Shrinking System Preferences
The Mini 9’s short/odd screen resolution (1024x600) means that tall System Preferences panes (e.g. Spaces, above) won’t fit on screen, making some settings inaccessible. A solution is to set an option to ‘shrink’ the application window, in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.SystemPreferences AppleDisplayScaleFactor .75
In our ongoing mission to make everything One-Click⢠easier, here are two little apps that will change the scale factor and restart System Preferences automatically:
Launch one of the apps and it will: Quit System Preferences (if running) > apply Scale Factor > Restart System Preferences with the chosen scale factor. The scale factor setting persists until you relaunch one of the SysPref utilities. Keep these on your Dock or Desktop for easy access. [You might see some display artifacts/errors when windows are scaled, they will still function correctly]
Shrinking Other Applications
If you know the name of the preference file you can set the scale factor for individual applications with a Terminal command. For example, Google Earth has a minimum window height of 768px, you would need to shrink the window by 78% to make it fit the Mini 9’s 600px screen. Quit GE, run this command in Terminal and relaunch GE:
defaults write com.google.GoogleEarthPlus AppleDisplayScaleFactor .78
Shrinking Everything
MyDellMini forum user bmaltais posted an application called ‘Scale Resolution’ that sets the scale factor system-wide to either 80% or 100%. As this doesn’t scale application that are already open, you need to relaunch them — to make the Finder scale relaunch via Force Quit…
Feedback and questions in the comments, please.
blog comments powered by Disqus
Shrinking System Preferences
The Mini 9’s short/odd screen resolution (1024x600) means that tall System Preferences panes (e.g. Spaces, above) won’t fit on screen, making some settings inaccessible. A solution is to set an option to ‘shrink’ the application window, in Terminal:
defaults write com.apple.SystemPreferences AppleDisplayScaleFactor .75In our ongoing mission to make everything One-Click⢠easier, here are two little apps that will change the scale factor and restart System Preferences automatically:
Launch one of the apps and it will: Quit System Preferences (if running) > apply Scale Factor > Restart System Preferences with the chosen scale factor. The scale factor setting persists until you relaunch one of the SysPref utilities. Keep these on your Dock or Desktop for easy access. [You might see some display artifacts/errors when windows are scaled, they will still function correctly]
Shrinking Other Applications
If you know the name of the preference file you can set the scale factor for individual applications with a Terminal command. For example, Google Earth has a minimum window height of 768px, you would need to shrink the window by 78% to make it fit the Mini 9’s 600px screen. Quit GE, run this command in Terminal and relaunch GE:
defaults write com.google.GoogleEarthPlus AppleDisplayScaleFactor .78Shrinking Everything
MyDellMini forum user bmaltais posted an application called ‘Scale Resolution’ that sets the scale factor system-wide to either 80% or 100%. As this doesn’t scale application that are already open, you need to relaunch them — to make the Finder scale relaunch via Force Quit…
Feedback and questions in the comments, please.
