OSX – bencoding

I think everyone, at least developers, have at least one iCloud account which is linked to an old email address. To address this I’ve been migrating mine over to another domain. The process is extremely easy, just visit appleid.apple.com and change your Apple ID email address.

Although easy, this can be a real pain as you will need to enter your new details 10x times per device. Annoying but worth the effort to clean up your accounts.

I thought I was all set until I ran into an issue on macOS. Since I didn’t sign out of iCloud on macOS before changing my Apple ID email it wouldn’t let me sign out. I figured there had to be information on how to force a logout on Stackoverflow or the Apple forums. But, after multiple searches I wasn’t able to find a solution that simply allowed me to sign out. I decided to look if there was any tweaks to defaults which could help.

After a few attempts I found a solution. If you ever run into this problem, you can simply do the following:

Open Terminal as a user with Administrator rights
Type: defaults delete MobileMeAccounts
Press enter to finish

You should now be able to go into System Preferences, iCloud and see the below iCloud login prompt.

after-signout

Like most developers the first thing I do when I get a new mac or do a clean install is run the below terminal command to show all hidden files and folders.

defaults write com.app.Finder AppleShowAllFiles Yes
killall Finder

This is a necessary evil as now I see Dot files on my desktop. For me this is the annoying .DS_Store and .localized files. The only way I’ve found to not show these on my desktop yet have hidden files enabled is to change their icon to transparent. This is very much a hack but accomplishes it’s goal in only a few clicks. Below is a step by step tutorial on how to get your clean desktop back.

Step 1: Getting the transparent image

This first thing you need to do is copy the below transparent image. I’ve placed border around the image to make it easier to find.

transparent

To copy the image just right click on Safari and select the Copy Image option as illustrated below.

Step 2: Get Info

The next step is to right mouse click on the .DS_Store file on your desktop and select “Get Info” as shown below.

Step 3: Updating the icon

This opens a dialog with all of the information about your .DS_Store file. You want to click on the document icon at the top left of the dialog and paste the image copied as part of step 1.

You will see the info dialog icon disappear.

After closing the info dialog you will also notice that the .DS_Store icon disappears on your desktop. Now you just need to repeat the process for each Dot file you wish to hide.

Step 4: Hiding the icon text

Now that the icons are hidden, you will simply see the icon text. I haven’t found a good way to remove the text but this is easy enough to hide. If you simply drag the icons off screen, for example to the bottom right of your screen as shown below. Their text will be out of view and they will be out of sight out of mind.