Comments on: Secrets Updated for Snow Leopard

By: Secrets preference panel updated for Snow Leopard | Sambal Oelek

Secrets preference panel updated for Snow Leopard | Sambal Oelek — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:11:42 +0000

[...] to the recently-revived Hawk Wings site for bringing this to my attention. If you use Apple’s Mail.app, Hawk Wings is a great [...]

By: peelman

peelman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:17:01 +0000

I will follow that up by saying that there may be very valid reasons the programmers don’t offer up an interface to turn on these features: they could break things and typically they’re completely unsupported.

That being said, anything that stands the potential to cause harm will almost always be classified as a “dangerous” secret, and will show up appropriately in Secrets (usually highlighted in red). But most of the stuff is just harmless tweaking.

Its almost worth noting that Secrets is community driven; if you know of a secret that you can’t find in Secrets, you can go to secrets.blacktree.com and submit it as a new one.

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 19:24:14 +0000

That’s a great explanation of why no one should be afraid to use it. Thanks, Nick.

By: peelman

peelman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:33:35 +0000

We see a lot of confusion about Secrets on its Google Group and in various forums online.

Secrets does NOT change anything except plist files on your computer. It doesn’t modify programs directly, it merely enables settings that programmers have already included but don’t provide GUI interfaces to.

All of the settings mentioned above for Mail.app are things Apple has put into place, they just don’t provide a mechanism to control. That’s where Secrets comes in.

You can think of it as a GUI interface for all those “defaults write com.company.app” things you see on macosxhints.com or elsewhere.