apple has a long history of useless UI and feature changes, often changing defaults for no apparent reason and then removing the UI to change things back. it’s maddening when you configure your environment perfectly for getting work done and they pull the rug out. here are some of the settings, mostly undocumented, i use to keep sane in the face of the apple insanity onslaught.

floating glass shelf for the dock? if i wanted gratuitous, distracting, photorealistic elements i’d be running linux and have neon glowing out the side of my fire-breathing gamer PC.

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES ; killall Dock

dashboard is one of the many osx doodads best suited to the iphone (see also: my multitouch trackpad with lots of scotch tape on it so it behaves more like a single touch).

defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES ; killall Dock

you can click to turn off genre in the browser for shared libraries, but not your own. wtf?

defaults write com.apple.itunes show-genre-when-browsing -bool FALSE

time machine is the best backup system i’ve ever used. for reasons i won’t investigate, apple requires that you buy a time capsule to use the feature, rather than allowing you to just attach a hard drive to your airport extreme (or similar). get sneaky.

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1