Customise OS X Desktop

Sat, 28 April 2007

Ever had a dozen of icons fighting over one square inch of your screen? Jumping on top of each other, taking focus, mixing labels and looking like this?

Yes, it’s OS X default setting, slightly oversized icons with no particular order where to place each of them. Pretty messy, isn’t it …

Of course, there is a lot you can do to change this. Let’s do it together.

Click anywhere on Desktop, then in menu bar select View | Show view options, or simply press Command-J on your keyboard and setting will come up:

First, let’s change that icon size from the default 48×48 down to 36×36, or even to 32×32 pixel. Simply drag the slider to the left until you are happy with the icon size.

Then reduce the font to 11 or 10 and tick ‘Right‘ to have the icon’s text label placed to the icon’s right side, and not below.

Clicking ‘Show item info‘ will add another line, showing more info about the application or the file the icon represents, such as the file size or image dimensions.

And finally, let’s get some order here and ask for icons to be snapped to grid, so tick that box too.

What you get now is much tidier desktop, easy to get around and have things in right places.

Stumble it!

• Mac OS X desktop and iPhoto tricks
• How intrusive is Google Desktop for Mac
• Show Desktop in OS X
• Saving files to Desktop
• Run dashboard widgets on your desktop

Web hosting - UNLIMITED space and transfer - $ 6.95 per month

Posted in New to Mac, Tips