One of the features of Mac OS X v10.1 ("Aqua") that went away with Jaguar was the Login window's ability to remember the last user who logged into the machine.

This hack doesn't actually restore the feature, but it will set a default username that will always show up in the Name field after you log out.

Checkout the path shown on the right. The file you will be editing in the English.lprog folder is called login.nib.

In order to edit this file, you will need to log out and log back in as root or edit the permissions of the folder "English.lproj" using the "Get Info" command in the File menu.

Double click on login.nib to open the file in the Interface Builder aaplication. If you cannot open this file, make sure you have the Mac OS X Developer Tools installed (check for a /Developer/ directory).

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After the Interface Builder finishes loading the file, double click on "loginpanel" in the Instances tab view of the window titled "login.nib".

You should see a window similar to the one below (mine has been modified to accomodate the Retro login theme by Derek Smith).

Click on the text field where you would normally enter your username (in this case, mine is labeled "Name:") to select it.

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With the text field still selected, move over to the Info panel (if this is not open, press Command+Shift+I to open it).Locate the item labeled "Title:".

Put your user name here (you can use your long user name or short one; it doesn't matter). If you don't want to put anything revealing, but you still want to have a cooler Mac than your friend, you can put something like "<Your Username Here>".

Save the file, and you're done!

Note that this is not a perfect hack. When you log out, whatever is in the username field will be selected. To enter your password, you must press the Tab key or click in the password field. However, there is no way to fix this behavior (unless you happen to have the source code for Apple's loginwindow.app).

There are situations in which having the password also show up automatically would be useful. However, if you try this trick with the password field in Interface Builder, you'll notice that it won't work.

Well, that's that...for now. Stay tuned for more!

Submitted by Josh Zerin ("Inspired of T M U") on 02/27/2003
http://www.inspired-tmu.com/