson X.

That’s not to say 15 Coins isn’t worthy of consideration—it’s sweet, simple, and quite fun—but it’s very much a title that will make you smile and gnash for a few hours over a few days, rather than one that will remain forever welded to your Home screen.

The bottom line. A minimal, fairly effective, and initially compelling arcade experience that lacks the depth and pulling power to keep it around for the long haul. Still, it’s worth a look for a buck or two.

On the surface, Paper looks a lot like what might have happened had Facebook invented Flipboard before Flipboard got the chance, and then slapped on a moniker rather too similar to an existing hugely popular (but entirely different) iOS app. Move beyond the snark, though, and you realize something surprising: Paper makes using Facebook almost pleasurable again.

Facebook on desktop ceased to be fun a long time ago, and even the once-streamlined mobile app is increasingly full of cruft. The idea with Paper appears to be to strip everything back, bring stories to the fore, and turn the Facebook experience into a kind of edited newspaper.

The screen is split in half: the top is filled with bold images, and a scrollable feed runs underneath. Tapping a story zooms it to full-screen, which is just as well given the eye-squintingly tiny text in the feed. You can then tap a link to open the story in a full-screen browser; a share button at the bottom-right provides options to share the story, copy its link, open the page in Safari, or send the content to a user-defined read-later service.

By default, your own Facebook feed is loaded, but you can add broadly defined sections (“Tech,” “Planet,” “Pop Life,” and so on) full of stories picked by editors. Everyone sees the same thing, thus Paper lacks the granularity of Flipboard. There’s no means to define a single Facebook user or publication as a section, for example, but the no-nonsense approach means that the app is simple to set up and browse. Standard Facebook notifications and messages are also accessible from within the app.

The design perhaps needs to settle down a bit — it’s largely intuitive, but very reliant on gestures. These sometimes clash with iOS 7, and horizontal swipes on the large images at the top of the screen perform different actions depending on context. We expected them to navigate through big photos, but on the main feed they switch sections, and in a single person/organization’s Facebook feed, they navigate the timeline on a month-by-month basis. Also, whoever decided people would want to “explore” high-res images by tilting a device around like a crazy person needs someone to give them a very stern look.

The bottom line. Minor grumbles aside, Paper is a good start to Facebook’s news-oriented ambitions. Flipboard is still a better bet for browsing a set of articles you’ve carefully curated yourself, but Paper’s simpler to get started with, focused, and pretty great for browsing Facebook itself.

A major departure from its predecessor, Ulysses III is more reminiscent of Mail.Despite the “III” in the name, this is a new product. Rather than iterate on Ulysses 2, the app reimagines the text editor in a way that visually resembles Mail and con…