Mac Gems: Startupizer takes control of login items
Gentle Bytes’ $10 Startupizer is one of those utilities that does one very specific thing, but does it well. The thing, in this case, is manage your login items—those apps and other nifty processes that you’ve opted to automatically launch or open every time you log in to your account on your Mac. Startupizer does this well by giving you greater control than OS X over exactly when and how those things launch. (Note that, confusingly, Startupizer doesn’t manage startup items, the system-level items that run when your Mac starts up. Rather, it manages only the user-level items that open when you log in.)
Normally, your list of login items sits buried a couple levels deep in the System Preferences utility (specifically, in the Login Items screen inside the Users and Groups pane). Once you find that list, there’s not a lot you can do with it: You can add items to it, and decide whether they should launch visibly or not, but System Preferences doesn’t let you otherwise control the login process.
Startupizer replaces the Login Items list in System Preferences with its own list.
Startupizer automatically detects any items (apps, files, menu-bar utilities) you already have in the official login-items list. You can then select which of those items should be managed by Startupizer. If you later add new items to OS X’s login-items list (say, by installing a new app and opting to have it launch at login), Startupizer detects that addition and alert you; you can then choose to move the new item to Startupizer’s list or leave it in System Preference’s list.
Once an item is in the Startupizer list, you define the conditions under which you want it to launch. Those conditions fall into three categories: date and time; modifier keys; and power source (battery or power adapter). So, for example, you could define a condition that says a particular app should launch whenever you log in between the hours of 9am and 5pm on weekdays. (You could call that condition Work.) Or you could define a condition that says don’t launch an app if you hold down the Option key at login. You can create as many of these conditions as you need, and then choose which ones apply to which apps.
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