Tag Archives: hack

How to remove iTunes store and Ping arrows / buttons next to songs in Windows

Prior to iTunes 10 an arrow button would be placed next to the selected song, album, and artist. Clicking on any of these arrows / links would open the iTunes store. With the introduction of iTunes 10, this arrow has been enlarged and now sports the word “Ping” as this button is now used for Apple’s new Ping musical social network.

I hate these buttons with a passion.

The only thing I get out of them is anger when I accidentally click one of them. Apple of course has not included a way to easily disable these. Thankfully some resourceful users on the Apple discussion forums discovered a way to turn this junk off!

The Solution!

Run the following commands in your command line (Start -> Run -> cmd):

"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt hide-ping-dropdown 1
"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt show-store-link-arrows 0
"C:\Program Files\iTunes\iTunes.exe" /setPrefInt disablePingSidebar 1

If you’re running the 64 bit version of Windows when you will need to change “Program Files” above to “Program Files (x86)”.

Source of the fix. [apple.com forums]

Submit unchecked checkbox value

I had never noticed before that submitting a form with unchecked checkboxes in it results in those checkboxes not being sent to the server at all. I had always assumed that a zero ( 0 ) would be sent for unchecked since a one ( 1 ) is sent when checked. Rather than add code to specifically handle these individual checkboxes, you can just add hidden inputs above the checkboxes in the HTML with a value of zero like this:

<input type="hidden" name="box1" value="0" /> <input type="checkbox" name="box1" value="1" />

This is a much simpler solution that doesn’t require writing any additional code or sending an array of checkboxes. I chose this method since I was using an automated Settings saver in PHP so it would be a pain to modify it and it could make the code more dirty.

Thanks to iamcam for writing about this.