Under the hood of Mac OS X lies a haven of nerdy FreeBSD Unix goodness; If you know what you’re doing, you can pretty much make the OS do all sorts of things you couldn’t do in a mouse-driven graphical interface just by opening the Terminal utility and typing in a few commands.

However, as powerful as Unix is, unless you’re a hardcore computer geek or a programmer, it’s still somewhat difficult to grasp for the rest of us mere mortals (yours truly included!) who have been brought up on a steady diet of mouse pointers, icons and windows. This has provided a golden opportunity for independent Mac developers - you’ll find a lot of shareware/freeware programs that exist now for the Mac are essentially a friendly graphical front-end to a set of complex Unix commands.

Which brings me to Tinkertool, one of those items of software I personally can’t imagine doing without. TinkerTool lets you tweak Mac OS X’s default settings in ways that you wouldn’t normally have been able to do unless you knew Unix - as such, it doesn’t provide any new features, it just brings already-existing features out of hiding.

Among the tweaks which are now possible:

• Change the default file format for screenshots (PNG is the Mac default, but you can set it to JPG, TIF, BMP & more).
• Change the default system fonts.
• Show hidden system files (Be careful with this one - those files are hidden for a reason!)
• If you don’t like Apple’s Dashboard, you can now disable it completely.
• Disable those hidden files that tend to show up on a PC when you’re sharing files across a Mac-PC network.
• Make dock icons turn semi-transparent to show that a program is hidden (a personal favourite of mine)
• Group scrollbar arrows together at either ends of a window, to save mouse mileage (very useful if you’re dealing with extra-large
  windows)

…Plus heaps more. Download Tinkertool from Bresink.com and give it a spin - you’ll find all sorts of subtle ways to make your Mac OS work the way you want it. And just like any other software we endorse here at Inspect My Gadget, it’s completely free!