SETTING DESKTOP PREFERENCES

Setting Desktop Preferences

You can configure your desktop so it appears the way you want it to. You can control some of the icons that appear on it by default, and you can configure the image that fills your desktop.

Setting Finder desktop icon preferences

By default, icons for your Macbook hard drive, external hard drives, DVDs and CDs, and servers appear on the desktop. This is okay if that is your preference, but they take up space on the desktop that isn’t really necessary because you can get to these elements even more easily by opening a finder window and using Sidebar. To hide these icons, perform the following steps:

1.       Choose Finder → Preferences. The Finder Preferences dialog appears.
2.       Click the General tab if it isn’t selected already.
3.     Uncheck each check box if you don’t want to see the icon for items of that type       on your desktop.For example to hide the icon for the Macbook hard disk, uncheck the Hard disks check box. As you uncheck the check boxes, the related icons disappear from your desktop.

Setting desktop pictures

Since you stare at your desktop so much, you might as well have something interesting to look at, which is where desktop pictures come in.

You can set any image to be your desktop picture. The images you can use as your desktop include the default images that are included with the Mac OS X, image files you create or download from the internet, and best of all, photos from your iPhoto Library. You can also configure your MacBook so that the desktop picture changes over time to keep it even more interesting.

To configure your desktop pictures, perform the following steps:

• Open the Applications folder and double-click the System Preferences icon. The System Preferences application opens.
• Click the Desktop & Screen Saver icon. The Desktop & Screen Saver pane appears.
• Click the Desktop tab. The Desktop picture tools appear. On the lower-left side of the pane are the sources of images from which you can select pictures for your desktop, such as black and white images, abstract pictures, or photographs from your iPhoto albums.

1. a source of images in the left pane of the window, such as an iPhoto album.Thumbnails of the images in that source appear in the right pane of the window
2. Click the image that you want to apply to the desktop. The image fills the desktop and you see it in the image as well at the top of the Desktop pane .
3. If the selected source is iPhoto Albums, use the pop-up menu at the top of the window to choose how you want photos to be scaled to the screen.
4. If the image doesn’t fill the screen, click the Color button that appears to the right of the menu when it can be used.
5. When it appears, use the Color Picker to choose the background color that appears behind photos when they don’t fill the desktop.
6. To have the image change automatically, check the Change picture check box.
7. On the pop-up menu, choose how often you want the picture to change.
8. If you want images to be selected randomly instead of by the order in which they appear in the source, check the Random order check box. A new image from the selected source is applied to the desktop according to the timing you selected.
9. To have the menu bar be translucent so you can see the desktop picture behind it, check the Translucent Menu Bar check box. With this option unchecked, the menu bar becomes a solid color.
10. Quit the System Preferences application. Enjoy your desktop.