To avoid a lengthy intro, here is the thing: at some point OSX – and I’m talking specifically Snow Leopard 10.6.8 here – started feeling sluggish. The transitions didn’t feel smooth anymore and the general feeling was that OS was not as snappy as it used to be. Turns out all this has something to do with OSX’s built-in GPU power management, which reduces GPU clock speeds in order to save power. So what we want to do here is to turn this sort of throttling off and keep the GPU at its maximum speed at all times.

As all latest Macbook Pros, mine too comes with two built-in GPUs. It’s a mid-2009 model and has the less power consuming Nvidia 9400M and the more powerful 9600M GT. The idea here is to turn throttling off ONLY for 9600M GT and run it at its maximum speed when the computer is plugged into AC power. On the other hand, I want the system to use 9400M, which is less power consuming by design, when laptop is running on battery. Also the point is to keep the 9400M throttling scheme intact, because that’s what helps having an 8-hour battery life.

First, to have seamless switching between the two GPUs without logging out and back in, we will have to install a cool program called GfxCardStatus. It also features power-source based GPU switching, meaning that if we run 9600M GT on AC power and switch to battery power, the system will start using 9400M instead of 9600M GT. That’s the easy part.

Next: how to prevent 9600M GT from going into power-saving states and make it run at maximum power all the time? I found out that one way to do it is to disable a kernel extension AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext by moving it or renaming it (it can be found in /System/Library/Extensions/), but that disables throttling on both GPUs and we are left with no power saving benefits on 9400M; having no GPU throttling on 9400M cuts battery life from 8 hours to 4 hours, which is definitely not an acceptable option.

Let’s get back to AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext. Locate this file (and make also a backup copy of it), right click on it and select “Show Package Contents”. Find file Info.plist and open it with an appropriate editor (you will need Property List Editor from Developer Tools, PlistEdit Pro or a similar program that allows editing of .plist files). Within this plist file, navigate to IOKitPersonalities, AGPM and then find the corresponding model of your Macbook Pro (mine is MacbookPro5,3). It reveals settings for IGPU and GFX0 and LogControl. Turn LogControl to 1 (we will need this to monitor changes of GPU power states in Console). It doesn’t take much to figure that IGPU stands for integrated GPU, 9400M in my case, and GFX0 stands for 9600M GT.

Look in “Heuristic” – there are settings for Threshold_high and Threshold_low. They are not very self-explanatory, but some people on some forums have figured out that state 0 is the state of maximum power (highest GPU clock, memory and shader speeds) and state 3 is the state that saves most power (lowest clocks and voltage).

So the trick here is to set thresholds for going into power-saving states 1, 2 and 3 impossible to reach. The easiest to do so is to set their thresholds above 100.

Original settings, GFX0:

And now modified settings, GFX0:

Explanation: just added “1″ before an original number, so for instance, 65 becomes 165, just for reference, otherwise it doesn’t matter which number you use as any number above 100 will presumably do just fine. Also, power state 0 is the state of maximum power and I have set its Threshold_Low 0 and Threshold_High 90. The following state, state 1, had in its original settings Threshold_Low 68 and Threshold_High 65 (inverted, I know, odd, I know!), but I just simply bumped them to Threshold_Low 168 and Threshold_High 165.

When you finish editing, save the Info.plist. May require some permission acrobatics on your side, but once you get the modified Info.plist saved in the kext package, you will also have to repair permission on the modified kext, otherwise it might not load at startup. You will need Kext Utility for that. I used version 2.4.2 for Snow Leopard and 64-bit kexts. Run Kext Utility and wait one or two minutes for it to repair permissions in the Extensions folder. Then reboot the machine.

Logged back in, let’s check if everything works as planned. At this point I assume you have already installed GfxCardStatus so we can switch between the two GPUs on the fly.

