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.
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