Filed under: How-tos, Tips and tricks, Mac 101
Mac 101: Launch at startup, the Login Items tab
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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Mary said 7:54AM on 5-18-2007
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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racco said 8:12AM on 5-18-2007
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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Lars said 8:36AM on 5-18-2007
I second Mary's comment. I'd like Mail to open, but just not show it's window.
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Paul said 8:37AM on 5-18-2007
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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racco said 8:44AM on 5-18-2007
cheers paul :) that was exactly what was happening
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Jamie said 9:32AM on 5-18-2007
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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jtr said 10:21AM on 5-18-2007
Perfect! I'm new to the mac, and was wondering this very thing...
thanks.
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iGO said 10:39AM on 5-18-2007
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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Kruch said 10:46AM on 5-18-2007
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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Dave Chartier said 12:31PM on 5-18-2007
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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Lars said 1:42PM on 5-18-2007
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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Ryan Maxwell said 6:55PM on 5-18-2007
the app doesn't need to be open to get the "Open at login" menu item from the dock.
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Eleventeen said 7:16PM on 5-29-2007
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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