Mac OS X Lion was introduced in 2011 and came with a new feature called Power Nap. This allows computers to receive push notifications, check for new messages, update calendar events, run iCloud updates, download software updates, and run Time Machine backups in the background while a computer is asleep – they don’t go all the way to sleep, they just kinda’ take a nap. Application persistence was released the next year and is an API that Apple uses in a number of programs on and exposes to third party software developers who can opt into the ability to have the state of an application persist and be restored when…

Got a call recently for a post house that wants to have a dashboard of what input devices are running in Logic Pro across a fleet of audio edit bays. Logic still uses a standard .plist format to store settings in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.logic10.plist. So it’s easy enough to read and write settings. There’s a lot in there but let’s focus on just the Current Hardware, which is in a dictionary called AudioHardwarePreferences. We can find that by running the defaults command on the defaults domain com.apple.logic10 followed by the dictionary name: defaults read com.apple.logic10 AudioHardwarePreferences The output then shows us the last few and some other information (e.g. we can actually…

There’s a directory full of .dat files that I needed to change a string in. But there were hundreds of files nested in different folders in a directory, let’s just call it /var/folders/apptemp. The following command would change hello to hi. It aint purdy and we’re piping to xargs ’cause stdin but it works. This can be kinda’ dangerous so proceed with caution: find /var/folders/apptemp -name "*.dat" -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i '' -e 's/hello/hi/g' 

When I’m writing scripts in an IDE, the smart dashes on the Mac can end up killing me. This is where the — turn into —. To disable this feature: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool false To turn smart dashes back on: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticDashSubstitutionEnabled -bool true

I’m always configuring something on my printers every time I print. So now I just have it expand the printer dialog rather than give me the simple screen you see here: To configure, just un the following: defaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint -bool truedefaults write NSGlobalDomain PMPrintingExpandedStateForPrint2 -bool true Then it looks like this. 🙂