Login Items

This version of this page is valid for OS X 10.3. If you are on OS X 10.2 or earlier, please visit the 10.2 login items page instead!

Many of Stick Software's products, such as Measles, Eyeballs, BigFoot and Jiggler, work well as "login items". Login items are applications (and other documents) that your computer opens automatically for you every time you log in to your user account. If your computer is set up to have only one user account, then your login items will be opened whenever you start up your computer. Typically, login items are things you want to run all the time, whenever you're using your computer.

These instructions assume that you have already installed the application you have downloaded, by decompressing it, opening the disk image file, and copying the application inside to your local hard drive. If you have not done this (or if you're not sure), please read our help file on disk images first.

System Preferences

Login items are configured in System Preferences. System Preferences is a very useful application provided by Apple as part of your installation of OS X. It can be found inside the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Double-click it to run it. A window will appear, filled with icons with titles beneath them. Find the "Accounts" icon in the "System" section, or alternatively, select "Accounts" from the View menu:

Once you have selected the Accounts view, the window will change to display a list of user accounts for your machine. It should look vaguely like this (although your user account names will be different, and you may have only one account or more than two, and the window may have a toolbar at the top, and so forth):

With the topmost account selected (the one marked "My Account", the currently active user), there will be a "Startup Items" tab on the right that you can click. (With other user accounts selected, that tab is not present; only the current user's startup items can be configured, so if you want to change them for a different user, you need to log in as that user.) Click on the "Startup Items" tab and you should see a list like this:

The table on the right lists all of the applications and files that will be opened when you log into the current user account. There may be no items in your login items list (although sometimes particular products will insert items into your login items automatically, to have "helper" applications running all the time for them; that is generally fine, so don't worry too much about items in your startup list that you are not familiar with), but you should feel free to add any applications that you find useful enough to wish them to always be running, such as TextEdit or Preview.

Adding items

You can add a login item in two ways. One is to click on the "+" button (the one right below the startup items list, not the "+" button below the list of user accounts on the left):

Then select the application you wish to add in the sheet that appears. The other is to drag the application that you wish to add into the login items table:

Shown here is a drag that will add Eyeballs to the user's login items. The Eyeballs application is being dragged in at the right side of the window.

Removing items

To remove an items from your login items, simply select it by clicking on its entry in the table, and then click the "-" button (pictured above; the one right below the startup items list, not the "-" button below the list of user accounts on the left). The selected startup item will be removed immediately.

Further questions

If you have further questions about System Preferences or the Login Items panel, you might try reading Apple's documentation, available through the Help menu in System Preferences. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you have, comments on this page, or other issues, by sending email to our support email address. Happy downloading!