Hide / Show Mac OS X Desktop Icons

So you want to make a screencast and you’d like to put your best foot forward which means, in my case at least, hiding the mess that is your Mac OS X desktop. No sweat. In the screencast below you’ll learn how to quickly build two Automator applications that will allow you to toggle the visibility of your desktop icons on or off.

The shell commands you’ll need to build your Automator apps:

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
killall Finder

defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
killall Finder

*Update*

You can reduce this to a single Automator app that checks the current visibility and toggles to the opposite state using the following bash script:

# checks visibility and stores value in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder CreateDesktop)”

# toggle desktop icon visibility based on variable
if [ "$isVisible" = 1 ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool false
else
defaults write com.apple.finder CreateDesktop -bool true
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

***************************************************************************

And for the truly lazy–a precompiled app that toggles visibility on or off:

http://www.brooksandrus.com/downloads/hide_icons.zip

Importing Camtasia:mac Audio

In a previous post I demonstrated how to directly import Camtasia:mac screen footage into your professional video tooling. There is a small caveat that I didn’t mention–Camtasia:mac stores microphone and sound card data in separate file streams. The relationship between these file streams and your recorder settings is somewhat obtuse–thus, the screencast presented here.

After viewing you should understand which file streams in the recording application bundle contain audio. Luckily once you’re armed with this knowledge its a snap to import the audio streams along with the screen footage into the video tooling of your choice. Enjoy!

The Importance of Constraints

I stopped at the local Big Ten Party Store on the way to the golf course last week and busted up when I saw this sign:

Sometimes limits are a good thing. Now to convince my friends on the Jing team. ;-)