First check System Profiler > More Info > Extensions to check if our modified kext has been loaded. If you see AppleGraphicsPowerManagement.kext there, it’s been done. Now let’s check how our power state changes are being logged and view the log in the Console. In Console, select “All messages” and filter strings matching “AGPM”. Now, if you are running 9400M (IGPU), you should be seeing quite frequent power state switching in the Console. Now switch to 9600M GT (GFX0) via GfxCardStatus. Then run Exposé repeatedly for 5 to 10 seconds. What you should be seeing in the Console is that GFX0 has been set to the highest power state (state 0) and remains there without any further switching. The last message you should be seeing in the Console (unless you switch back to 9400M, of course) should be something like:

AGPM: GPU = GFX0 G-state set to 0 from 1, ControlID = 17

Noticed how more fluid OSX user interface is now? Good. Now if you switch to battery, the GfxCardStatus should automatically switch to 9400M and you should be getting the same long battery life as before (6-8 hours).

If you feel these power state numbers (0,1,2,3) are too abstract, you can do your own checking of GPU power states translated to more realistic numbers with Nvclock. Nvclock (Linux utility that has recently been ported to Darwin/OSX) will reveal actual clock speeds (core/memory/shader) you are currently running. Explaining Nvclock is a bit beyond this tutorial, suffice it to say that I’m running 9600M GT at maximum speeds 540/792/1350 (540 MHz core, 792 MHz memory, 1350 MHz shader). These numbers reveal an interesting fact that Apple Nvidia Driver runs the GPU at slightly higher speeds than factory settings (which are 500/792/1250). No overclock to brag about, but fine by me, anyway.

While this sorting of hacking works just fine in my case, remember you are doing this at your own risk, and make backups beforehand.

Cheers,
Mark

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(disables BeamSync automatically at every login)

Here is a simple Automator application I put together to automatically disable BeamSync when logging into Snow Leopard. It’s not a particularly elegant solution, but gets the job done; I have been searching online for that one program which supposedly existed some time ago on the link http://glyf.org/beamsync/beamsync.gz, with no success. The other option – to modify com.apple.windowserver.plist with Property List Editor and put value of “deferredUpdates” to 0, just didn’t work for me, not even when doing a terminal command “sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -integer deferredUpdates 0″ and rebooting – the changes just won’t stick.

Anyway, to use this Automator action, you WILL need a Quartz Debug app (version 3.0) from the earlier XCode Leopard bundle (not from Snow Leopard). You can actually download it from this link. Quartz Debug app should be located in the Applications folder. Another thing you need to make sure is that when you launch Quartz Debug app is that the Beam Sync Tools window should already be open – to do so, launch Quartz Debug, open Tools menu, select Show Beam Sync Tools and quit Quartz Debug. Next time you launch Quartz Debug, the Beam Sync Tools should also open automatically.

To automatically disable BeamSync at login, just add “qd” to login items in the Accounts preference pane. Download the app “qd” here.

Hope it works well for you. Cheers.

P.S. Disabling Beamsync results in faster drawing and therefore a more fluid interface. Practical benefits are noticeably smoother scrolling (Safari, Twitter and within apps in general), smoother QuickLook previewing, smoother Exposé and Spaces transitions, more fluid video playback, etc. The downside to it is that you’ll see some tearing of window edges when moving windows around, but it is not too bothersome – for me at least. The increase in frames-per-second is substantial and really makes the interface feel “fresh” again.

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aka “Performance gaming on a low-end Macbook Pro laptop”

This post (which admittedly has nothing to do directly with being more productive on a Mac) was initially meant to be a lot more thorough and longer and cover step-by-step all the essentials on how to optimize old Macbook Pro with ATI X1600 graphics to run games well. Instead I decided just to focus on how to optimize it to run well one of the most demanding first player shooter multiplayer games right now, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (BFBC2 or BC2). You can then, however you find appropriate, apply these methods on other games as well, even though I have to admit that the time to upgrade the “gaming rig” has now finally come. Besides, there’s been said a lot online on how to optimize performance of Bad Company 2, so let’s just see how to get it to be playable in our case. We’re talking only fairly decent 20-30 FPS here, low resolution of 1024×768, low settings, all while retaining good visual quality and what’s also of utmost importance: keeping the game responsive and snappy.

