• Mac OS X

    Disable Dock Autohide

    One of those annoying little things is when you ARD into a system and the Dock is nowhere to be seen. Why do we (or should I say they) autohide Docks on servers? Either way, when I ARD into a box and I don’t see a Dock I have this line saved as a Template: defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool false; killall Dock By writing an autohide key that is false into com.apple.dock for the currently logged in user, I don’t have to deal with the Dock disappearing any more. You need to kill the Dock and let it respawn, thus the killall as well. Once I’m done working with…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Adding Objects To The Dock

    Using Mac OS X, one of the most trivial things (provided you have permission) is to add an object to the dock. Applications go on the left side of the dock and folders/documents/stacks go on the right. From the command line it isn’t quite as trivial but not that complicated either. To do so from the command line, you can write directly into the com.apple.dock.plist for a user. To do so, we’re going to use the defaults command and we’re going to look at adding an application first: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘<dict><key>tile-data</key><dict><key>file-data</key><dict><key>_CFURLString</key><string>/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word</string><key>_CFURLStringType</key><integer>0</integer></dict></dict></dict>’ You can also add a custom title for the object that you are adding…