Customizing Your Mac OS X Folder Icons

Tired of those lame arse filing cabinet folder icons? Looking to make a particular folder stand out? No problem. Step inside my friends, and I’ll show you exactly how to remedy this situation.

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

Run Eclipse from the Command Line on OS X

If you’re looking to launch Eclipse passing in the -clean parameter on OS X you’ll want to cd into the eclipse directory that contains your Eclipse.app package and use the following syntax in bash or your favorite shell terminal:

./eclipse -clean -vmargs -XstartOnFirstThread

The arguments following ./eclipse are all passed to Eclipse and the arguments following -vmargs are passed to the Java jvm.

As an alternative you can modify the Eclipse ini file (see image below for ini location). If you alter the ini file, the arguments set there will be passed in each time Eclipse is run as opposed to a one time deal with the command line.

Why would you want to use the -clean argument? According to the documentation the -clean argument provides the following:

Cleans cached data used by the OSGi framework and Eclipse runtime. Try to run Eclipse once with this option if you observe startup errors after install, update, or using a shared configuration.

Newly installed plugins will often not work until Eclipse has been run with the -clean parameter. After a good chunk of time the Eclipse workspace may also become corrupt and -clean can sometimes work wonders. If you’re having Eclipse workspace issues check out Riyad Kalla’s excellent article.

Finally, if you’re like me and have hard time remembering where in the Eclipse help documentation you kind find all of the Eclipse startup arguments and their uses the Jing screengrab below should help.

Mac OS X – Show / Hide Hidden Files in Finder

I always forget how to do this because I toggle this rather sporadically so I’m adding it to the public record.

To show hidden files in Finder pop open your terminal and type the text shown in the screen grab below.

To go back to hiding files we obviously just flip the AppleShowAllFiles flag to FALSE.

*Update*
As noted in the comments its nice to have the text available for easy copy and paste into your terminal.

Show:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
killall Finder

Hide:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
killall Finder

*Update 2*

You can use this script toggle between states:

# check if hidden files are visible and store result in a variable
isVisible=”$(defaults read com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles)”

# toggle visibility based on variables value
if [ "$isVisible" = FALSE ]
then
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
else
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
fi

# force changes by restarting Finder
killall Finder

You can also download an Automator application which will toggle hidden file visibility here:

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

Coherence–Parallels blurs lines between host and virtual os

As many of you no doubt are aware, Parallels has released a new beta build with a wicked cool feature known as coherence. Coherence allows the virtual desktop to interact with the native desktop in a fairly seamless manner. This short screencast (30 seconds) gives a small taste of the “coherent” feel Parallels brings to running Windows on Mac OS X.