Mac users familiar with Mac OS know that Apple hides a number of features and tweaks in the OS for the sake of usability and ease-of-use. They can be unlocked only by power users who know what they're looking for. But a lot of those features can really improve the user experience. Thankfully, tools exist that help open them up to the average user. TinkerTool is one.
Some of the features TinkerTool (completely free) opens up make the interface more attractive and customizable, and others improve performance by changing graphics settings and turning off animations. If you're looking for more control over your Mac, TinkerTool is worth a try.
The version of Mac OS you're running determines what options TinkerTool can uncover for you. The app works with OS 10.2 through 10.4, and its developer expects TinkerTool to be ready for 10.5 as well, when it's released later this month.
Among some of the best tweaks that TinkerTool offers are ways to turn off Dock and Finder animations, which occur when you open files, applications, select items in menus, and more. Turning off these options can help some Macs, especially those with less RAM or running on older hardware, perform a bit better.
If you're a Mac user who often works with Windows network shares or portable storage, you're familiar with the annoying .DS_Store files that Mac OS creates on those volumes when they move from system to system. TinkerTool can keep your Mac from creating them. Additionally, TinkerTool gives you more options to customize your Dock; you can place it at the top of the screen (a feature hidden in OS X by default), make the icons transparent, change the animations, add shadow to the icons, and more. And TinkerTool offers a world of customization options for Safari, the way the Finder handles network files, displays icons and text on-screen, and more.
If you love TinkerTool, you can keep it installed for free as long as you like. If you need to remove it, it can safely revert your tweaks and settings back to OS X defaults, or back to the way they were before you started tweaking.
Don't expect a tool that'll help automate processes and run regular disk checkups though; TinkerTool is meant to help you customize your user experience and get rid of some of the more annoying aspects of the OS, not to keep your Mac running smoothly. TinkerTool handles a number of things that I've heard Mac users grumble about in the past, like why Safari can't open PDFs inside the browser instead of launching Preview, and why you can't re-order login items. Tinkertool fixes both of those issues, and much more.
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