So “our” machine is the first-generation Macbook Pro with specs:

Macbook Pro 15″, machine model: MacBookPro 1,1 (62 months old)
CPU: Intel Core Duo 2.0 GHz (T2500 CPU)
RAM: 2 GB DDR2 667 MHz
Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon X1600, 256 MB
OS: Windows XP SP2 via Bootcamp (version 3.2)
Game: Bad Company 2 and Bad Company 2 Vietnam (fully updated)

Definitely a vintage machine by today’s standards. Yet it could run first-person shooters very well so far. Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2 for instance both ran at around 40-70 FPS (tweaks applied of course) which is overall extremely satisfactory. In BC2, however, you will get varying levels of performance – generally all Vietnam maps will run next to spectacular without any drops in frame rate, while the regular maps run generally well, but experience FPS drops (to something below 20 FPS) in situations where there happen to be lots of trees (not the case with Vietnam though) or dust/snow/explosions on screen, like Valparaiso, Laguna Presa or Nelson bay. With the following enhancements applied you will get smooth performance in maps like Harvest day, Oasis, Isla Inocentes, Heavy Metal, Laguna Alta, Arica Harbor, Atacama desert and as previously mentioned, Vietnam maps (I btw recommend you get this expansion pack if you haven’t already because the difference in performance is substantial).

So here’s the brief summary on how to tweak BFBC2 performance for X1600 on MBP and an intro to what will be explained in a bit more detail further.

1. Check if the game is actually using both CPU cores (trivial but important)
2. Kill or pause unnecessary processes and tame the necessary ones, especially Punkbuster
3. Goes almost without saying but still – get the most suitable drivers for the X1600 GPU (in my case the latest and modded drivers from Catalyst 10.2 suite) and DirectX
4. Overclock the GPU, then overclock it a little more (we’ll see how to apply the extra GPU overclock to the game)
5. Optimize game settings (basically all low, except textures high, makes the game still look good)
6. Apply settings and other GPU tweaks using ATI Tray Tools (settings that work) and also Catalyst Control Center
7. Undervolt the CPU with RightMark CPU, max out the fans and lower the internal temps
8. Tighten RAM timings with Memset 4.1 (probably a very minor effect, but hey)
9. Lower DPC latency by updating other drivers (sound, wi-fi) and uninstalling unneeded devices, set timer with Time Resolution.

————————-

1. Force game to use max CPU

This first tweak is not a tweak really, it is a more of a workaround around the glitch of BFBC2Game.exe not using both CPU cores, at least on the very machine in question. To fix that, just launch the game in windowed mode or alt-enter to get from full screen to windowed mode and run Task Manager. There you can (will probably) see that the game is not using both cores at once, but switches from using one core to using the other. Just right click on the process BFBC2Game.exe and select “Set affinity”. Even though probably both CPUs (CPU 0 and CPU 1) are already selected (ticked out), just make sure they really are and click OK. This way the game will immediately start using both cores, and you will see the change in the usage monitor graph.

Before:

Now:

Sounds like a cheap trick, happens to be the most important one. Before I found out about THAT particular “method”, my in-game CPU usage was 60% with almost unplayable FPS. Now the CPU runs at 90-100%, the way it should anyway. I have to apply this “tweak” every time I launch a game.

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2. Kill unnecessary processes and tame unruly processes, especially Punkbuster

Ok, now that we got the BFBC2 game running at its maximum, we have to assure it actually GETS the maximum possible processing power, so we have to look into other processes that are running on the system. At this point I have to mention that I’m using this WinXP volume strictly for gaming, so there are absolutely no unnecessary programs running in the background and potentially hogging the system. The system is clean, yet I still kill all the unnecessary processes via Task Manager (or rather kill them with a batch file). Examples are CCC.exe, MOM.exe, jusched.exe etc; all the stuff that does not need to be there while you are shooting folks in game. That is the easy part.

However, there are processes that you DO need for gaming, and therefore can’t kill, and they will hog up your CPU, if they are not tamed. One of them is Punkbuster. It will at random times use up 30-50% of your CPU, and of course you will see a FPS drop when that starts happening.

The trick is to get Punkbuster to use only the desired/acceptable % of CPU (and this is somewhere between 2% and 5%) while still assuring you don’t get kicked out of the game. We need two tools for that: Threadmaster with Threadmaster GUI and Process Explorer.

