What Is Leopard’s Most Unused, Unknown Utility?

Friday, August 22, 2008 | Tips and Tricks | Read or Post a Comment

Utility It’s no secret that Apple is a secretive company. Apple wants you to know only what they want you to know and nothing else.

That desire for secrecy seems to extend into OS X itself which is full of secret short cuts, secret features, seemingly secret utilities which most Mac users don’t know about.

Maybe that explains why there’s not really an instruction manual that comes with your Mac. Take it out of the box, plug it in, turn it on, walk through the setup, and.... (excerpted).

3 Reader Comments

Karl Cook said:

Without a doubt DU is one of the most underutilized and undervalued utilities bundled with our Macs. Its a great admin tool that I use to make images of the drives of fully configured systems that I can then “restore” onto new identical systems. Its way fast at doing that. In about 15 minutes you can have a brand new system completely configured and ready to deploy.
Under 10.5 you can repartition your disk nondestructively on the fly- meaning you don’t have to backup (although you should anyway) and erase the drive before creating new partitions. You can also [shudder] run DU from the command line in Terminal by typing in diskutil. To learn more about it in that environment, type in man diskutil to have its manual page displayed with an explanation of all its features and commands.
Another utility I can’t live without is Cocktail- it has an option (among many, many others) to anchor those pesky floating help pages!

Johnny Walker said:

You’re absolutely right. Disk Utility is highly underrated, and yet may be the single most valuable extra utility on the Mac. Very much recommended. I use it all the time to set up disk images to send files to other Mac users.

Pro Dual 3 Gig said:

I power read through your article Ron. Yep I knew about that one, and one very funny thing! When I was trying to find out how to burn a disc, I called tech support three times in the same day (this was a long time ago) and none of the Apple tech support agents had a single clue on what to tell me. So I searched and searched knowing there had to be a way to burn a disc with out buying third party software and then that yellow radiation like burn button popped into my head in disc utilities. Then I remembered there was a button to “create new disc image” was there also. I think I burned a disc in tiger like this also, as a matter of fact I am almost positive that I learned to burn a disc like this in Tiger.

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