For many, the horizontal scroll of their Apple Magic Mouse drives them completely crazy. As there is no way to disable the horizontal scroll while keeping the vertical one in the System Preferences/Mouse panel, you need to find your way around with the following method:
Just disable it
Open Terminal and paste this line :
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool NO
Disconnect your mouse, and reconnect it. It should do the trick.
Want the horizontal scroll back?
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool YES.
After reading how Amit likes to keep his OS X Menubar clean of the things that doesn’t provided him value, I’ve decided to do the exercise on my own:
- I removed all the native Mac OS X menu bar items I didn’t want their by selecting them (holding the Command key) and dropping them away.
- I also placed the icons in the order I want by holding the Command key and move them around. Note that only the native items to the operating system can be moved.
- I went into my System preferences > Accounts > Login Items (for the selected user account) panel and removed all the applications/services I didn’t want to start at log-in.
- I changed the appearance of the icons that were in color (or with a poor dark contrast) by editing the PNG icon files in the app’s package content resources folder.
To change the appearance of your menu bar icons
For example, I like to keep the GMail Notifier icon in my menu bar, but the default red envelop is attracting to much my attention, so I changed it to black and white with a darker contrast.
To do so, you need to go into your Applications folder, find the application that is more likely to have/control the icon in your menu bar, right-click on it and press on Show Package Contents.
Once into the Ressources folder of the package, find the icon(s) you wish to change (some application has more than one status for the same icon) and make a backup copy in the case you wish to reverse to the original state.
Edit them into Preview by adjusting their colors (Tools > Adjust Color / Command+Option+C). Change the saturation and contrast to your desired levels.
In the case of the GMail notification icons, I also changed their dimension, as I found them to be a bit big compare the native system icons.
Make the menu bar icons disappear
If for any reason you wish to remove an icon from the menu bar - and that the developer doesn’t provide the option - you can simply replace all the icon_name.pgn in the resources folder of the application package contents by a transparent .PNG of the same file name. Note that the item will still be present in your menu bar, but with a transparent PNG. You will still be able to access it, but not to see it. Here is a transparent menubar PNG icon for you to use.
Note: I don’t like to use very much this method to hide my less valuable icons. You don’t control easily the order of the none-native system items in your menu bar so the transparent PNG may leaves an empty space between two items.