Install Threadmaster (even though it says it’s for Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003) and Threadmaster GUI. Add the PnkBstrB.exe to blacklist and assign 3% CPU limit to it. Set 10 seconds sample time. Add BFBC2Game.exe to exceptions. You can add some other processes to blacklist as well – I also added “explorer.exe” to blacklist and assigned it 1% CPU. Save settings. Done.

To monitor if the limits are well in effect (while gaming of course), use Process Explorer. Open up processes in separate windows for BFBC2Game.exe and PnkBstrB.exe and minimize them. This way you won’t lose monitoring data once you exit the game and processes close. Since you’re doing these tweaks anyway, you’ll figure it out for yourself. To conclude: after a heavy session of gaming, PnkBstrB.exe should have an almost flat graph with only occasional spikes (peaking at 1-3 %). Despite that, larger spikes will probably occur in the time frame of the 10 seconds sample time. After that the unruly app will be tamed to the previously set limits. If you look at the process BCBF2Game.exe, it should have a graph with heavy usage around 95%, and that’s exactly what we are looking for here. If that is the case, well done.

The last suggestion concerning getting rid of unnecessary processes, is that you use Game Booster. It will put on hold some processes you’re probably not aware of. Just use it, even if benefits from using it are most probably minuscule.

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3. Get latest graphic card drivers and latest DirectX

I’m using the latest Catalyst 10.2 legacy driver for X1600 (driver version 8.695.000, dated 10th feb 2010), downloaded from ATI, modded with Mobility modder. It does seem to give much better performance in Vietnam maps than the outdated Apple’s X1600 Boot camp driver, even though the old driver seems to load maps a bit faster. How to modify a 10.2 driver with Mobility Modder, is explained on the previous link.

I’m having latest DirectX 9.0c installed (files ending in *43.dll).

————————-

4. Overclock the GPU and use the trick to make the game use a higher clock

I’m overclocking the ATI Mobility X1600 in the Macbook Pro using ATI Tray Tools (ATT). I will not go into the process and details of overclocking, because it is well explained elsewhere. The point here is another: how to apply a higher GPU overclock so that BC2 game still remains stable. It happens that at higher clocks the game will freeze when it tries to load a map, and you’ll need to hard reset the laptop. The trick is to load the map at a lower clock and switch to a higher clock only when you are already in the game. That’s why you need to create at least two overclock profiles (say with lower and higher clocks) and assign hotkeys to trigger them. I am using a lower 445/522 (core/memory MHz) and a higher 465/522 clock and the latter is what the game still accepts without crashing. Even though by testing in ATT I can get to maximum 495/531 without artifacting, I cannot use this clock in the game because it freezes after a little while. However, as it’s a rule when overclocking, my clocks may not work for you (even if it’s the same machine) or, on the other hand, you can go even higher, so just do your own thorough testing.

And a little sub-tip: when you are switching clock speed in BFBC2, press ESC beforehand to get to the scoreboard screen, and only then do the switch. Otherwise if you try to switch mid-game, the game may freeze. And when a game on a map is over, switch to a lower clock before the next map starts loading.

————————-

5. Game settings

Edit the settings in settings.ini (in “/My Documents/BFBC2/” directory) like this, save the file and make it read-only.

[WindowSettings]
Width=1024
Height=768
Fullscreen=true
RefreshRate=60
VSync=false
[Sound]
Quality=low
VoipEnable=false
SpeakerCount=2
[Graphics]
Effects=low
Soldiers=low
Vehicles=low
Overgrowth=low
Undergrowth=low
StaticObjects=low
Terrain=low
Shadows=low
Bloom=false
HSAO=false
MSAA=0
Water=low
MainQuality=custom
Texture=high
DxVersion=9
Aniso=0
Detail=low
RenderAheadLimit=0
Fov=55

Basically all settings except textures are set on low. You could, however, set soldiers and vehicles to medium or high without a performance drop. And, if you are really bothered by how water surfaces look, switch it to medium.

We are using RenderAheadLimit=0 here, which tells the game to use graphic driver settings, and we will set that driver value to 0 (instead of the default 3) in the next step with ATI Tray Tools.

