Start(up) the day with a smile.
That first big smiley MacOS logo at startup is great but who says you have to keep looking at the same old thing? For those with a large number of control panels and extensions in their system folder, the startup screen takes a new meaning while waiting for their Mac to start up. Not to mention those folks, beginner and expert users alike, who love to customize and hence collect enough extensions and control panels to cover half the screen at startup!
TIME FOR CHANGE
Here at Mac Plaza's Desktop Gallery you can find a collection of great startup screens. All you have to do is download them, place them in your System folder (remove the old one of course) and the next time you restart or switch on your Mac you have a brand new startup screen to admire and impress friends and family with. Hold on a minute, can it be that simple? In short, yes and no, let us see ...
INDIFFERENCE A DIFFERENCE
The difference between ordinary desktop pictures and startup screens is the special name it has: StartupScreen. Just like that, one word, no spaces, no name extensions. Actually there's also the fact that a PICT file needs to have a resource ID of Zero for it to be a startup screen but that's beyond the scope of this article but read on. For now, be contend with downloading pictures that are clearly made as startup screens and use those.
If you do insist on making your own startup screens though, you are NOT on your own. Get your own picture that you want and then use one of the more popular shareware utilities to format it into a startup screen. I recommend the excellent shareware ($30) GraphicConverter which can deal with about 100 file formats for this and other image coversion purposes.
Just open the image, choose "save As" and select "Startup Screen" in the dialog box. Easy!
There is also the ResEdit way of making customised startup screens. This article by Michael Coyle of ResExcellence and fellow contributor to Mac Plaza shows you how. While using ResEdit is usually beyond the expertise of the beginner, Michael does a very good job of simplifying the instructions. If you do decide to take this route, read his guidelines first. You have been warned!
There are a couple of small problems with customizing your startup screen though. For one, the progress bar is obscured and some people feel more comfortable being able to see this. If you're one of them then there is a possible way to restore the progress bar on your customized startup screen.  Screener is a shareware ($5) program written for just this purpose. You do need a little bit of ResEdit knowledge though. The program is written by Chiper who says he's working on a more elegant solution. |
THERE MUST BE MORE
What else can you do at startup after the eye candy? As an extension of the startup process, you could have a screen pop up with a reminder for yourself or a gentle message telling unauthorized persons to buzz off if they switch on your Mac.
To do this, create a clipping file of your notes or message. Name it so that it is alphabetically last (eg. start the name with a z) and place an alias of it in the Startp Items folder.
At startup the Finder does not have to launch any application but after other startup items have loaded, the note will be displayed. After reading it you can close it using Command-W.
By the way, you 're not stuck with Note Pad for editing your clipping files. The shareware application and extension FinderNote produces a special kind of file that you can read and edit directly from the Finder. Very handy!
Lastly, now that we've touched a little bit on the Startup Items folder, you could make an alias of common software that you run when you're working on your Mac and place them in this folder. After startup all of them will be launched and you're ready to rock. A real productivity boost, no messing around opening folders to launch your applications, unless of course, you already have easy access to them via various launcher programs and utilites.
That's it for this time, now go start your day with a bigger smile :)
| SUMMARY |
1. Download StartupScreen(s).
2. Remove old StartupScreen from System folder.
3. Drop in the new one. into System folder.
Making your own:
1. Get GraphicConverter
2. Open image
3. Save As ... StartupScreen
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Get THIS Startup Screen!
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