Secrets is back: Clever Preference tweaking
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
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
.

Some people are unhappy with the way Mail.app truncates the names of attachments so that you can’t quite see at a glance what you are clicking on. 
Open up the app and you are greeted with a Preferences pane that let’s you specify a default language (English, German, French, Italian).
Fluid has just been updated. It’s a clever new app that allows you to make your own site-specific browsers (including the power of Greasemonkey scripts in Cocoa). 




With its much more polished iPhone interface (pictured),
Hawk Wings reader Jon Yates emails to ask, “Any idea how to print a list of all your to do headings in OSX Leopard mail.app?”




Hawk Wings reader Adam sends in this tip for creating a custom keyboard shortcut that adds a hyperlink to an email in Mail.app without the need to go searching through its menu options.


