AppFlow

Many people do not relies it, but ours Macs all hide their secrets from us.  Hidden away within the Mac OS X operating is the OS X equivalent to windows registry, but it is hidden away with good purpose, we, the users cannot damage the core operating system.  The trouble with this is that things are hidden that would be useful for us to change.

And here, I present Secrets.  Secrets is a Mac OS X preferences add-on that allows you to change some of these.  Secrets won’t let you damage your system, but will let you change some of the things Apple has hidden from you.

What can we do with Secrets?

To learn this you really have got to spend a lot of time using it.  It varies depending on what Applications you have, so at this point I though I shall include a few “mini tutorials” to show you how to do some basic things.

Change Your Login Screen Background

At this point you will be requiring secrets.  So, if you haven’t already, go and download it for free.  Once it’s installed your all ready to go.

1. Open Secrets
2. Select System off the left-hand sidebar
3. Locate “Login Window Desktop Picture”
4. Double Click it
5. Locate and Select your new image
6. Your Done.
7. To revert it to the default locate and select it again and click “Revert”

So, in six steps you can easily change your Login Windows background.

Disable the Skype Splash Screen

The Skype splash screen is not only ugly, but slows down Skype during it’s launch.  Let’s get rid of it.

1. Open Secrets
2. Locate Skype in the left-hand side panel
3. Double-Click Show Skype Splash Screen and type in the place of “YES”, “NO” in all capitals.
4. If it was already open click “Quit-This” and then open it again

Change Time-machine Backup Interval

Want Time Machine to backup more of less often?  Here’s how.

1. Open Secrets
2. Locate “Time Machine” in the left-hand side panel
3. Double-Click Backup Interval
4. Change the 3600 to the number of seconds you want in between backups, do not change the word seconds.  3600 seconds is one hour.
5. Reboot

In this tutorial I have shown just a few of the things you can do with Secrets.  It really is worth downloading it and giving it a ago.  It may appear a little daunting at first, but at the end of the day if you change something and don’t like it their is that handy little revert button.  And, if you don’t know what something is don’t change it and their is no harm done. Simple Really,