OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide (14 page)
Read OS X Mountain Lion Pocket Guide Online
Authors: Chris Seibold
Tags: #COMPUTERS / Operating Systems / Macintosh
Out of the box, the Mac is a fantastic machine. Its graphical
interface is clean and uncluttered, you can use it to accomplish tasks with
a minimum of frustration, and everything performs exactly how you expect it
to. That honeymoon lasts for somewhere between 10 seconds and a week. While
everything is great at first, you’ll soon find yourself saying, “Man, it
sure would be better if....” When this happens, your first stop should be
System Preferences.
Apple knows that different people want different behaviors from their
Macs. While Mountain Lion can’t possibly accommodate everything that
everyone might want to do, most of the changes you’re likely to want to make
are built right into Mountain Lion.
System Preferences, which you can get to by clicking the silver-framed
gears icon in the Dock (unless you’ve removed it from the Dock, in which
case you can find it in the Applications folder or the
menu), is the place to make your Mac uniquely yours.
But as you’ll see later in this chapter, you can also make some tweaks by
going beyond System Preferences.
One thing that will inevitably happen while you’re adjusting
your System Preferences is that you’ll make a change and later decide that
it was a mistake. For example, say you adjust the time it takes for your Mac
to go to sleep and later decide that Apple had it right out of the box.
Fortunately, some preference panes feature a Restore Defaults button that
resets the settings in that particular pane to the factory defaults.
Mountain Lion comes with 29 preference panes, each of which
controls a bevy of related preferences. With all those options, how will you
remember where to find every setting? For example, are the settings for
display sleep under Energy Saver or Displays? Mountain Lion makes it easy to
find the right preference pane by including a search box right in the System
Preferences window (OS X is big on search boxes). Type in what you’re
looking for; the likely choices get highlighted, and you’ll see a list of
suggested searches (
Figure 5-1
).
Figure 5-1. Likely candidates for keyboard-related preferences
Try searching for one term at a time. For example, if you can’t find
the settings for putting your display to sleep by searching for “display
sleep,” try searching for “display” or “sleep” instead.
With so many preference panes, it’s hard to keep track of
what they all do. This section describes each one.
The System Preferences window is divided into five categories:
Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System, and Other. However,
you may see only the first four because the Other category is reserved for
non-Apple preference panes and doesn’t appear until you’ve installed at
least one third-party preference pane (which usually, but not always, is
part of a third-party application).
Some preferences, such as those that affect all users of the
computer, need to be unlocked before you can tweak them. (If a preference
pane is locked, there will be a lock icon in its lower left.) These can be
unlocked only by a user who has administrative access. On most Macs, the
first user you create has those privileges. If you don’t have
administrative privileges, you’ll need to find the person who
does
and have him or her type in the username and
password before you can make changes.
This preference pane lets you tweak the look and feel of
OS X. The first two options control colors. The Appearance setting
controls the overall look of buttons, menus, and windows and has two
choices: blue or gray. The Highlight setting controls the color used for
text you’ve selected and offers more choices, including selecting your
own color (choose Other).
And the “Sidebar icon size” setting lets you adjust, well,
the size of the icons in OS X’s various sidebars. (The most obvious
sidebar is in the Finder, but if you adjust this setting, other
sidebars—like Mail’s—will also change.)
The second section of this pane lets you decide when you
want the scroll bar to show up. “Automatically based on mouse or
trackpad” leaves the decision up to your Mac; “When scrolling” means the
bars show up only when you’re actively scrolling; and, for those who long for the
days of Snow Leopard, “Always” keeps them visible all the time. No
matter which option you choose, you’re stuck with gray scroll bars—no
more colorful scrolling.
You’ll also find options to modify what happens when you click a
scroll bar. You can set it to automatically jump to the next page or to
the spot that you clicked. The difference between these options isn’t
trivial: if you’re looking at a lengthy web page or a 1,000-page
document, opting for “Jump to next page” means it’ll take a lot of
clicks to reach the end, whereas “Jump to the spot that’s clicked” could
shoot all the way to the end in a flash.
By default, Mountain Lion shows your 10 most recent
applications, documents, and servers in themenu’s Recent Items submenu, but you can change
that number here.
The Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane has two
tabs. The Desktop tab lets you change the desktop background (also known
as wallpaper). You can use the Apple-supplied images, solid colors
(click Custom Color to create your own), or pictures from your iPhoto
library. You can even specify a whole folder of images by clicking the +
button in the tab’s lower-left corner.
If you’re using multiple monitors and invoke this preference
pane, your Mac will open one window on each monitor. You guessed it:
this lets you control the desktop picture and color for each monitor
individually!
If you pick an image of your own, you can control how it’s
displayed by selecting Fill Screen, Fit to Screen, Stretch to Fill
Screen, Center, or Tile from the menu to the right of the image preview.
If you like a little liveliness, you can tell your computer to change
the desktop picture periodically. Apple supplies options ranging from
every five seconds to every time you log in or wake from sleep. And if
you want your menu bar to be solid instead of see-through, turn off the
“Translucent menu bar” checkbox.
If you choose to change the picture periodically without
carefully vetting the source images, you’ll likely be presented with
something completely useless, confusing, or embarrassing at a random
moment.
The Screen Saver tab is a bit more complicated. In the
left half of the pane, you’ll find a long list of slideshows (14
different styles, to be exact). Select a slideshow style and, in the
right side, you’ll see a Source pop-up menu that lets you tell the
slideshow to use images from one of four default collections (National
Geographic, Aerial, Cosmos, Nature Patterns) that all look fantastic.
You can also pick a folder for the slideshow to use. Finally you’ll see
a “Shuffle slide order” checkbox, which you should check if you grow
tired of the same progression of pictures time after time.
If you scroll past the 14 slideshow options, you’ll discover
Screen Savers. Your choices are limited to only six option (seven if you
count Random). Select the screen saver you want your Mac to use, and
you’re done. Well, maybe not—depending on the screen saver you choose,
you might get options. If that is the case, the Screen Saver Options
button in the right side of the pane becomes clickable. Clicking it lets
you set options for that screen
saver.
Below the area where you choose slideshows and screen
savers, you’ll find a pop-up menu labeled Start After which allows you
to control how long your Mac is idle before displaying your chosen
slideshow or screen saver. You’ll also find a checkbox labeled “Show
with clock,” which makes your Mac display a clock with your chosen
animation.
If you’d like the screensaver to kick in on demand—handy
when you’re messing around online and the boss walks in—you can set a
hot corner
that lets you invoke the screensaver
right away. Click the Hot Corners button and you’ll get a new window
with options for every corner. Use the drop-down menus to set options
for any corner you want. After that, when you move your mouse to that
corner, your Mac fires up the screensaver (or does what you told it
to—put the display to sleep, launch Mission Control, or whatever). The
only downside of setting hot corners is that Apple gives you eight
options for each corner, so unless you want to use a modifier key with
the corner, you don’t have enough corners to use all the
options.
By using modifier keys (you can choose from Shift, ⌘,
Option, and Control), you can get a single corner to do many different
things. To add a modifier key to a hot corner, hold down the modifier
key while you select what you want the hot corner to do from the
Active Screen Corners window’s menus. Using modifiers with hot corners
not only gives you extra flexibility, but it also prevents you from
accidentally invoking the hot corner action when you’re mousing
around.
There aren’t a lot of options in the Dock preference pane,
but they give you control over the most important aspects of the Dock.
You can change its size—from illegibly small to ridiculously large—with
the aptly named Size slider, which works in real time so you can see the
change as you’re making it.
If you turn on Magnification, the application or document you’re
mousing over will become larger than the rest of the items in your Dock.
How much larger? Use the Magnification slider to determine that.
If you want to move the Dock somewhere else, click one of the
three “Position on screen” radio buttons: Left, Bottom, or Right. (Top
isn’t an option because you don’t want the Dock to compete with the menu
bar.)
The “Minimize windows using” menu lets you choose which
animation your Mac uses when you minimize a window: the Genie or Scale
effect. (These days, this is just a matter of personal preference, but
in the early days of OS X, some machines weren’t fast enough to render
the Genie effect.) The “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize”
checkbox does just what you’d think—with this setting turned on, you can
minimize windows by double-clicking their title bars.