————————-

6. ATI Tray Tools settings and tweaks (and to a very minor extent settings in Catalyst Control Center)

Direct 3D:

Antialiasing: Application-controlled (meaning no AA), no adaptive AA.

Anisotropic filtering: 2x, performance, no high AF /// we override the Application settings which tell the game not to use any AF – for some reason the performance with no AF, application controlled, is much worse than our setting.

Flip queue size: 0 /// Yes, set this to zero. It means the CPU will not render ahead any frames for the GPU. It just happens to give best results under the circumstances – increased responsiveness and frame speed even on graphically more demanding maps such as Laguna Presa, Oasis, Port Valdez etc.

Optimizations: Anisotropic filtering optimizations on.

Catalyst A.I.: disabled /// tested and having it set to low (standard) or advanced seems to produce additional input lag without cranking out any additional FPS. I am aware that the general recommendation is to set it to Advanced, but it’s not what works in my case.

Texture preference: High Performance /// seems to play a bit nicer than High Quality, not much of a difference, really.

Mipmap: set to Performance.

Vsync: off.

Other ATT settings (see pictures below):

Catalyst Control Center settings:
Disable Powerplay in CCC. After that you can exit CCC and kill CCC.exe and MOM.exe processes (as mentioned before).

————————-

7. Lowering the internal temperature and monitor it

Use RightMark CPU to undervolt the CPU and use Macfan to have the fans run at 6000 rpm when gaming. Monitor the temps using CPUID HWMonitor. My temps hit max 80C (CPU) and 77C (GPU – diode), which is supposedly acceptable.

My CPU voltages (stable, could go as low as 1.05V at 12x)

————————-

8. Try tightening RAM timings with Memset 4.1

It could supposedly give a very minor FPS boost, so I’m just using it. It makes me feel better at least. Download Memset here.

Default settings (left) and tweaked settings (right):

————————-

9. Lower DPC latency

Improve system responsiveness by lowering latencies. Measure with DPC Latency Checker (using V1.3.0)

You can lower latency by uninstalling the devices (in Device Manager) you don’t need for gaming – in my case those are: trackpad, iSight camera, ethernet, DVD drive and some others.

The next thing you can do is to update the drivers – I have updated wireless and sound drivers.

And another thing is to keep timer resolution to the minimum. Use Timer Resolution for that.

If you are connected via ethernet cable, then disable the wireless card. And vice versa. Wifi does seem to generate latency spikes though so go with ethernet when you can.

————————-

Conclusion

It’s definitely time for a hardware upgrade but you can (hopefully) have some more fun with your old machine, at least for a little while longer.

Happy gaming!

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Ever since I installed 10.6 Snow Leopard, the all-new, slow, laggy Exposé has been a constant annoyance for me. The windows in the 10.6 Exposé were now all neatly aligned and labeled, but the transition animation was choppy, adding to the perception of a slowed down OS. As always, I am running the OSX user interface mostly with BeamSync turned off, but that didn’t help the choppy 10.6 Exposé much. Being an optimization freak, a slow interface is sort of a worst thing for me. The general conclusion was that Exposé in the previous version of Mac OSX, 10.5 Leopard, was faster, smoother and also more intuitive, and the question was how to get the same functionality of Leopard’s Exposé back into Snow Leopard.

Luckily, a guy named miknos at MacRumors Forums came up with a solution and all I can say is thank you very much. The fix requires to replace Snow Leopard’s Dock.app (found in System>Library>Core Services) with a fixed Dock.app from an early BETA version of Snow Leopard. I’m running 10.6.3 and the solution works with a 10.6.4 as well. It requires you to download the fixed dock and use some Terminal, so here are the instructions, copied from the MacRumors forum:

——————-
Instructions:

1 – Download the fixed Dock.app from this link on a MacRumors forum thread. Extract to Desktop.

2 – Create a new folder on the desktop called OldDock.

3 – Open terminal and (changing username) type:

sudo chown -R root /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app
type your password if necessary

sudo chgrp -R wheel /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app

Now copy/paste everything. Don’t forget to change to your username:
sudo killall Dock && \
sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app /Users/USER/Desktop/OldDock/ && \
sudo mv /Users/USER/Desktop/Dock.app /System/Library/CoreServices/

Restart and Enjoy! To revert, just put the dock.app inside OldDock folder in Desktop and repeat everything.

