This App Unlocks Hidden Features on Your Mac
Apple is committed to making the Mac as easy to use as possible. At the same time, there’s also a rich world of hidden features and settings for those of us who aren’t happy with the default macOS. While you may be fiddling with terminal commands or combing through every page of the various settings menus to find something useful, you can also make your life easier with TinkerTool , an application that puts obscure Mac features at your fingertips.
Customizing Appearance Options for Various Applications
TinkerTool lets you restrict dark mode to specific parts of macOS rather than enabling it system-wide. Open the app, go to the Appearance tab and look at the options. You can restrict dark mode to the menu bar and dock, leaving almost every other app in light mode.
In addition, you can separately select the applications that will remain in Lite mode. The caveat here is that TinkerTool can’t access all apps, so your choices might be a bit limited. You can also switch to the Safari tab if you want the browser to stay in Light Mode.
Fix Finder Frustration
When you go to the Finder TinkerTool tab, you have the ability to quickly fix a few annoyances. You can have the Finder show the path to any given folder in the window, which is useful if you’re trying to paste the exact location into terminal commands.
Similarly, you can disable Finder sound effects, remove animations, and prevent Finder from creating hidden DS Store files on network drives. You can also hide features like “Burn Disc” or “Connect to Server” from Finder if you don’t use those features.
Change the dock to your liking
TinkerTool’s Dock tab allows you to turn off animations, such as to show or hide the dock, and prevent any changes to the dock. Restricting Dock changes is useful if you share your Mac with others and they accidentally change your preferred layout. You can also add a separator between the two dock icons for better organization.
Change Screenshot Settings on Mac
Your Mac has a lot of screenshot-related options tucked away in various menus, and TinkerTool puts the most useful ones in one section. Go to the General tab of the application and scroll down to the Screenshot File Format field. Here you can change the default screenshot format, remove shadow from screenshots, hide screenshot preview thumbnails completely, and change the default screenshot save location.
Other useful settings
TinkerTool lets you choose what happens when apps crash. If you’re constantly annoyed by the “This app is closing unexpectedly” pop-up, you can change or disable it. Go to the Desktop tab and look at the options under When Applications Crash .
You can also make it easier to resize windows on macOS by increasing the resizable area. Click the General tab and check the second option under the Windows section.
Check out the other changes available in TinkerTool and see what you like. Be sure to read the description at the end of each settings page because it describes what you need to enable these changes. Sometimes you may need to log out and log back into your account; in other cases, you may need to restart some applications for the changes to take effect.
Finally, if you’re not happy with the changes made with TinkerTool, go to the Reset tab of the application and select Restore to pre-TinkerTool state to undo all the changes in one go.