MacAppZone

Onyx: Access Your Mac’s Hidden Settings

February 5th, 2010 by Erik Bernskiold

There comes a time when you might want to tidy up your Mac, perform some cleaning tasks and maintenance to make it run better. If you are a power user, you might definitely try and do this, or change some of the OS X specific settings that are usually only handled form the Terminal. Onyx is here to help you access these settings and cleaning tasks, without you getting your hands dirty in the Terminal.

Maintenance and Cleaning

When you open up Onyx you are greeted with a bar where you can select the different tasks that onyx can do, including access to hidden settings.

Onyx can verify and repair system file permissions as well as run scripts that affect maintenance operations. It can also help you to rebuild certain content on your Mac, should anything happen to it.

Apart from these maintenance settings, it helps you clean out system, user, internet, fonts, logs and miscellaneous files that can usually be purged at times.

What is a bit scary with all of these settings in the maintenance and cleaning sections, is that they are not well explained. Unless you know what you are doing, this isn’t a place to be in, trying things out. Perhaps a bit better documentation would be of big help, even to the power user.

Accessing Hidden Settings

There are a lot of hidden settings on your Mac that could usually only be accessed through command line commands in Terminal. Onyx puts these settings into a graphical interface and makes it easy to change them, as well as reverting back to the defaults.

Again, this is not a place where you will find the settings to be well documented, but most of them are actually useful settings that do not cause much harm if entered incorrectly.

Examples of what you can do here is changing the screen capture format and directory, showing hidden files in Finder, choosing what to appear in the Finder menus, change the Dock style and appearance including many more settings for QuickTime, Safari, iTunes, the login, Spotlight and more!

The Interface

The interface in Onyx is a bit so-so. It adheres to the main interface guidelines of older Mac OS versions but could well receive an update in order to make settings more clear. This would also help the Onyx experience to feel less like hacking your computer and doing things that it isn’t supposed to do at all.

Conclusion

Onyx provides access to areas of your Mac that you wouldn’t otherwise get to. It also opens up for maintenance and cleaning operations that far surpass what Disk Utility does by default. The interface could be improved, but it isn’t disastrous, however, it would be great to see some more documentation and explanation inside of the app when you work with it.