Everybody has programs that are pretty much always open (Mail, iTunes, Quicksilver, etc.), so it's good to have them launch automatically at startup. There are a couple of different ways to do this. If the program is already running you can hold down your (left) mouse button on its Dock icon and choose "Open at Login" from the pop up menu. However, the best way to manage these is in "Login Items" tab of the Accounts Preference Pane in your System Preferences. Here you can manually add login items. In fact, in addition to adding login items (just by clicking the plus sign), you can also remove anything you don't want (with the minus). It's useful to scan the list periodically and remove anything you don't commonly use (sometimes developers, e.g. Adobe, will put things in there without asking). Removing these unused items can free up system resources for more useful things. But be careful that you do not remove anything important (basically if you don't know what it is, don't remove it). In addition to adding applications to the login items tab, you can also add Volumes to mount on login, including network mounts. Just mount the network drive first in the Finder, then after hitting the plus sign select it and it will be placed on the list, as you can see for my WebDAV mount above.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-18-2007 @ 7:54AM
Mary said...
Does anyone know how to make the "Hide" checkbox work? Some apps, e.g. Mail, refuse to open hidden, regardless of whether this is checked or not.
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5-18-2007 @ 8:12AM
racco said...
I've been having a problem with one of my Login Items for a while now. for some reason everytime mail.app launches, so does iCal.
could anyone explane why? it happens every time I launch mail.
not a big problem I know, but I never use iCal and it just anoyes me that everytime I come to my Mac in the morning the first thing I have to do is close iCal
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5-18-2007 @ 8:36AM
Lars said...
I second Mary's comment. I'd like Mail to open, but just not show it's window.
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5-18-2007 @ 8:37AM
Paul said...
racco - do you have MailTags installed? If so there's an option in the "Calendar" tab of the MailTags preferences called "Open iCal when Mail launches".
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5-18-2007 @ 8:44AM
racco said...
cheers paul :) that was exactly what was happening
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5-18-2007 @ 9:32AM
Jamie said...
The option to mount volumes automatically is really handy, does anyone know of a way to make it work without OSX opening a finder window for each volume?
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5-18-2007 @ 10:21AM
jtr said...
Perfect! I'm new to the mac, and was wondering this very thing...
thanks.
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5-18-2007 @ 10:39AM
iGO said...
What I'd like to know, post mounting that External Volume/Drive, is how to share the contents of that external volume/drive, available across the home network. Anyone?
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5-18-2007 @ 10:46AM
Kruch said...
If you know your way around UNIX you can use samba (comes with OS X) to make shares outside your home directory. If you don't you can use SharePoints (http://hornware.com/sharepoints/).
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5-18-2007 @ 12:31PM
Dave Chartier said...
For everyone wondering about whether you can automatically hide something you set to start up when you log in: in this Login tab in your Account System Preferences pane, there should be a 'Hide' column that offers a check box next to each thing you want to start up automatically. Checking that box should - in *most* cases - cause that application or drive to hide itself upon starting up.
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5-18-2007 @ 1:42PM
Lars said...
Oddly enough, ticking the box for Mail doesn't hide it at start up. Maybe they could fix that in .10 ;)
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5-18-2007 @ 6:55PM
Ryan Maxwell said...
the app doesn't need to be open to get the "Open at login" menu item from the dock.
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5-29-2007 @ 7:16PM
Eleventeen said...
You can also drag Automator apps or AppleScript apps into it as well. I have one that clears my DNS cache when I move from one network to another (my work network forwards to a local server for our webpage.) It's pretty handy.
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