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#MacOsX : Disable Auto-Save and Versions in Mac OS X

Dec 5

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Auto-Save and Versions are excellent features in Mac OS X, but some advanced users are annoyed by  them as they often don’t want to save intermediate versions of their work.
Moreover some apps write lots of data on disk (e.g. iMovie and iBooks Author) and this can shorten the life of SSD (look here for more tuning for SSDs).
If you know the name of the app plist you want to disable auto-save and Versions for, you can just plug the name into the defaults write command:

defaults write app-plist ApplePersistence -bool no

If you don’t know it then you can find it with the following command:

osascript -e 'id of application "NAME OF APP"'

Now if you enter the Versions window, auto-save list will be empty and there are no versions to restore to. You’ll probably want turn off File Locking too.

NOTE: some sandboxed apps require another command in addition:

defaults write app-plist AutosavingDelay -int 0

This is expecially true for TextEdit as it is the only Apple app that uses “old-style” autosaving and this causes issues with the sandbox in Lion/Mountain Lion.

NOTE2: It seems that the preference can be set globally but it may cause the login process to become very slow and possibly cause other unexpected behaviour:

defaults write -g ApplePersistence -bool no

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Posted in Mac OS X Tips & Tricks

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#MacOSX : Enable Half-Star Ratings in iTunes

May 9

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iTunes allows users to rate songs on a 1 star to 5 star basis, but what if a song is somewhere in the middle of the rating scale, not quite worthy of 4 stars but not a 3 star song either?

For more precise personal ratings, enable the half-star rating option in iTunes:

  1. Open Terminal app
  2. type:
    defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE
  3. Quit and relaunch iTunes for changes to take effect. To give something a half star, click and slide the star rating scale until the 1/2 value shows.

NOTE: removing the half stars moves the song rating to the star below it, so a 3 1/2 star song would turn into a 3 star song, and so on, but the metadata of the songs are still in half-star increments.
So, if you turn the option back on again, the ‘correct’ half-star ratings would show and be intact.

Posted in Mac OS X Tips & Tricks

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