Desktop Icons on a MacBook Pro

Tinytony

Sorry for the stupid question but I'm messing around with a Mac for the first time and I'm just wondering how do you add icons to the desktop?

Sad Professor

You mean change icons? Right-click, get info, click on the icon and copy/paste.

Tinytony

Well I have all the icons along the bottom but I just wanted to put a firefox icon on the desktop. When i right click on the firefox icon on the bottom it just opens. I don't get a menu.

Sad Professor

You mean like a shortcut? Go to your Applications folder, right-click on Firefox, click make alias and then drag the resulting file to the desktop. The icons along the bottom of the screen are called the Dock.

Oh and I just remembered your right-click probably isn't turned on so you'll have to use control-click instead to bring up the contextual menu.

You can turn on the right-click in System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse

Tinytony

Yip, cheers for that! Much handier.

It's my first time using a mac, just setting one up for someone else.
Must say they're v nice!!

nialler

Hi Tinytony

You can add practically anything to the dock, if you want to add an application (like firefox) just navigate as sadprof said to the applications folder, click once to highlight it and drag it over the dock until you see the icons in the dock part to make room and release, this will put a shortcut in the dock to whatever application you like. If you would like to put a shortcut to a folder into the dock you can also do the same procedure but it must be right of the line dividing the applications in your dock and the trash can, this also works with documents (word, excel etc). You can also put shortcuts to any application you want into every window that you open but just doing the same thing and dragging the application to the top of the window (I have my calculator and network utility there).

Hope that helps.

Niall

Sad Professor

Yeah, having shortcuts on the desktop is more of a windows thing. Better to take advantage of the Dock.

ZENER

To think Microsoft payed the Rolling Stones a small fortune for the Start Me Up song back in '95 to highlight the Start menu and still no-one uses it.

I cringe when I see PC's with hundreds of icons on the desktop - how do you find anything ? The only icons on my desktop are my drives !

ZEN

ZENER

Tinytony wrote: »

Well I have all the icons along the bottom but I just wanted to put a firefox icon on the desktop. When i right click on the firefox icon on the bottom it just opens. I don't get a menu.

Why do you want an icon for Firefox on the desktop when it's already on the dock ?

ZEN

nialler

it might be in the dock because it's launched, then disappears when quit. Then again you could be right zener, could be a windows centric type thing.

Sad Professor

ZENER wrote:

To think Microsoft payed the Rolling Stones a small fortune for the Start Me Up song back in '95 to highlight the Start menu and still no-one uses it.

Indeed, although the Start menu is probably pretty intimidating to new computer users. Everytime my uncle rings me with a problem with his Dell and I tell him to access something in the Start menu he doesn't know what I'm talking about. He's been using the computer for over a year and only uses the Start menu to shutdown. He can browse the web, check email, import photos, print, etc but he hasn't a clue what anything in the Start menu does.

One day when I cleaned up his Desktop I counted about 300 shortcuts, lol.

The Dock is so much simpler. Although Apple could do with adding some kind of tutorial for new users like in the System 7 days.