I love my iMac as I’m sure I’ve made clear on more than a few occasions. As much as I love it though, I’m still a relative noob having enjoyed the merits of OS X for only a little more than a year now and was unclear on how to keep a lot of my files and applications well organized. After doing some research (and a bit of trial-and-error) I found a lot of great ways to keep things easy to locate so I can spend less time searching for what I need and more time being productive. I’ll list out the changes I’ve implemented below.
Removed the drives from my desktop
Sure, this might seem like a small inconvenience, but I like to think of my virtual desktop like an actual desktop. That is it’s a place where I spread out the files I’m currently working with and when I’m done, I put them away or delete them. I don’t like having icons there if I can help it, preferring to admire whatever pretty wallpaper I’m using and appreciating the simplicity of seeing it in it’s entirety.
To accomplish this, navigate to a Finder window and choose Finder -> Preferences. From here you can go to the ‘General’ section at the top and uncheck which items you don’t want displayed on your desktop. As an added bonus, you can also use this to define the default location to which a new Finder window will open.
Finder is your friend
After removing those pesky drive icons (along with any mounted .dmgs) I needed to be able to access them again. Most of you know your drives will still appear within a new finder window (cmd+n), but what you may not be aware of is just how configurable your finder window can be.
With a Finder window open, go to Finder -> Preferences from the menu bar. From here you can define what is and isn’t displayed via the ‘Sidebar’ option at the top. For instance, I don’t have access to an iDisk so I removed that from being visible.
Ditched the Powered Drives
Alright, technically I haven’t accomplished this yet but I certainly intend to. This is also more of an iMac centric step as it’s more outside the machine itself. The longer I’ve used my iMac the more I’ve appreciated all of the wires that aren’t flowing out of it like it’s on life support. However, my Mac has a measly 640GB HD which isn’t really sufficient for all of the MP3s, videos, and high-res pictures I have floating around. Until this point I’ve had two external hard drives for this- one for time machine and another 1.5TB for media and important personal files. What I didn’t like though is that they’re powered and they eat up desk spac
e. Enter the Twelve South Backpack-
This ingenious little device can be had for a mere $29.99 from Amazon. It’s also adjustable and you can technically add more than 1 on your iMac at the same time so you can make good use of the space behind that gorgeous display. So, what with making the iMac even more mobile on my desk should I need to move or adjust it for any reason, I’ll be putting two Western Digital passports on this tiny shelf behind the iMac to free up power cords and improve how it looks aesthetically. Granted, I’ll sacrifice some data access speed, but generally I’m not constantly moving files about and I’m hoping this will be sufficient. Worst case scenario I go back to the old powered ones and have a couple of passports for general use as I go back and forth between home and the office.
Auto-Hide the Dock
This is easy enough to do by right-clicking in your dock area and checking the option to auto-hide the dock. I don’t always leave it hidden, but if I’m writing or performing some other task where I want complete focus I’ll get it out of the way just for concentration’s sake.
While I’m sure there have been plenty of other things I’ve done to make working on the Mac more streamlined and more that I’ll find out, these should suffice for now.
What steps have you taken to make your computing more efficient?
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