Could you add a sentence or two explaining what these are about? Some are very clear; others aren't.

How do I UNINSTALL this? You say how to install, but how do I entirely remove it from my system at some later date? I like to know that about something before I just go ahead and install it.

To uninstall Secrets.prefPane, simply right click (control-click) on the icon in the view all part of system preferences. Then click remove in the list (should be the only thing in the list).

I install it, but immediately get the following error - my only way out then is to force quit system preferences:

Data was corrupted: XML parser error:

Encountered unknown tag html on line 4

Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex

I'm having the same issue as @johnlatvia.

Same, as the above two. On a powerpc / G4 / Leopard latest version.

Same as above. Imac Core Duo running 10.5.2

Works fine for me until I attempt to RELOAD then same error as those above. Al iMac 2.4 Ghz/4 GB RAM/10.5.2

There needs to be an explanation of what the different colours mean, as well as why some items are bold and other aren't.

An RSS feed of updates would be nice too.

for unistall remove the file in ~/Library/PreferencePanes?/Secret.prefPane

Safari 3.1 breaks Secrets, update please! :-D Thx!

Same problem as everyone above. On a MacBook? Pro 2.6Ghz/4GB RAM/10.5.2

I think a great feature would be to have new secrets highlited. Because when I click on "update secrets", I have no way to know if there have been some new secrets unless I scroll down the whole list.

But except that, it's a great prefpane, thanks a lot for the good work.

I second romain.pontida's idea -- I had assumed that there's some way to view new additions after updating, but that I just couldn't find it. So if this isn't in there already it definitely would be useful to have.

Ive installed it but I cant update it to get any secrets, it gives me the following error.

Update Error Could not download latest data: Operation could not be completed. (HTTP Status error 500.)

Macbook Core2 Duo

same as carlo

secrets.textdriven.com is down

secrets.textdriven.com is still down

its down man

The secrets server has been down for over a month. Pretty obvious that the author has abandoned it. Damn shame too as it was a great app. The least the author could do is stop by here and let us know what is going on.

secrets.textdriven.com is back up now, as of May 2, so the preference pane works again. :-)

Down again (May 3, 2008 10:23:24). It gives me a "500 - Internal Server Error"

I believe it is an .htaccess file error and that if they would delete it or figure out what the problem is with it the site can be up again.

its up as of right now. i JUST updated secrets and have been trying for weeks to update and it FINALLY went just now!

Update server's down as of now

Still down, as of May 20th, 2008, 9:40 GMT.

Still down. It was a great "hack" and now it is useless.

still down. does anyone know the author's email?

also, if the author is done with it, would someone else equally tech-savvy willing to continue it? that would be a great help because it is awesome when it works.

So I believe that the developer is using Google's App Engine. In the source, the /server/ is python code that utilizes App Engine. Now I know Google App Engine has a limit of how many requests can be made per day, so maybe that's why there are a 500 Internal Error on the website.

Server is still down. I'm just going to uninstall this thing.

The update server is always down, the author has given up on this. Don't bother installing.

Here's a workaround until (if!) the server comes back online. The advantages of having two macs, only one of which just got a reinstall. :-)

Obtain a Secrets.plist file dating from before the server died. Here's mine, dated March 1. (Anyone got newer?) Download it and copy it into ~/Library/Caches (ie: in your home folder, open Library, in that open Caches, and drag Secrets.plist into there.

Start System Preferences and load the Secrets prefpane. It should all be there now. Seems to work too. :-)

Thank you very much! it works

I think that the server is back up.

Dock > Show Shadow won't turn off :'-(

Hi. To my Mac occurred an error: error 500. I don't know what is it, but I erased Secrets. I've got a PowerPC G4 with 10.5.1 ('cause the 10.5.3 did to my Mac a problems. Sorry if I wrote bad: I'm italian.

error 500.. server down again?

I just downloaded it today and got a 500 server down error

Error 500...

Error 500

overquota? damn!

Oh man, what's your host? Also the Error 500. >:o

I successfully launched Secrets and looked at a few options, without changing anything.

Now a solid black box encloses every Finder window, every TextEdit? window, clickable fields in other applications, etc. This weird display issue only occurred after I installed Secrets.

