Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Desktop & Screen Saver

This panel offers two ways to show off Mac OS X's glamorous graphics features: desktop pictures and screen savers.

Desktop

Mac OS X comes with several ready-to-use collections of desktop pictures, ranging from National Geographic–style nature photos to plain solid colors. To install a new background picture, first choose one of the image categories in the list at the left side of the window, as shown in Figure 9-7.

Your choices, greatly expanded in Tiger, include Apple Images (muted, soft-focus swishes and swirls), Nature (bugs, water, Tiger fur), Plants (flowers, soft-focus leaves), Black & White (breathtaking monochrome shots), Abstract (swishes and swirls with wild colors), or Solid Colors (boring grays, blues, and greens).

Note

Several of Apple's ready-to-use desktop pictures come in two sizes. The elongated versions (with the flatter, squashed-down thumbnails) are designed to perfectly fill the extra-wide screens on 15- and 17-inch PowerBooks, Apple Cinema Displays, and other unusually wide screens.

Using your own pictures

Of course, you may feel that decorating your Mac desktop is much more fun if you use one of your own pictures. You can use any digital photo, scanned image, or graphic you want in almost any graphics format (JPEG, PICT, GIF, TIFF, Photoshop, and—just in case you hope to master your digital camera by dangling its electronic instruction manual in front of you each morning—even PDF).

Figure 9-7. Using the list of picture sources at left, you can ...