MacBook® All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 2. Giving Your Desktop the Personal Touch

In This Chapter

• Picking your own background

• Adding and selecting a screen saver

• Choosing menu colors and highlights

• Keeping track of things with Stickies

• Customizing the Dock and using Dashboard

• Cleaning and sorting the Mac OS X Desktop

"Tweak! Tweak!" It's not the cry of some exotic bird — that's the call of the wild MacBook Power User. Power users like to tweak their Mac OS X Desktops just so, with that menu color, this background, and those applications in the Dock. Noncomputer types just can't understand the importance of the proper arrangement of your virtual workplace: When things are familiar and customized to your needs, you're more productive, and things get done faster. In fact, if you've set up multiple users on your computer under Mac OS X, the Big X automatically keeps track of each user's Desktop and restores it when that person logs in. (For example, when you use the MacBook, you get that background photo of Suzanne Sommers from the '70s whereas your daughter gets Avril Lavigne.)

In this chapter, I show you what you can do to produce a Desktop that's uniquely your own, including tweaks that you can make to the background and your Desktop icons. I also show you how to use Desktop Stickies instead of a forest of paper slips covering your monitor.

With your Mac OS X Desktop clad in the proper harmonious colors — yes, that can be your favorite photo of Elvis himself — and your new Dock icons ready for action, you're indeed prepared ...