Mac OS X

Both my MacBook Pro and my Hackintosh are running Mountain Lion (v10.8.3).

• How to rebuild LaunchServices to remove duplicates from "Open with" menu
• Managing OS X's downloaded file warning system
• Database of hidden settings
• dotfiles
• Add more effects to Photo Booth and iChat

My hacks:

• Turn off Dashboard
• Configure iTerm2 to Act Like Visor. I've mapped my terminal to Ctl-Command-Option-T
• Remove Finder from the Application Switcher in Mac OSX. This turned out to be more trouble than it's worth
• Experimented with f.lux for better lighting management, but didn't see or appreciate the impact.

Apps

I use Alfred as my launcher.

I use Bartender to keep my menu bar clean.

I'm using SizeUp on my Hackintosh to resize and move windows easily. There's an open source equivalent (ShiftIt), but it requires X11. Divvy looked pretty good, but the additional shortcut step didn't seem worth the added flexibility. Most of the time, I'll be making windows full- or half-screen, and I'd like to be able to do that as quickly as possible. If I find my use cases shifting (for example, often wanting to easily take up 2/3 of the screen), I'll try Divvy.

I recently installed Notational Velocity. I love the concept, and I especially love the notion of using the search bar for both searching and creating docs. It's very similar to Collab:Link As You Think. However, Evernote seems to play the same role, and WriteRoom (or Aquamacs in full-screen mode, which is what I use) is better for distraction-free writing.

Mountain Lion eliminated a useful feature: The ability to show time remaining on my battery charge. I replaced that functionality with SlimBatteryMonitor.

Investigating:

• Adapter for video ripping and media file conversion. I'm currently using Handbrake.

MacPorts

I opted to install MacPorts over Fink or Homebrew, although I'm intrigued by the latter. In order to install it, you need to install the Xcode command-line tools.

On April 10, 2013, I tried installing metapixel, but discovered that it's incompatible with libpng 1.5. Found a Homebrew patch that worked just fine.

PDF

Mac OS X has built-in support for generating PDFs via the print dialog. Sadly, not all apps use this. In the old days, Adobe provided a PDF printer driver, but that no longer is available as of 10.6 (Snow Leopard). CUPS-PDF is an open source alternative based on CUPS, but it's not clear how possible it is to customize. For example, I would like to have different options for paper size, but it's not clear / easy how to do that.