Removing the crap from iTunes 10.0.1

I use iTunes to play music on my osx laptop, though I have been very disappointed with the latest updates to iTunes. It seems that apple thinks that I want to be a part of yet another social network and thus has enabled "Ping" on my iTunes account.

First thing I did was to "opt-out" of ping (wtf Apple, these things should be opt-in), a quick Google search reviled that it is fairly easy to do (after you agree to their new terms and conditions of course). Though even after I did this, the iTunes interface is still littered with crap about Ping (including the new side bar that was added with 10.0.1). It seems that you can removed these with a quick jump into Terminal.app with the following commands:

defaults write "com.apple.iTunes" "disablePingSidebar" -bool "TRUE"
defaults write "com.apple.iTunes" "hide-ping-dropdown" -bool "TRUE"

I also discovered that you can get the minimize/zoom/exit buttons back with some other plist values:

defaults write "com.apple.iTunes" "full-window" -boolean "YES"

While I am at it, if you want to disable to links to the itunes store from next to your songs, you can use this option:

defaults write "com.apple.iTunes" "show-store-arrow-links" -bool "FALSE"

Don't forget to restart iTunes after you have made these changes.