—————————

Read the whole thread here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=869611

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Ok, this is another post related to saving more disk space, particularly in the context of using a small SSD drive. My Kingston SSDNow SNM225-S2 (Intel X-25M) SSD’s capacity is only 80 GB and there is a constant need to have less clutter and pack more useful stuff into it. In my previous post I explained how to snatch back disk space from the jaws of Gmail, and I’ve been since monitoring who are big “squatters” on my disk. It turned out that the client for the popular music service Spotify can actually use more space than it really should.

If you’re using Spotify, then you probably already know that you can set the size of the cache anywhere between 1GB and 4GB, or even set it to automatic handling.

Naturally I have set the cache all the way from 4GB down to 1GB. But thinking about it, I really don’t need as much cache as 1GB – that’s still quite a lot of music (at non-premium bitrate) taking up disk space. I figured out that it is actually possible for Spotify to use less than 1GB cache – I have set mine to 384 Mb, which should be perfectly adequate for my listening habits.

First quit Spotify if it’s open. Then go to ~/Library/Application Support/Spotify/

Edit the file “settings” with a plaintext editor – change the “cache_size” value to the wanted size in megabytes.

Save the file, start Spotify. Even though the preferences in Spotify will show as if you are still using the minimum “allowed” cache (1GB), you’ll be using less than that – if you watch Finder, you’ll see you have freed extra disk space.

Enjoy!

Related articles (Zemanta)

• Move Your Caches to a RAM Disk to Reduce Wear on SSDs [Hard Drives] (lifehacker.com)
• Superfast SSDs are coming, but will they be used the right way? (arstechnica.com)
• Boost you Mac’s speed with a hybrid drive (macworld.com)
• Hybrid drives: the next generation (go.theregister.com)

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• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)

There is a good chance you read your mail from Gmail with Mac’s native Mail app. There is also a good chance you never really paid attention to how much disk space all this content synced with Gmail IMAP really takes up. Having recently replaced my internal 160 GB hard drive with an Intel X25-M SSD drive half the size, I’m naturally eager to strip all the unnecessary stuff out of the system in order to save some SSD space. So how to free a few gigabytes of space from Gmail?

This question has long been lingering around, it’s just that I didn’t care about it when I still had disk space to throw away: Why does ~/Library/Mail/IMAP-marknanut[...] folder take up almost triple the size (some 7 GB) of the amount of actual mail being shown in my Gmail web account (some 2.5 GB)? Gmail messages seem to take up too much space when used with Mail.app (or any other client that uses IMAP, really). Right click on the “IMAP-youraccountname” folder and select Get Info to see its size:

Ok, this isn’t that hard to find out and goes roughly like this: Gmail’s tags are not exactly compatible with IMAP’s folder logic, thus being displayed as folders in IMAP. In very rough terms: a mail with multiple tags, say 2 or 3 tags, gets locally copied to the same number of folders with these tag names (2 or 3 folders). If you do a Spotlight search in Mail, you’ll usually get duplicate results – for instance the same received mail message appears in “All Mail”, “Inbox”, also “Starred” and so on, whereas a sent message appears in “Sent Mail” and “Sent”.

It would obviously be best to prevent Mail.app from downloading folders where there are most certainly mail duplicates. You’ll figure it best for yourself, but for a start we can eliminate the “All Mail” folder. So how to do it?

Inspired by the post of Rajiv Pant, I went to my Gmail settings, and under Labs section I enabled “Advanced IMAP controls”.

Next uncheck all tags (folder) you don’t want to download locally (for instance “All Mail”) in the Labels section.

I also unchecked “Starred” and “Spam”. I restarted Mail.app, and voila – no All Mail, Starred and Spam folders, no duplicates and more than 4 GB extra space.

Which IMAP folders you’ll prevent from downloading, is of course up to you to figure out. I wish you success. Check out Rajiv Pant’s post too.

