Drag-Create Links on the Desktop

One of the great new features of the BeOS Preview Release (if you used the previous releases, anyway) is the ability to put items on the Desktop. This means that you can put your most frequently used applications and files on the Desktop, where they are always handy.

Something that you will quickly find, however, is that it's better to put a link to the item on the Desktop, rather than the item itself (links are like Mac OS aliases, a reference to the item, rather than the item itself). This lets you keep your files organized, and applications stay in their folders inside the /applications folder, where they belong.

What is cumbersome, at least until you know the trick, is to get the link there in the first place. That is, if you select the item and use the Create Link command in the File menu of the Tracker (or in the context-sensitive menu), you can create the link almost anywhere on your hard drive -- except on the Desktop, it seems. So you create it somewhere, and then move it to the Desktop, and grumble that the BeOS interface needs a bit of work.

There is an easier way, though. Instead of selecting the item and using the Create Link command, try the following steps:

1. With the secondary mouse button (or while holding down the Control and Command keys on your keyboard if you have a single-button mouse), click and hold down on the item, and immediately drag it to the Desktop.

2. Drop the item there (by letting go of the mouse button).

3. Instead of moving the item to the Desktop, a short context-sensitive menu will appear under your mouse pointer. Choose Create Link Here from the menu.

Shazam! A link to the item is created on the Desktop, with the same name as the original item. Note that you could have done any of the other things in the context-sensitive menu, also.