Secrets is back: Clever Preference tweaking
After a pause brought on by server troubles, Secrets, the clever system preference pane for system tweaks, is back.
Developed by Alcor, who is also the brains behind Quicksilver 
, Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.
It lists available tweaks by app. Here is the pane for Mail.app:
Once, in order to work around the minute font size in messages from email clients like Outlook Express, you had to open Terminal and type:
Now, it’s as simple as entering the point size you prefer into the text box of Secret’s “Minimum HTML Font size” option, restarting Mail and enjoying readable text.
The Mail section also lets you set a preferred text encoding for Mail, enable plugin bundles and more.
The Top Secrets pane lists the most popular tweaks:
Here you can (among many other things) set a nice Desktop picture for your login screen, show or hide hidden files in Finder, tweak the Dock and unlock dragging widgets out of the Dashboard.
Of course, this kind of power comes with a hint of danger. As Alcor warns, “Secrets is in Beta and many of these options can harm your system if used improperly.” Nothing very terrible has happened to me though.
Behind the scenes, Secrets allows clever users to create their own tweaks which are stored on the Secrets server and can be downloaded by normal people like you and me with the pane’s “Update Secrets” button, so the list of options is always growing and improving.
Get the latest version (1.0.4, Leopard-only) from Secret’s Google Code page .
Related posts
June 18th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
“Secrets makes entering arcane text strings in Terminal a thing of the past.”
I don’t know why people much such an issue of clicking a button as opposed to issuing a command. Heck, if it *that* important, on OS X copy-and-paste works in the Terminal, so no typing need be involved.
So if the user finds he needs to write to defaults after consulting an Apple support document — say this one:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303796
all he need do is click once with the mouse in front of the command, once after it with the shift key held down (to highlight), press command+C (to copy), switch to Terminal and press Command+V (to paste). Really, how “hard” is that?
IMO, that is better than installing third-party software for something that you *can already do* with the default installation. Installation of software always raises issues of trust with regards to both quality and security [1]. (And, if it doesn’t, users have become too blasé for their own good.) Installing, say, Photoshop or Microsoft Office, which offer significant new functionality is one thing; installing something to do what the system already does (and more elegantly and economically) for itself seems crazy to me.
[1] And the last time this software was mentioned at TUAW, some posters *did* say it had caused their machines problems.
June 18th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
This does offer an advantage over using the terminal: it acts as a menu to order from.
If you found a web page that tells you what to do, then that is great. You knew what you wanted and went out and got it. The real value here is in making the options very visible so you don’t have to go out looking for them.
June 19th, 2008 at 1:17 am
It also makes reverting easy.
Obviously, the program was made for people who find it helpful. If you don’t need it, the nice thing is you don’t have to download it!
I would like for the program to have a “dumbass mode” available, which only displays the safest customizations…
July 8th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
defaults write com.blacktree.secrets dumbAssMode FALSE