Modding Mac OS X

Getting Ready to Hack

You’re about to do some truly appalling things to your Terminal application. The Terminal provides a near-ideal platform for hacking interfaces because it reads its NIB (NeXT Interface Builder) files each time it creates a new window. This allows you to make changes to the NIB files and test them immediately by opening a new window, without having to relaunch the application. (To be truthful, there are times that it helps to relaunch, particularly when you change image assets, but these times are relatively few.) Here are a few steps you’ll need to take before you begin your exploration of interface adaptation:

1. Make sure you’ve installed the Xcode Tools on your Mac. The easiest way to see if you have the Xcode Tools installed is to open a Finder window and click on your primary hard drive’s icon in the Sidebar. If you see a folder named Developer, Xcode is installed. If not, you’ll need to install the Xcode Tools.

   The Xcode Tools can be found on a separate disc that comes with Mac OS X Panther. You must install the tools to add the developer environments, documentation, applications, and utilities, all of which gets placed in the Developer folder.

   If you can’t find the Xcode Tools CD (also called the Developer Tools CD), the tools are freely available from Apple’s developer web site: http://developer.apple.com/tools/download/. The Xcode Tools download is about 350 MB, so you’ll need a fast connection and a little bit of patience to get it all down.

2. Open a new ...