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Customizing OS X - Part 2 of 5 |
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 This is part two of a five part series on customizing OS X. If you haven't already, I suggest reading part one first.
After yesterday, our dock is looking like the cat's pajama's, but on the default desktop, it just doesn't look right. So let's get started. The first thing we want to change is the background. The one's Apple supplies are nice, but that isn't the name of the game here - we want our own. To do that, you can surf to one of hundreds of desktop sites. One of my favorites is macdesktops.com. Let's go ahead and use the foggy night desktop made by one really cool dude. Once you download that picture, you can go to System Preferences and then to the Desktop preference pane. In there, pull down the Collection menu, and select "Choose Folder...". Select the folder you saved foggy night in, and hit ok. Then select that desktop, and you are golden. Now our desktop looks like this:
What a difference a custom background makes. But, lets have a go at that hard drive icon. For that we go back to that SNOW.E aqua icon set we downloaded yesterday. Using the same method for changing the icons we did for the dock folders, you can change the hard drive icon to this:
OK, now that we have a new icon, we want to be able to see it. For that, while working with the desktop, we click on view, and choose "Show View Options". We can do all kinds of cool stuff with this window. First thing we are going to do is make our icons on the desktop bigger. Default size is 48 X 48. Lets go ahead and bump that up to 80 X 80. Now we have a big hard drive icon. While in here, let's go ahead and bump the text size up to 12 pt, and put a check in "Show item info" & "Show icon preview". |
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The "Show item info" option will show info about hard drives size and free space, movie & MP3 length, and the number of items in a folder. While the "Show icon preview" will show a preview of a picture file, (such as jpeg files) rather than the default picture icon. Slick eh? You can also put the label position on the right of the icon, have everything snap to grid, and keep your icons arranged in here.
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I know what you're thinking. What else could we change about the desktop? The answer is Konfabulator. Konfabulator is a program that runs JavaScript & XML programs called widgets that can do just about anything. They can tell the date and time, show you system info, give you network status, show current topics from webpages (like ours), or be completely useless. There is even a widget that has a kitchen sink that sits on your desktop, just to make sure that Konfabulator has everything, even the kitchen sink. After Konfabulator is installed, and runs for the first time, your desktop will be filled with default widgets:
Alright, that is WAY too many widgets. Let's go ahead an close some of those. In fact, let's close all of them, and download a couple other widgets. To close, you can either, ctrl-click on the widget, and choose close, or you can hold down ctrl while selecting the widget from the konfabulator menu up at the top. Now that we have them all closed, lets download "2 Guy's widget" and "WorldWeatherTime". The 2 Guy's widget will show you the current headlines from your favorite mac site with a long name, and, by the way, it was made by the same really cool dude that made the foggy nights desktop, with some help from other cool dudes, one of which, name begins with "J" and ends with "onahan". The WorldWeatherTime widget will show you world weather, and time. For now, I am just going to put in my location, and remove the rest, and set 2 guys to only show the last 3 stories.
Now that we have the time on the desktop, let's get it out of the menu bar. To do that, we go to the System Preferences, and on the Date & Time pane, under the Menu Bar Clock tab, we can take the check out of "Show date and time in menu bar". Also while we are in System Pref's, head over to the Login Items pane and add Konfabulator to login items, so it starts every time you log in. (just click add, then select Konfabulator, and hit OK)
Well, that's it for today. Tomorrow we will work on customizing the Finder, and I have quite a bit lined up. But until then, here is todays desktop, just to make the ladies wet.
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July 23 2003, 10:39 AM EDT, by
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Comments:
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| Wasabe |
7/15/03, 2:38 PM EDT |
I'm not sure how many "ladies," or for that matter "people" are reading these articles Kenny boy.
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| not a lady |
7/15/03, 3:19 PM EDT |
i'm not a lady, but i am reading these articles. thanks for the tips! now i need to get a towel for my girlfiend...
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| iKen |
7/15/03, 5:09 PM EDT |
hey... that wasn't me... IMPOSTER!
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| Jonahan |
7/15/03, 8:43 PM EDT |
Yeah that wasn't iKen. I deleted his post. On second thought I should've just changed his name to fhqwhgads or something, but oh well :)
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| Wasabe |
7/15/03, 11:00 PM EDT |
*whistle whistle whistle. Wasn't me! Nope! No sireeeeeee!
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| madage |
8/1/03, 5:00 PM EDT |
What happened to worldweathertime widget? The link doesn't work and I can't find it on Konfabulator's site. Anyone know how I can get it?
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This article is archived, so you may not comment on it.
(The good news is there's always the shoutbox, the forums or the contact form if you're socially-inclined at the moment!)
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If I come back as a horsefly, I think my favorite thing would be to land on someone's lip. Even if they smash you, ick!, you're all over their lip.
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