TINKERTOOL MAC REVIEW

TINKERTOOL MAC is our topic of discussion. There are many settings that are hidden from plain sight in your Mac. These settings or preferences can alter the way your Mac looks without affecting harming your system. Some apps claim to help you uncover these preferences but none does it better than Tinker Tool.

TinkerTool mac from Marcel Bresink provides access to many hidden preferences in a simple way. It lays out most of the available OS X preferences in a user interface that's easy to navigate and understand.

Pros

• Can set many of Mac’s hidden preferences.
• Can reset to system defaults, or restore to condition before your last edits.
• Settings well organized by app or system component affected.
• Indicates when the selected change will take effect.
• Can export preference settings for use on another device.

Con

• Poor documentation, other than an online FAQ.

Installing TinkerTool Mac

TinkerTool is downloaded as a disk image file; double-clicking the .dmg file will open the image file to reveal the app and a link to the online FAQ. As mentioned in the cons for TinkerTool, the FAQ is the extent of the help available. Although the FAQ is not a replacement for a manual, you can actually learn something from there.

Installation is as simple as moving the TinkerTool app from the image file to your Mac’s Applications folder. Once that's done, you can close the image file and move it to the trash.

Using TinkerTool

TinkerTool opens as a single-window app with a tabbed toolbar. Each tab represents a category for changing system settings. Currently, there are 10 tabs:

1.     Finder

2.     Dock

3.     General

4.     Desktop

5.     Applications

6.     Fonts

7.     Safari

8.     iTunes

9.     QuickTime X

10.            Reset

Each tab contains system settings appropriate to the listed category. Though TinkerTool has many of the most often-used hidden system preferences, it's missing a few, such as the ability to add a Dock Spacer to your Mac.

One very helpful feature of TinkerTool is that in the bottom left corner of each tabbed window, you'll find a note indicating when changes you make will take effect. For instance, any changes in the Applications tab won’t take effect until the next time you log in or restart your Mac. So, be sure to check for when the change will actually occur, so you won't think it didn't work.​

Then comes the Reset tab that saves the day. TinkerTool Mac can restore changes you make back to either the original default settings that were present when a fresh install of OS X happened or to the condition the system preferences were last in before you got a hankering to tinker with TinkerTool. 

Either way, you have a quick and easy way to extract yourself from any trouble you get yourself into, which is a very nice feature for an app to have.

Review

TinkerTool is one of the best utility for getting our Macs to work the way we want them to. It’s an easy-to-use interface, comprising mostly of checkboxes, radio buttons, and drop-down menus, makes it clear what most changes will do.

What makes TinkerTool more appealing than most competing apps that manage hidden system preferences is that it only allows you to change existing preferences; it doesn't install any type of code, create background processes, or in any other way interfere with how your Mac operates.

 It has no cleaning or monitoring options, and not as likely to cause irreversible damage if used incorrectly.

TinkerTool simply does what its name implies: lets you tinker with your Mac’s settings.

TinkerTool is free.