The HIDDEN customisation tool for Mac

Customisation

One of my favourite things about Macs is the level of customisation and personality you can imprint on them. There is a culture surrounding the Mac that emphasises individuality, originality and creativeness, the likes of which you don’t see in the Windows community.

I don’t know why but maybe this all stems from Apple’s early marketing campaigns - Think Different

Anyway…

Tinker Tool

“TinkerTool is an application that gives you access to more preference settings Apple has built into macOS. This allows you to activate hidden features in the operating system and in some of the applications delivered with the system.” - bresink.com

This somewhat uninspiring tool offers up some of my favourite customisations. Not only because they are good but because they are settings that are usually hidden away. What TinkerTool does then is bring these features, which would usually require some Terminal magic, up to the surface and enable you to tweak away through a User Interface.

My Settings

I have highlighted for you a couple of settings which I have applied to my machine. This is by no means the full list and I recommend you take the time to install the utility and have a look around yourself.

Dock > Dimmed hidden icons

Dims the icons in the dock when you have hidden an application.

Dock > Disable animation when hiding or showing Doc

Disables the sliding animation of the dock. This happens when you have your dock hidden by default. As you mouse over the edge of your screen the Dock will appear with a sliding animation. This setting speeds things up by having the dock appear instantly.

Dock > Disable delay when showing hidden Dock

When running a hidden dock there is a delay between moving the mouse to the edge of the screen and the Dock appearing. This setting switches off that delay and thus speeds everything up

General > Screenshot file format

The default file format for a screenshot is .png which is great quality but it also takes up a lot of disk space. Switch it over to something like .jpg and you’ll save a load of disk space without any noticeable drop in image quality.

Applications > Delay when dragging a window to adjacent Space

When dragging an application into a new space or desktop there is a short animation to do so. Setting this removes the animation and speeds things up.

Wrap up

If you liked TinkerTool and want to play around with some other Utilities on your Mac, take a look at my other post - Best Free Utilities in 2022 (Part 2 - Mac OS)

Please do Like and Share the post if you found it to be of use! It really does help things on my end 🙂

Cheers!