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Productivity Tips

Words by Michael Pearce

March 2008

Manage That Desktop!

Many of you would be horrified if you got to see some of the cluttered desktops I run into at various client sites. Others would say, "That's not as bad as mine!"

Whatever your reason for leaving stuff around, whether you're a new user who does not yet understand file management or an overworked procrastinator, it's really important to your general well-being to get a handle on this.

There are simple steps you can take, right away, that will help. The simplest: Close all open windows so you see only your desktop, then go to the View menu and choose Show View Options. Check the box "Keep arranged by" and click the popup menu for Kind. That will instantly sort all the icons on your desktop starting with the upper right corner where your hard drive icon is, followed by any other hard drives and CDs. Each category of item to follow is alphabetized.

If you'd rather mix Kinds but keep sorted alphabetically, choose the Name option. You can also sort by date modified or label.

Attachments

Do you use an email program such as Eudora or AppleMail that saves its attachments in a separate folder at the time they arrive on your Mac? I used to tell Eudora (through the Attachments preference) to just put them on the desktop so I could file or delete them immediately, but they started to accumulate so I created a folder called "Incoming Attachments" on the desktop and told Eudora to store them there.

By default, Eudora stores attachments in the Attachments Folder, which is inside the Eudora Folder in your Documents folder. You can leave this be and create an alias of it and put that on your desktop instead.

Apple Mail buries it a little deeper: the path is Hard Drive -> Users -> YourUsername -> Library -> Mail Downloads. This may change depending on whether you are using version 10.2, 10.3 or 10.4 of OSX.

Other email programs use the "giant proprietary database" method of storing email (Entourage, Outlook Express, Netscape) that keeps it simple but puts you at risk of losing all your mail and attachments should the database file get corrupted or killed by a poorly designed antivirus program. I strongly recommend against them, but if you must use them be sure to export or drag any important attachments out of the window and file them away. Then delete the message, attachment and all. Or click on the attachment and delete it but keep the message.

Safari and other Web browsers also have a Preference setting you can change to point at your Attachments folder. By default they are set to just put downloads on the desktop.

Documents Folder

Apple advises that you keep everything in specific folders, which should not be moved or renamed: All files you create go in Documents; movies, animations, and videos you create or download in Movies, music files in Music, which also stores your iTunes library, and pictures in Pictures, which also stores your iPhoto library.

Inside your Documents folder you can create folders to organize your files in any way you desire. Keep the names as short as possible for easy viewing in Open and Save windows, and make sure the names are meaningful.

All that stuff on your Desktop can be dumped wholesale into your Documents folder, but you should store downloaded installers in the Installers folder in Applications.

Often a download will have three pieces: a file that ends in .hqx, which decompresses to a file ending in .dmg, which is a disk-image file. This is the standard format for installers and updaters and when double-clicked will either open a window with an installer, a .pkg file, or an application that can be simply moved to your Applications folder. Sometimes decompressing an .hqx file will simply result in an installer or a complete application.

Throw away the .hqx file immediately after decompressing it. It's the disk image you want to save in case you ever need to reinstall the item.

The "root" Level of Your Drive

Do not accumulate any files in this window. Everything you do belongs elsewhere. Most important, never ever save documents into the Applications folder. You risk losing your documents when an application is upgraded to a later version. Finally, never move or rename folders at this level or inside the Users folder. To do so can sometimes result in loss of access to everything inside that folder. The simple rule for folders: If you didn't create it yourself, leave it alone.