Welcome2Mac: Zoom Buttons, Desktop Backgrounds, and Color Labels

Welcome2Mac is The MacTipper Blog's weekly tip where all the people new to Apple's latest operating system can get Mac tips to help them better use Mac OS X.

As with last week, I'll go over three basic tips that will help you when using Mac OSX. Today we'll look at zooming windows, changing your desktop background, and labeling files in Finder.


Using the green circle in the upper-left hand corner of the window, you can zoom that window. Unfortunately, zooming windows is one of the more confusing aspects of Mac. Unlike the Maximize button on Windows, the zoom button makes the window only as big as it needs to be. So, if you have a Safari window with The MacTipper Blog open, you would see the main content with a 20 px grey border.

However, in TextEdit, the zoom button makes the window consume your whole screen. So, it's pretty much a thing of trial and error.



There are several ways to change your desktop background in Mac.

There's a new way in Leopard to change your desktop background. In Safari, you can right click on an image and select to "Use Image as Desktop Picture". This is convenient if you find a pretty picture online and want to use it as a desktop background.



Of course, if you want to do more than just have a background image you want to change every now and then, I suggest that you use System Preferences. To do this, go to the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane in System Preferences. (You can get there quickly by right-clicking on the desktop background and select "Change Desktop Background…".)



Once there you can change your desktop background to any variety of images. If you want to quickly change the desktop background, you can drag an image into the preview image in the upper-left hand corner of the System Preferences window. If you want to use a folder full of images, you can either hit the + symbol in the lower-left hand corner or drag the folder into the left-most column.



Finally, there are other options at the bottom of the window. Such as disabling the translucent menu bar and rotating the image. I suggest you check those out.



Labeling items in Finder makes it easier for you to organize your files. To label an item, either right click on it and select the color at the bottom of the contextual menu. Or, select several files, go to the File menu, and select the color label you want from the bottom.





While labels are somewhat convenient in themselves, what's even more convenient is that you can search for files based on their labels. To do this, start a search (Cmd-F). Now, click on "Kind" and select "Other...." Do a search for "label" and select the only one that turns up. If you're going to be searching by color label often, select the "In Menu" checkbox, then hit return.





Now, you can do a search for a color label by selecting the label that you want.



Finally, you can change the names of the labels in the Finder preferences (Cmd-,).