The “Minimize windows into application icon” setting determines
where your windows go when you click the yellow button found at the
upper left of almost every window. If you leave this unchecked, then
minimized windows appear on the right side of the Dock (or at the bottom
of it if you put the Dock on the left or right side of your screen). If
you turn on this checkbox, you’ll save space in the Dock, but to restore
minimized application windows, you’ll have to right-click or
Control-click the appropriate application’s icon in the Dock, select the
minimized window from the application’s window menu, or invoke Mission
Control.
The checkbox labeled “Animate opening applications” sounds
like more fun than it actually is. All it does is control whether
applications’ Dock icons bounce when you launch them. If you turn this
option off, you’ll still be able to tell when an application is starting
because the dot that appears under it (or next to it, if the Dock is
positioned on the left or right) will pulse (unless you’ve turned off
the indicator lights, as explained in a sec). If you turn on
“Automatically hide and show the Dock,” it will remain hidden until you
move the mouse above or next to it.
The blue dots in the Dock that indicate that an
application is running really bother some people. If these dots are the
bane of your existence, unchecking the “Show indicator lights for open
applications” box to make them go away. To figure out which apps are
running once you’ve banished the dots, use Mission Control or the
Application Switcher.
This pane allows you to adjust how you invoke Mission
Control and what happens when you do.
You’ll find an option to display Dashboard as a desktop space,
which is turned on by default; this setting puts a mini-sized Dashboard
screen at the top of your monitor with your other spaces. You can opt to
have OS X arrange your spaces so that the ones you’ve used most recently
are at the top of the list; if you like to manually set your spaces,
uncheck this option. You can also have OS X switch you to a space with
an open window when you switch applications. With this option on (which
it is by default), if you have a space with a Safari window open, say,
and you switch to Safari from another space or full-screen application,
the space you switch to will have a Safari window open already. If you
turn this option off, you might find yourself in a space without an open
window for the application you just switched to, which can be confusing.
The final option, which is on by default, tells Mission Control whether
to group windows by application. Leaving this box checked keeps all the
windows for Safari (for example) together when you invoke Mission
Control.
You also get to change the shortcuts for invoking Mission Control,
opening application windows, showing the desktop, and showing the
Dashboard. Finally, the Hot Corners button lets you define what your Mac
does when you slide your cursor to a corner of the screen (everything
from launching Mission Control to putting your display to
sleep).
The Language tab of the Language & Text preference
pane lets you set the language your Mac uses.
The Text tab is helpful if you spend much time typing. It
includes a list of symbol and text substitutions your Mac performs,
which lets you do things like type(r)and have it automatically show up as ®.
Even better, you can add your
own
substitutions.
Click the + button below the list to add whatever text you want
substituted and what you want it replaced with; make sure the checkbox
to its left is turned on, and your Mac should make that fix
automatically from then on. This won’t work in every application, but in
the supported ones, text substitutions can save you a lot of
effort.
The Text tab also lets you adjust how OS X checks spelling
(the default is automatic by language, but you can have it check
everything for French even if your Mac is using English). The Word Break
setting affects how words are selected when you double-click on a word,
and two drop-down menus let you customize how double and single quotes
are formatted.
The Region tab (which, before Mountain Lion, was called
the Format tab) lets you control the format of the date, time, and
numbers on your machine; pick which currency symbol to use; and choose
between US (imperial) and metric units of measurement.
On the Input Sources tab, the “Input source” list lets you
select the language you want to type in. You can choose anything from
Afghan Dari to Welsh, which can mean a lot of scrolling. To speed things
up, use the search box below the list to find the language you are
after. You can choose as many languages as you like and switch among
them using the flag menu extra that appears in your menu bar
automatically when you select multiple languages. So you don’t have to
spend all day changing languages, you can assign the languages globally
or locally, respectively, using the radio buttons labeled “Use the same
one in all documents” and “Allow a different one for each
document.”
Turning on “Show Input menu in menu bar” adds a multicolor flag to
the otherwise grayscale menu bar. If you check the box labeled Keyboard
& Character Viewer (at the top of the list of input sources), you’ll
be able to launch the Character Viewer and Keyboard Viewer from the menu
bar.