5 Ways To Make The Best Use Of Your Laptop’s Screen

Apple’s consumer line notebook, the MacBook features an ultra-compact 13.3� screen. You need to make the best possible use of your limited screen resolution. Here’s 5 ways to maximize your working space and productivity using your small display.

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5.

Hide the dock. If you hide the dock you open up a few extra pixels for yourself to extend the height of your screen.

4.

Switch on tabbed massaging in Adium. This way you will only have one chat window open to host all of your chat’s which are currently active. Use iChat? Then install Chax to group all of your chat together nicely and keep your chat interface organized.

3.

Make your desktop icons smaller by clicking on the desktop, selecting view, show view options in the menu-bar. You can change your icons to display as small as 16×16, which saves extra space on your desktop.

2.

Expose is there on your machine, so are hot corners, use them! Switch on Expose with hot-corners, you will have no idea how much this will revolutionize your OSX experience.

1.

Virtue Desktops. Cant wait for Leopard to arrive so you can try out Spaces? Install Virtue on your Mac and start creating some “virtual� desktops.

This way you can keep all your work related windows in one desktop, your music related stuff in another, and your Mail and IMs in another.

Flick between these desktops using keyboard shortcuts or your mouse, it will save you time, and make you feel like you have a line of ten displays lining your desk, minus the sore neck from moving from side to side.

Comments

  1. #1

    wph

    I use 5, 4, and 2. I like big icons, so I don’t do 3, and virtual desktops were to messy for me, so I don’t use 1.

  2. #2

    Fidel Mercado

    Your link to virtue desktops is not working?

  3. #3

    Sphereboy

    I would like to add, using DragThing has helped me organize many things into a customizable dock that is always available.

    http://www.dragthing.com

  4. #4

    Greg

    I actually use Virtue Desktops now on my MacBook Pro which can be downloaded at http://virtuedesktops.info/ . It’s got the added functionality of motion and light sensors to switch desktops if you’ve seen the SmackBook videos. I’ve come to rely on it to keep my many-many-opened-windows organized.

  5. #5

    Stu

    Tabbed massaging Sounds good. What’s it like?

  6. #6

    Fidel Mercado

    It’s like tabbed browsing in Safari or Firefox; the tabs are the people you are chatting with.

  7. #7

    Jonathan Huyghe

    I find 16×16 a bit extreme, but I did change it to 32, thanks for the tips

  8. #8

    Blair Beckwith

    Didn’t know about Chax; thanks!

  9. #9

    Craig McDiarmid → craigeth.wordpress.com

    i got 4 out of 5. never used Virtue. i dont think my powerbook could handle more than 1 desktop running at once.

  10. #10

    Jehad → jchandab.wordpress.com

    Spaces is great on the MacBook especially when you want to quickly clear the screen for a whole new set of note taking / research whilst still having everything open just a click away.

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