How can I get rid of these annoying black boxes?

The solid black box annoyance I reported a couple of hours ago only appears on the window or finder item that is in focus. So it would seem that the black box is some type of focus indicator. How can I turn this off?

If you turned up your sound, you would hear someone saying whatever's in the focused area. You've turned on VoiceOver? by mistake. Go to System Preferences, Universal Access, and turn off VoiceOver?.

secrets prefpane crashes whenever i scroll to within an inch of the bottom of the list

Right click on Pref Pane does not have remove option, Pref Pane is not in either user/library or /library. Where is it?

Please add a default button

Can anyone help? I installed secrets and not sure what I did, but my dock now has a complete rectangle around it and I don't know how to get rid of it.

Thanks Barb

That's the Dock 3D Glass / 2D Black Box setting under "Dock > Dock Appearance".

Btw, kudos Nicholas another awesome app!

For the love of Steve Jobs, where are the instructions that explain how to use this thing?

I have the secrets prefs pane installed, I can see a few secrets that loaded with the install, but how on earth do I get the secrets that are listed on the web page onto my computer?

The "Update Secrets" button in the prefs pane does nothing!

is this app even being actively developed or looked at? i see no responses in the issue tracker or here or anywhere else...

also have the same question as georgeruddmn has posted..

The HiddenUsersList? array field is very dangerous "as is".

Anyone can type in any value in & the value is taken as a string NOT an array.

The result is that LoginWindow? will crash on load... over and over and over...

Consider this a WARNING!!

Is it possible to see the defaults read ... / defaults write ... call that underpins these knobs?

I'm trying to manipulate the com.apple.sidebarlists domain, because it looks from defaults read com.apple.sidebarlists systemitems | grep ShowServers like there's a way to set ShowServers? to 1 and by so doing cause Finder to display network drives on the sidebar by default, which is exactly what I want to do.

Unfortunately, I can't get a read more "clever" than piping through grep to work (right result, wrong solution), and I can't get a write to do anything useful at all, as the key to manipulate seems to be several levels down in the hierarchy.

Just seeing fuller examples of the syntax for this kind of thing would help -- the defaults manpage doesn't have any good examples, and Google searches aren't helping either.

Thanks!

I used the secret that makes iTunes' arrows redirect to the library. I disabled it but I still get the genre/artist/album browser at the top of the Music and Podcast playlists.

Please help, this is very annoying and entirely unexpected (and seemingly unfixable).

Could we have a secret that could prevent my Mac from opening Aperture every time I plug in my iPhone for syncing? I know there is a way, but it would be so much easier through Secrets.

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/873-tip-prevent-iphoto-from-opening-when-you-plug-in-your-iphone

It all works perfect for me, except that the desktop icon size does not change no matter I change in Secrets.

Hey i was wondering if anyone knew how to save the settings once i change them. Every time my laptop goes to sleep or shuts down the Secrets application reverts back to default settings.

Same question as GeorgeRuddMN,

I have it. Works fine. but how do I update it. I hit the button UPDATE SECRETS and nothing happens. To see if maybe there was something wrong, I downloaded the latest version of SECRETS and installed that (hopefully that replaced the previous one) and when I opened the latest version, I saw NEW SECRETS

so the question is - how do you update? or are other people havin trouble updating? if so, how did u fix it?

My Secrets doesn't seem to work i set the startup delay to 4 min and i don't know how to apply it. Does anyone else have this problem.

I did a little search about the Quartz 2D Extreme and Quartz GL twiks (Although I thought they were the same thing Quartz GL being the new name for Q2DE in Leopard.) Well, this is the only secret I'm interested in and brings me to my question. Do Powerbook g4 1.67 laptops run these settings without kennel attacts ? I read that this twiks is better for the PPC architecture because it causes x86 macs apps running under Rosetta to misbehave. But i dont know, please share your knowledge.

Secrets wont change my account sign in background

can you please release one for tiger? please please please please please

How Can i reset all settings to default?

Any chance of this being updated for snow leopard? as well as making it 64 bit?

works on snow, but please make it 64 bit...

yes 64bit please... thanks!

I added a secret the other day ("Highlight Stack Items on hover (10.6)") and I can find it on the web site but when I click update in the app, the little icon in the status bar spins for a few seconds but my new secret never shows up... anyone know why?

