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

Polished Screencasts With Jing Pro and iMovie

The big selling point of Jing Pro is the real-time MPEG4-AVC (h.264) encoding it does. The bitrate is low enough to provide PDG (pretty damn good) file sizes regardless of the type of content that’s being captured, but high enough to allow post-production editing and encoding. If you’re lucky enough to be on OS X you need look no further than iMovie for proof of the interoperability benefits.

When it was initially released iMovie ’08 got some unwarranted bad press from existing users (it has a different model / approach than previous non-linear editors), but its actually a very slick and powerful little tool that promotes the creation of polished productions quickly. It’s extremely easy to combine multiple Jing Pro videos and its template presets allow you to quickly create sophisticated titles, transitions and credits. On the audio front, its simple to add an additional voiceover or background music and apply fading and ducking.

In short, iMovie can make your average screencast look like it was put together by a pro. To prove the point I put together a short (45 seconds) montage of some some recent Jing Pro screencasts I’ve made (I’m calling it a jingcast dash). Check it out, then start creating your own. ;-) (more…)