Taking the blinders off of Finder
While in a previous post I claimed that Finder had the 'good sense' to not show .DS_Store files, the fact of the matter is that in general I don't want it hiding things from me. If something's on disk, I want to see it. Apparently I'm in the universal minority here, since all three main platforms (*nix, OSX, and Windows) have as their default behavior the cloaking/supressing of various filesystem content. On linux, 'ls' requires the '-a' argument if you want to see everything. Windows forces you to edit folder visibility properties. And OSX hides all '.*' content unless you apply the following bit of voodoo:
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
A quick restart will reveal all, including things like '.localized' on your desktop.