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There are plenty of ways to turn your Mac into the ultimate productivity machine, but few are easier than ensuring that the apps you use every single day are loaded as soon as you turn it on and log in. OS X Lion may have gone some way to solve this by introducing Resume – a feature that automatically reloads recently used windows, but there’s a little-known feature lying in System Preferences that gives you even more control over what goes on.
Login Items enables you to load apps every time you boot up your Mac on a user-by-user basis – making it great for families who share the same machine. Over the next nine steps, we’ll take you through everything you need to know about Login Items and how you can master this useful OS X feature to make your Mac life more productive than ever before.
1: All in the Apple
Load the Apple menu in the top-left of your menubar and fire up System Preferences. You can also find this by searching for it in Spotlight.
2: Locate preference
In System Preferences, head over to the Users & Groups preference pane – it’s usually situated in the bottom-left corner under the System heading.
3: Unlock it
In order to make any edits to your Login Items, you’ll need to unlock the Preference pane. To do this, click on the padlock and enter your login credentials.
4: Choose a user
From the list, choose the username of the person whose Login Items you’d like to edit. Choose carefully if you’re using a shared or work machine.
5: Click the header
Over on the right, you’ll see all the different preferences available for that specific user. At the top, click on the Login Items header to make changes.
6: Give and take
Below the list of current Login Items, click on either the plus or minus icon to add a new Login Item or delete an existing one, respectively.
7: Add an app
If you decide to add a new Login Item, click on the plus icon then choose an app you’d like to load (when your Mac boots up) from the File browser.
8: Keep it hidden
There may be some apps you’ll want to load when you log in, but keep hidden. If that’s the case, click the Hide checkbox next to its name in the list.
9: Lock it up
When you’re finished editing, be sure to click on the lock padlock icon to stop any unauthorised edits that could cause problems later on.
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