By default, the Mac desktop will show external drives and volumes, including things like external hard drives, USB flash keys, and other external storage. If you wish to not show those external volumes on the desktop, you can adjust a setting in MacOS to hide external drives form the Mac desktop. Hiding external drives from … Read More
If you have updated to macOS Big Sur 11 or macOS 10.15 Catalina or later from an older version of Mac OS, you might find a new folder on your Desktop called “Relocated Items”. The Relocated Items folder can be confusing and look scary, especially if you aren’t expecting to see it. But you needn’t … Read More
If your Mac desktop is a mess of files and folders, you’re not alone. A messy desktop must be common enough that a feature called Stacks has been included in MacOS specifically to ease that burden. Basically Stacks cleans up a mess of files on your desktop automatically by arranging them into organized groups of … Read More
If you want to show the Mac desktop quickly, the fastest way to do so is often with a keyboard shortcut to reveal the desktop. This approach will push aside all on-screen windows, apps, and other information, and show only the Mac desktop – all without closing any apps. These tricks can offer a fast … Read More
A fun way to customize the Mac desktop is to add floating widgets for things like weather, ski conditions, stocks, and time. These widgets are actually from Dashboard, a largely forgotten feature of Mac OS X that can be made useful again by bringing them more to the forefront of your desktop experience. This is … Read More
With Desktop switching keyboard shortcuts set, you can instantly move windows between different desktops without going through Mission Control of Mac OS X at all. The only requirement is to configure the control keys for switching desktops on the Mac, and you must have multiple desktops or else you won’t have anything to switch the … Read More
Recently we covered how to show full file names on the Mac OS X desktop, avoiding the abbreviated labels that occur when a file or folders name is too large to fit in the allowed character count limit. That trick was done by increasing the desktops grid size, but as one of our readers pointed … Read More
Have you ever noticed that some files and folders display truncated names when they’re placed on the Mac OS X Desktop? A file or folder named anything over a certain character limit will be shortened with a series of three periods, something like “Mobile Documents Sync” will display as “Mobile Do…ync” and so on. One … Read More
The desktop in latter versions of Mac OS X has simplified the Finder window sidebars by showing just a few choices, with the emphasis on the ‘All My Files’ directory rather than individually pointing to your Pictures and Documents folders. If you prefer to see more options from the Finder and Desktop window sidebars, you … Read More
The Mac now has the highly desirable “Cut and Paste” file feature throughout the Mac OS X desktop and Finder, allowing users to truly cut and paste to move the selected documents or folders to a new location, rather than just making a copy of them. In this sense, the cut & paste ability behaves … Read More
How’d you like to get notifications from your Android phone onto your desktop Mac or Windows PC? This cool little utility will notify you of incoming SMS’s, phone calls, and battery notifications, right on your desktop. The app installs on your Android and also on your desktop PC and communicates through Bluetooth, it’s fully multi-platform … Read More
Dateline is a nice little utility that places a transparent linear calendar on your Mac desktop. It’s pretty customizable so if you want the dates to be horizontal or vertical, or the text color or their background colors to be different it’s just an easy couple of tweaks away. Perhaps the best part about Dateline … Read More
Want to hide all desktop icons on a Mac? Desktop icon clutter can really impact workflow by overwhelming you with files and just too much stuff to look at. Inevitably, it can be hard to avoid since a lot of apps download things to the Desktop by default, we save things there, screenshots go there, … Read More
Want to see available disk space of drives and volumes on the desktop of Mac OS X? Perhaps you’d like to see information about files and folders that are on the Mac desktop as well, including dimensions of images, and data about file counts contained within folders. You can reveal this information easily with a … Read More
