Welcome to another edition of Mac 101, TUAW's series for beginners. Today, we show you how to get more bang for your desktop real-estate buck with Finder icon labels.

Have you ever wanted to know how large a picture on your Desktop was, but didn't want to open it (or even just hit ⌘I to get info)? Or instantly know how many items were in a folder? Mac OS X lets you display that information right under (or next to) the icon itself.

How? Easy! Click on your Desktop, and choose Show View Options from the View menu (or just hit ⌘J.) Then, click the radio button next to Show item info. Voíla! Instant metadata for your Desktop files and folders. For pictures, the Finder will show their width and height in pixels.

You can also adjust the position of the labels associated with the icons on your desktop. Instead of having the file and folder names beneath your icons, why not have a change and put them to the right? Just click either Right (or Bottom, if you prefer the default) under Label position.

For other awesome beginner tips, visit our Mac 101 category.

More Mac 101, TUAW's series for beginners. My mom called me up last week with this question about Mail: "Where did my send button go?"

Turns out she had mistakenly clicked the white chiclet (pictured) in the upper-right hand corner of her message's compose window, hiding her toolbar. When she clicked it once, Mail remembered her settings and hid the toolbar for other message windows, too.

So, just clicking that chiclet showed the toolbar again, and brought her send button back. Magic.

Also, you can hold down command and click the same chiclet to show and hide icons and text labels in the toolbar. Repeatedly clicking with the command key held down cycles through all your options.

Now that my mom is happily sending emails again, I can sleep well knowing all about the new Bob's Big Boy and the local woman who was on Survivor.

Hey Folders! is a handy utility from the maker of Mail.Appetizer that extends the Finder's colored label feature to labeled folders themselves. As you can see, the entire folder icon takes on the color of the label, though files (fortunately) do not receive the colored overlay treatment (I wager that would result in some really funky looking icons). Hey Folders! requires a small amount of manual work to get it to start with each login, however, as you simply need to add it to your startup items if you want it to augment your finder 24/7 (it's a background process known as a daemon; it won't appear in the dock or menubar - only in a process list like Activity Monitor). Full instructions are listed at the Hey Folders! site. Note: at the moment, Hey Folders! is PPC only, but the developer told me a Universal Binary version is 'coming soon.'

Hey Folders! is offered as freeware from Bronson Beta.

Memorex has entered the fast paced world of iPod coverings. Announced at CES (where Engadget is spending many caffeine fueled hours trying to cover every single new product released), the 'Printable Wraps for iPod,' wins my CES iPod accessory award for lamest/most straightforward name of a product.

These things are just like the HP iPod tattoos in that they are stickers that you can print out designs on and slap onto your iPods (iPods with video, shuffles, 4G iPods, nanos, and minis versions are all available).

A pack of 10 will set you back $14 bucks, but it also comes with Memorex's exPressit label maker application that allows you to choose from 1500 preloaded backgrounds, or any background picture you might have.

[via Mobilemag]

Tagging is all the rage now adays. Web 2.0 companies have risen and fallen over tagging. People love it so much that some folks would like to tag files in the Finder so that they can leverage Spotlight%uFFFD for their own purposes. However, wouldn't it be cool if you could automatically 'tag' files? Well, Mac Geekery is on it with this little bit o' command line magic that will do just that (when combined with cron).

Another gem from MacOSXHints covers a method, albeit not exactly pretty, for labeling TV video files you bring into iTunes as TV shows. This helps with organizing videos and I believe using the new Search Bar in iTunes 6 (Edit > Show Search Bar).

The MacOSXHints post offers a command line tool by the name of AtomicParsley for doing the editing and applying the correct label, while a commenter on the post created a GUI wrapper for it. Make sure you follow the instructions when using a tool like this, because it's playing around with some real low-level stuff in your video files.

While these are some handy tools, I'm much more of a fan of simply editing all the files in iTunes using Get Info and applying a Grouping label. A Smart Playlist can then organize everything for me - no fuss, no muss.