Of all the "under the hood" components of Mac OS X, my personal favorite is preferences files. Why? For starters, they are important. They potentially affect every application you use, from the Finder ...

The Preferences in Adobe Illustrator allow you to make changes that will fit your needs. There are default preferences that come with Illustrator; however, the user can make changes to the panel ...

In a recent Mac OS X Hints blog, I explained how you can use Terminal to control a number of features that Apple removed from iTunes 8—including the ability to toggle the iTunes Store link arrows on ...

Safari crashes on launch. Mail quits when you try to send a message. What to do? Most savvy Mac users will delete the application’s preferences file, which stores changes made to the program’s default ...

Migration Assistant is a great tool if you want to transfer all your applications, settings, documents, and other files over, but if you want to start fresh it doesn't give you a lot to work with. Mac ...

In this installment of our continuing series on preferences (.plist) files, we finally delve into the details of how to interpret and edit .plist files. I'll be primarily showing you how to do make ...