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Don't let downloaded files clutter up your desktop.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Making OS X downloads behave, Part 1: DMG control


April 27, 2005


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2005, The Post-Standard

   Mac OS X computers make downloading easy. But sometimes, even "easy" is a little hard. If you're new to the Mac or if you're a longtime OS X user frustrated by downloads, this week's tips are for you.
   1. Know where your files go.
   Don't let downloaded files clutter up your desktop. The desktop is great for storing lots of things, but it's a terrible place for downloaded files. They'll clutter it up before you can say "Jack Robinson's iPod."
   Create a folder just for downloads and put it on your desktop or in your Documents folder. Call it "Downloads." (No, don't put the quotation marks in the name. I'm just showing you what the name should be.) Then tell your Web browser to put downloads there. You do that in the Preferences for your browser. (In Safari, for example, open the Safari preferences. Under "General," open the dropdown menu that says "Save downloaded files to:" and choose the location.)
   2. Use DMG control.
   A DMG file, pronounced "dimage" or "damage," is a disk image. When you double click a DMG icon, the disk hidden in the disk image expands into a virtual disk and shows up on your desktop. Your Mac thinks it's a real disk, which is both good and bad. It's good, because a disk derived from a DMG file can hold anything a real disk can hold -- a complete program you just downloaded, for example -- but it's bad because your Mac practically invites you to run programs you download right from their virtual disks.
   Bad idea. Treat those DMG files as if they're just temporary containers for downloads, because that's all they are. The virtual disk will go away when you delete the file it arrived in. That could be a rude surprise.
   So do it this way. When the disk image appears on your desktop, look around to see if it's already opened itself in a window -- sometimes downloads do that for you -- and if you don't see it, double click the disk icon to provide a window. Your downloaded item, usually a program or application, will show up in that window.
   Be sure to do this next: Look for documentation and read it before doing anything else. (I'm saying "Be sure to do this next" because many of you are going to do the opposite. You'll look for the downloaded program and forget to look for anything that tells what it does or what it doesn't do. Bad idea No. 2.)
   Sometimes the documentation is fancy -- a full PDF document with illustrations, maybe -- but most of the time you'll find just a note written in a text file.
   3. Make sure you have your own Applications folder. This is a one-time step, so do it now if you haven't done it already. Create it within your home folder. Your home folder is the one that has an icon that looks like a cozy house in the Users folder. (Double click your hard drive icon, then double click the Users icon. You'll see your home folder. Drag it down to the right side of the dock to put an alias on your dock. (That's always a good idea.)
   Having your own Applications folder separate from the one Apple provided is essential in two ways: Stuff you put there is clearly yours, and doesn't belong to others who use your Mac with their own logon, and everything in your home folder is a cinch to back up.
   So go ahead and make a folder in your home folder called Applications. Then, each time you have a new downloaded program that you want to install, create a folder in your own Applications folder named for that program and drag the files in the downloaded DMG into that new folder.
   There are other kinds of downloads, and we'll look at how to handle them next week. I'll also suggest a cool way to keep track of your applications so you can launch them without hunting around.