One of Apple’s selling points for its Macintosh Operating System is “it just works”. For the most part,that is true. Things just work and you go happily along being more productive while OS X takes care of all that stuff Apple thinks you needn’t worry about. Not only is Apple confident that you won’t want to peak “under the hood”, they don’t even bother to tell you where it is or even if your Mac has one.

Enter Secrets, a handy little application that not only allows you to peek under the hood, but you can change things too. Installing Secrets adds an icon in your System Preferences.

and from there you can look at or change some of the hidden settings on your mac and for some 3rd party applications installed on your Mac. Caution: changing some of the setting could potentially mess things up and so you change them at your own peril. But this post would be way less interesting if we stopped here. So let’s check out what Secrets is all about.

Secrets is essentially a database of hidden settings for Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) and it is updated when new settings are discovered. Some settings have been found but no one is sure what they do, that is besides Apple. However, many settings and what they control have been discovered and Secrets will tell you everything it knows. When you start up Secrets, it takes you to its ‘Top Secrets’, or in other words, the most popular ones. On the left is a list of applications with settings Secrets knows about. On the bottom are a few buttons, the first is ‘Update Secrets’ where Secrets will update its database. The ‘Revert’ button changes the settings back to what they were (if you changed something by accident). Let’s look at an example.

The first item on my ‘Top Secrets’ list is ‘Login Window Desktop Picture’. At the bottom of the list is a description saying this is the location of the desktop picture shown when you login. Leopard owners should all be familiar with the pink aurora picture by now. In fact, this is where you can change it. If you click on the right hand column, it will bring up a finder dialog where you can choose a new picture. Let’s go from this:

to this:

and you now have something different to look at when your Macbook is starting up. There are hundreds of settings you can look at or change and Secrets is a very easy way to access them. So should you feel like you want to change your Mac ever so slightly from your friends and family, grab yourself a copy of Secrets and enjoy. Don’t forget to drop us a note of any changes you made on our new forums.

One of the great things about the the OS X user interface is its ability to give users ultimate access to the space on their desktop. Although the Dock is a great way to quickly launch and see what applications are running, it sometimes can get in the way.

To get the most real estate out of your desktop, try hiding the Dock:

1. Click Apple and then select Dock
2. Select Dock Preferences

3. When the Dock Preferences window opens, check Automatically hide and show the Dock

After you’ve made the selection your Dock will hide off the screen. Move your mouse to where the Dock usually resides and it will re-appear.

Got a Quick Tip? Need one? Share it with us in the Maciverse.com forums.

Since Google released Gmail one of its most popular features is its Conversation View. Google built their mail system around the idea that individuals are carrying on a conversation through their emails and that those conversations are weakened when spread throughout an inbox.

To account for that problem, Google built gmail with technology that would automatically link conversations over email together. When someone replies to your email the response is automatically connected to other emails that you’ve received from the individual on the current topic in the email.

I know that I personally was a bit frustrated at first when I started to use Mail with my Gmail account because I lost the “conversation” features. I didn’t want to have to sort through my email to find the other emails in a conversation. Luckily for me, Mail also included a Conversation View, I just hadn’t enabled it yet.

To view your emails in a conversation similar to the way you do with Gmail:

1. Open Mail and View
2. Select Organize by Thread

After filtering your email by threads, you’ll notice some additional detail and option in your inbox. Blue arrows will let you expand and collapse emails to see all the others that make up the email conversation or, as Apple has titled it in Mail, the email thread.

Hopefully this quick tip will allow you to optimize your Mail experience. What other features about Mail make it a powerful email client?

If you’ve always wondered what it would be like to take courses at Stanford then head over to the iTunes Store and link into iTunes U. iTunes U offers a number of course videos from colleges across the country that are available for download to iTunes, iPod’s, and iPhones.

While Stanford isn’t the only college that offers course videos on iTunes, Stanford is now also offering the entire course materials that correlate to some of the course’s videos.

Sync up the videos offered through iTunes U with the course materials now available from Stanford’s Engineering Everywhere program.

Having used the new version of iTunes 8.0 for a couple of hours, here are some of my initial thoughts. The thing I like best about the latest version of iTunes isn’t Genius, but rather the new visualizer. I found myself searching for songs that I wanted to see on the visualizer as some of the new modes are highly responsive to the audio. Ironically, I found the visualizer responded better to classical/instrumental music than to songs with heavy beats. Your mileage may vary. But you can check out some classic Chopin below.

On the other hand, Genius playlists are good. I haven’t used them enough to say they are great. But as long as you don’t mind sharing your song information with Apple, you won’t be disappointed. But that brings us to the Genius Sidebar which is probably my least favorite aspect. The Genius Sidebar  “recommends” (i.e. sells) related albums and songs based on what is playing. Apple claims that the Genius Sidebar won’t recommend songs you don’t own, but my sidebar recommended a song for me to buy that was already in my library. I own “Shadows Part 2″ but the sidebar notes it is one of the top songs I am missing.

Genius Sidebar recommending an existing song

To me, that’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is the whole notion of “Top Songs You’re Missing.” Perhaps the greatest strength of iTunes and specifically the iTunes Music Store was that you could buy exactly what you wanted. Two tracks here, another track there, and you had your awesome music collection for way less than the CD’s. The Genius Sidebar betrays some of that coolness of iTMS by ignoring that those missing tracks may be intentional. But the main focus of the Genius Sidebar is to get you to buy more music so from that perspective it makes sense. So far, the Sidebar hasn’t recommended anything I’m remotely interested in. Perhaps despair.com was right, none of us is as dumb as all of us. Time will tell.

Couple of other things to note. NBC is back with HD shows, not to mention a freebie episode of The Office. 1.33Gb download for 41 minutes of HD fun. Those Apple TV’s are going to fill up even faster assuming HD shows are a hit with Apple TV owners.

You can still roll your own ringtones with songs you’ve imported from CD’s. You can find the details on how to do it here.

Also, time will tell if the synchronization between the App Store regarding updates has been resolved.

Overall, iTunes 8.0 is a decent update.

PS. You can download the screen cast of the visualizer here