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• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)

Annoyed by text underlined with red dots? Tired of having to turn off spell checking every time for a particular application? Here is a quick solution to disable spell check in Mac OS X, derived from what I’ve found here at Dry Fish blog.

Apparently, “disabling” the system process AppleSpell.service by renaming it is not a good solution since you’ll keep getting the dialogs about the service not being able to be found. Dry Fish suggested renaming the language directory en_GB.lproj within the AppleSpell.service package. I did that, but found out that wasn’t good enough since the spell checker also checks spelling for other languages (German, Dutch, etc).

So all I had to do was to try and rename the whole “Resources” directory within the AppleSpell.service application, quit the AppleSpell.service process in the Activity Monitor and open any app that uses the spell checker (used Tweetie for Mac in my case) to bring back the AppleSpell process. No red dots anymore, finally. So here are the instructions.

AppleSpell.service is located in System > Library > Services. Right-click on it and select Show Package Contents.

You won’t be able to rename the Resources folder directly in Finder, so use Terminal and run the following line in it (you will need the administrator password!):

sudo mv /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources.disabled

You should now see the renamed directory:

Quit AppleSpell.service process in Activity Monitor and bring it back on – by running any app that uses the spell checker. You’re done.

Disabling spell checking works in Snow Leopard. Re-activate spell checking by renaming the “Resources.disabled” folder back to “Resources”:

sudo mv /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources.disabled /System/Library/Services/AppleSpell.service/Contents/Resources

Cheers.

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Here’s how: ‘Get Info’ of an app (Cmd-I), unlock permissions (click lock icon at the bottom of Info window; requires admin password) and change permissions of user ‘everyone’ to Read & Write.

Now you can paste in the new icon from the clipboard, return the permissions back to “Read Only” and lock the permissions.

If you’re not yet familiar with replacing icons, here’s a short how-to:

1. Open the file containing icon graphics (PNG, JPEG,…) in Preview. Naturally, it’s best if this file is a PNG file with transparent background. For instance, you can find some PNG icon files for Fluid apps on Flickr.

2. In Preview, select the graphic (Cmd-A) and crop if needed, then copy to clipboard (Cmd-C):

3. In Info window of the app whose icon you wish to replace, click on the top left icon to select it:

4. Paste the graphic from the clipboard over the selected icon (Cmd-V):

Done:

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A quick no-tip: if you use and want to uninstall Tabexpose (a plugin that enables Expose on Safari tabs) from Snow Leopard (Safari 4), then you’ve probably figured out that instructions posted on Cocoamug’s website don’t quite work. Obviously, the Tabexpose plugin is not located in /Library/InputManagers/ folder, so the best thing to do is to do a Spotlight search for Tabexpose.bundle (use my previous tip on finding system files with Spotlight).

A system-file enabled Spotlight search will reveal that Tabexpose.bundle is located in ~/Library/Application Support/Pumba/ folder. Trash the file, empty Trash, restart Safari.

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• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
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To make a long story short: if you’re using Snow Leopard, you have probably noticed that Spotlight search doesn’t show all files on your disk. For example, when you search for a preference file, library or other system files, nothing shows up in results. The good news is that all these files are in fact indexed, they are just excluded from showing up in the results.

To include these (system) files in the results:

1. Invoke a Spotlight search window (not the Spotlight menubar search), default key combo is Cmd-Alt-Space.

2. Click (+) and select “Other…”,

3. Add “System files” from the selection to the menu (checkbox) and then

4. select to include System files in the search:

Then do a search for your preference files, bundles, etc.

How to include system files in Spotlight search by default? I haven’t yet found a setting that overrides the default search scope in Finder, but here’s what you can do: easily create a Smart Folder for an “empty” search that includes also your preferred system files (for instance .plist files) and place it in the sidebar. So now whenever you do a search for system files, just click on the Smart Folder with the extra search criteria before you enter your search term and there are your results (works in Snow Leopard).

Cheers.

(thanks to this article from Tidbits)

Most Commented Posts

• Disable spell check in Mac OSX system-wide
• Use less than default 1GB Spotify cache, save disk space (SSD)
• Claim back disk space from Mail.app (Gmail)
• Maximize battery cycle time and extend Macbook battery life