It is there in mine...at the very bottom of the list...

Now that I have 1.0.6 all the new secrets are there. I don't know why the previous version never updated for me.

The website had a glitch in it where new(er) secrets weren't getting posted, I was looking at the wrong one when i posed that, my bad. You're not going crazy, it was in fact screwed up :) but now its fixed :)

Downloaded the new version which failed to install... Getting an error stating that "cannot open secret preferences as it doesn't work on an Intel based Mac" Cannot uninstall this as I get another error stating that "the secrets preference pane could not be removed because of an error occurred" Bit stuck now.. Any ideas?

Is there an old Tiger version around? Because of constraints imposed by a few programs on my system, I can't upgrade beyond Tiger until I get a new Mac (and I gotta get $5000 before I can do that!).

Does 1.0.6 still work on Leopard 10.5.x or have all the secrets been updated to only work on Snow Leopard 10.6.x?

Need to know how to undo all I've done please. I know you can revert one-by-one but that's too time consuming. Thanks.

Hey. I can't seem to get the following to work:

defaults write -g WebAutomaticTextReplacementEnabled? -boolean

I've tried several times both manually and with Blacktree's "Secrets" to no avail. I have to manually right click on the text box and choose Substitution, Show Substitution, and Text Replacement. I'm running the latest version of Snow Leopard 10.6.1

J'ai fait l'essai de supprimer le nom et les signes "<>" dans mail pour le "copier coller" d'adresse et ça ne fonctionne pas (j'avais pourtant quitté Mail avant de le faire). Do not laugh : I tried to delete the names and symbols "<>" in the mail for "copy paste" address and it does not work (yet I left Mail before doing so).

the IncludeDebugMenu? option has no more effect in Snow Leopard (Safari 4 ?). It seems to be replaced with an IncludeDevelopMenu? option.

Not seeing any of the supposed new Quicktime X secrets. I uninstalled and reinstalled the latest build I could find (1.0.6) but nothing.

"Comment by deandmx, Mar 07, 2008 There needs to be an explanation of what the different colours mean, as well as why some items are bold and other aren't."

Please explain this. It's not obvious but should be mentioned somewhere.

ALSO... Any item that is not at its default should somehow be highlighted, and any category that has such items should be highlighted as well.

Oh no! Installed this and changed a few innocent options, and now spot light is gone, no programs startup at login, ALL APPLICATIONS have very limited functionality: no "new" etc. How do I solve this. Very interesting program and I might still use it but I can't even access system preferences any more. I had to write this from my other machine.

Restarting the PRAM did not help.

anyone?! My computer (work computer) is a brick.

Repairing permissions did not help

Suggestion for a new Secrets feature.

In Mail, single page PDF's display inline in the documentation but multi page documents show up as an icon. It would be fantastic to be able to make all PDF's show up either inline or as an icon upon user selection.

Thanks.

Randy

Anyone having issues with the "Use metal appearance in all apps" option under system? I tried it, didn't like it, and wanted to revert back. However, no matter what I do to undo it I still have safari with the "metal" skin and finder shows up with the normal white "Inactive" skin even when active. Doing research, it's only been tested on tiger and is from 2005. WHY IS IT IN SECRETS?

I downloaded the app and I really like what it's done, but someone got onto my computer and went into it and from, doing research, believe that they have disabled the Leopard UI. I tried to reverse it, but System Prefs doesn't boot, and nothing else will open, only Finder, Safari, and iTunes work (because they were running and the time and haven't been shut down since).

So can anyone tell me how to fix this? Thanks

A&I

the dock has lost its "extras" (recent apps, documents; user-defined "pinned in dock"; etc) after ruuing secret perfs!

(1) why? (2) how do i retore? (3) pls add a "defaults" button that ACTUALLY does revert (as opposed to being just an "undo" command for the last unsaved selection!)

thanx.david

ps: pls also the folliwing features: (a) the in-line help/explnantion for each setting needs to be VASTLY improved / completed / expanded! (b) a proper log needs to be created. (c) profiles need to be created which store different combinations in configuration files (plist) (d) a webform (here) that honours line line breaks / paragraphing!