This chapter shines a light into some further corners of Lion’s world. It takes the form of a list of additional miscellaneous customizations that you should not neglect in your eagerness to get on with using Lion.

Set Up Login Items

Your login items are applications that launch automatically when you log in to your user account. These are typically applications that you like to be always active; because of Mac OS X’s virtual memory model and non-polling event loop architecture, there is usually no penalty for having numerous applications running, except that when you start up your Mac, you must wait for them all to launch before you can get much done.

Login Items vs. Resume

Login items are not the same as Lion’s Resume feature (described earlier, in Get Ready for Resume). Resume will relaunch GUI applications (applications with windows) that were running when you logged out, unless you unchecked that option in the logout dialog. A login item will always launch when you log in, even if its process was not running previously, and even if its process does not have a GUI.