Optimizing Your Mac

The Mac OS X Leopard is a great operating system with many customizable applications. You can optimize your Mac computer to make your life, work, study, and play more efficient. Many people don't realize the potential that these machines have to make your life run smoother. Here are a few tips that will help you out.

-Stacks This is a great concept that will let you keep your apps. organized and managed. Stacks lets you organize documents on your dashboard, and when you scroll over them they "spring" into view. You can use this on your applications to keep them group together, and also keep your dashboard from getting cluttered.

The Steps:

1. Create a new folder and title it whatever you want that group to be (Music, videos, internet, ect).

2. Create an aliases of the applications you want to stack by right clicking them and selecting "Make Alias."

3. Place the Alias in the appropriate folder.

4. Drag the folder in your Dock.

-Apps There are plenty of great and free applications available on the internet designed for the Mac that can do almost anything. Most are small so the download time is short, and most are simple to use so it won't be hard learning them.

-Klok If you are a freelancer who writes, draws, or does anything else based on commission, then time management is key. Klok is a program that allows you to keep track of time while you work on projects, helps you schedule, and a whole slew of other things.

-Do It Another one of my favorite apps. It is a simple to-do list that you can post on your dash. It lets you set priorities and check them off. You can customize the appearance and how your tasks are listed. It includes different tabs for different topics or places.

-Voodoo Pad This is great for someone who is doing any type of writing or research. It lets you create pages and links within a document. You can export from and import to almost any other text editing application. It's truly fantastic.

A few more of my favorite apps that keep my Mac lovable are: Appzapper, FFmpegX, Battery Health Monitor, TraffiX, Miro, and Twitterific. On of my favorite websites for great apps is here.

I hope these simple steps help you utilize your Mac more efficiently. I trust that if you start using these steps while using your machine you'll safe time, and if you do what I do then you'll also make more money. If you have additional tips I'd love to hear them. Post them below in the comment box.