Mac OS X Tweaks

If you use Apple's Automator program to make your life simpler, you may find yourself wanting to change your world quickly due to… Well, every time I need to have a web-based conference call, I need to change my desktop environment, for very few people have the resolution to keep up with my Cinema display.

So I found myself constantly changing my desktop resolution, and then hiding the dock, turning off Growl notifications, etc. After the meeting, I needed to reset everything back to the way it was. Didn't take too many of these meetings before I decided to automate this process.

One thing I wondered was how to programmatically turn the Dock hiding on and off. You may have seen little tweaks for changing the Dock (and other Apple apps) that you can run in the Terminal, something like defaults write com.apple.dock…

Well, you can figure out what options are available with the following command:

defaults read com.apple.dock | less

Ah, what I needed was autohide. Now I can do something like this in the Run Shell Script in my Automator:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -boolean YES
killall Dock

Changing Screen Resolution

I haven't found a standard way of changing the screen resolution, but you might want to compile this little bit of C code, cscreen and then you write something like:

~/bin/cscreen -h 1280 -v 960

To lower the resolution automatically, and then in a restore script, use:

~/bin/cscreen -h 1920 -v 1200

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