How can I give my Mac desktop some flavor?
Just add a spice of oregano and… wait, just start by reaching for the System Preferences pane instead.
The basics: desktop wallpaper and screensaver
Your desktop wallpaper is the picture that’s displayed on your computer screen behind all of the programs and documents that you’ve got open. Every computer comes with default desktop wallpaper set up, and on Mac OS X it’s a calm blue pattern. You can change this to any image or photo that you like.
- In the dock, click on System Preferences.
- Under Personal, click on Desktop and Screensaver.
- Under the Desktop tab, you can browse around the folders on your Mac as well as the albums in your iPhoto library. Once you find an image, click on it to set that image as your new desktop wallpaper.
Your screensaver is the animation that fills your screen when your Mac is idle for an extended period of time. From the Screensaver tab (located right next to Desktop) you can select an animation and set the amount of idle time to wait before activating it.
Customize the dock
Now that you’ve got your wallpaper and screensaver set, you should realize that the dock (the set of program icons across the bottom of your screen) can also be tweeked. Go back to the System Preferences pane and click on Dock, underneath Personal.
- Dock size is how large the icons should be. Use the slider to make them bigger or smaller.
- Magnification refers to the enlarging effect that icons in the dock have when your mouse cursor moves over them. Toggle the checkbox to turn magnification on and off, and use the slider to adjust how large the dock’s icons should magnify.
- Position on screen controls whether the dock sits on the bottom, left or right of your desktop.
- Minimize using: specifies the animation to use when you hit the yellow minimize button on a program window.
- Animate opening icons will make icons in the dock bounce when you start those programs.
- Automatically hide and show the Dock will make the dock and all of its icons hide from view when the mouse is not near it.
Desktop productivity: tweeking Expose
Expose is an Apple program that allows you to manage your desktop, program and document windows in some useful ways. With Expose, you can zoop all your windows into view at once, clear them off the screen to reveal the desktop, toggle your screensaver and more.
Go to the System Preferences pane and click on Dashboard & Expose, under personal. The window that opens will have two sets of options:
- Active screen corners allows you to assign different Expose/Dashboard events to happen when you touch one of the four corners of the screen with your mouse.
- Keyboard shortcuts lets you assign those different Expose/Dashboard events to key combinations as well as (or as opposed to) corners of the screen.
For more about Expose and its features, read the Of Zen and Computing article titled “Take control of your Mac desktop with Expose“.
Forecast the weather
It seems like every other Windows PC you use has some program from The Weather Channel or Weather Bug sitting in the taskbar, telling you the current temperature outside in the wide world. Well, good new friend: your Mac can do the same. WeatherMenu from AfterTen software is a wonderful little program that sits in your Mac’s menu bar and displays the current temperature along with an informative little icon representing the current conditions. Clicking on the WeatherMenu icon brings up a forecast menu that’s probably more in-depth about the weather than you probably ever wanted to get.
Monitor your Mac with MenuMeters
For the more technically inclined (or technically curious) readers, you can customize your Mac’s menu bar to display all sorts of information about the status of the system. MenuMeters form Raging Menace uses animated icons to tell you how much network activity is going on, how much memory is used/free, what the processor is up to, how much disk I/O is going on and even what the CPU temperature is like.
Add more widgets
Widgets are mini-programs that do one very specific task, and live on your desktop just a click away. Click on the Dashboard icon in the Dock to see what widgets are currently installed. To download more widgets, visit Apple’s Dashboard Downloads site. Here are a few of our favorite widgets:
Further reading
Apple Support has a set of pages called Mac 101 - Customize My Mac that contain even more juicy how-to articles for customizing your desktop. This site will teach you how to change file icons, add background images to the Finder, customize the buttons you see in a Finder window, customize the Finder sidebar, and more.
[tags]desktop,customization,mac os x[/tags]
