The System Preferences application is found in your Applications folder and is also available at any time from the Apple menu at the top-left of the screen. When launched, it provides access to a number of panes that deal with various aspects of how your Mac works, appears and behaves, such as screen resolutions, input device shortcuts, and internet accounts.
Accessing System Preferences Panes
When System Preferences is first launched, you’ll see rows of icons, each corresponding to a specific group of related options. Click on any icon to access the relevant pane. Alternatively, you can access a pane via the View menu, or by using the System Preferences Dock icon’s contextual menu (accessed by a click-hold, Ctrl-click or right-click).
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If you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for, use the built-in search. Click in the search field (or use Cmd+F) and start typing. As you type, the number of subjects in the results list will be filtered to match your search term, and spotlights will appear, highlighting potentially relevant panes that might offer what you require. Use the cursor keys to navigate the results list and the spotlight will become more vivid over the option you’re about to chose. Pressing Return or clicking a results list item will confirm.
Customising System Preferences
There are two different kinds of customisation worth noting with system preferences: the panes that are installed and the panes that are visible. By default, OS X will provide you with just under 30 panes in OS X Mavericks (the exact number is determined by the hardware you’re using — for example, if you’ve no optical drive, ‘CDs and DVDs’ will not be shown), but third-party products may also install into System Preferences. Such panes are initially placed at the very bottom of the window. A third-party System Preferences pane can be removed either by the pane’s own uninstaller (if it has one) or by Ctrl/right-clicking it and selecting ‘Remove…’.
You can reorder the panes by using the View menu, which provides options for organising panes by category or listing everything alphabetically. View > Customize enables further changes to be made. When you select this option, checkboxes appear next to each pane. Deselect any pane’s checkbox and click Done and the pane will be hidden, but it will remain accessible from the View menu and when performing searches. Revert a pane’s visibility by using View > Customize, selecting its checkbox and clicking Done.
General
The General pane is a grab-bag of options related to appearance, scroll bars, document behaviour and the number of recent items shown in the Apple menu.
The ‘Appearance’ menu determines the button, menu and window theme for OS X, enabling you to switch between Blue and Graphite. This affects default buttons in dialogs, selected menu items, and also the close/minimise/zoom buttons at the top-left of most app windows. With the Graphite theme, all of these are grey. In the Blue theme, you get the familiar ‘traffic light’ buttons at the top-left of windows and blue buttons/selected menu items elsewhere.
‘Highlight colour’ enables you to change the colour of highlighted content such as selected text in documents. Apple provides a list of colours you can choose from, but you can define your own by selecting Other and using the standard OS X colour picker.
‘Sidebar icon size’ gives you alternate options for the size of icons in Finder’s sidebar. Medium is the default, Large is good if you find it hard to accurately click the existing icons, and Small is the best choice if you’ve a small display or like squinting a lot. Note that the setting you define here also affects the sidebar in Mail.
‘Show Scroll Bars’ adjusts how scroll bars in OS X behave. By default, they are not visible, and show automatically, their visual appearance in part defined by the input device. You can adjust this so that they only show when scrolling regardless of the input device (akin to how scrolling works on iOS), or always show when content is too big for the viewport. The last of those options provides much thicker scroll bars than what you usually see when scrolling; instead, their appearance is like when you hover over an OS X scroll bar and it widens for drag-based interaction.
The ‘Click in the scroll bar to’ setting changes how OS X jumps to content when you click inside a scroll bar. With ‘Jump to the next page’ selected, content jumps in screen-heights or pages, in the direction of your click; with ‘Jump to the spot that’s clicked’, it instead jumps to the point in the document relative to the location clicked on the scroll bar. The first option is less abrupt but slower. If, for example, you were looking at the top part of a very large list in Finder and then clicked the bottom of the scroll bar, ‘Jump to the next page’ would take several clicks to reach the bottom of the list, but with ‘Jump to the spot…’ it would take only one.
The next group of options deals with document behaviours. ‘Ask to keep changes when closing documents’ and ‘Close windows when quitting an application’ do much as you’d expect. In the former case, it’s worth noting that changes are automatically saved when documents are closed: by turning on this option, you instead get the choice regarding whether to save the changes or revert the document to how it was when last opened. If you leave ‘Close windows…’ unchecked, open documents should reappear as they were when you last closed an application. Check this option and applications will launch without any open documents, unless they have their own built-in settings to override OS X’s default behaviour.
The ‘Recent items’ option defines how many items appear in the Recent Items menu in the Apple menu. By default, up to 10 of each type (applications, documents, servers) are shown, but other options are provided. Note that any setting chosen also affects recent-item Dock stacks. You can create one of those by typing the following in Terminal and then hitting Return:
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }' ; killall Dock
Finally, the LCD font smoothing option makes text appear in a slightly more pleasing manner in OS X. There’s no compelling reason to turn this off, so we suggest you don’t.
Desktop & Screen Saver
The Desktop & Screen Saver pane is where you adjust your desktop background image and/or the screen saver that kicks in after a user-defined period of time.
Switching the desktop image doesn’t in fact require a trip to System Preferences. In Finder, you can Control-click any compatible image and choose Set Desktop Picture; similarly, Control-click an image in Safari and you can select Use Image as Desktop Picture. However, the System Preferences pane provides a much greater degree of control, along with a central area to access collections of images.
Click the Desktop tab to access desktop settings. The well will display a thumbnail of the current background image, alongside which will be its title. From the pane on the left, you can select collections of images. By default, you’ll see two under the collapsible ‘Apple’ list (Desktop Pictures and Solid Colors), and your iPhoto albums appear under iPhoto. Below iPhoto will be a collapsible list called Folders, to which you can add custom folders by using the + button. (Sneaky tip: Apple includes a bunch of folders in /Library/Screen Savers/Default Collections, which are otherwise only used for screen savers. They’re worth adding if you like wildlife, space and landscape shots.)
To change the desktop background, select a collection and then click any of the images within. Alternatively, you can drag an image to the well from Finder or iPhoto. If the image is of a suitable size and aspect ratio for your display, it will be resized automatically. If not, a menu will appear enabling you to define whether the image should fill the screen, fit to the screen as best it can, stretch, be centred, or tile.
It’s also possible to have your desktop background change at regular intervals. To do this, select a collection and then check ‘Change picture’. In the pop-up menu, define how often you’d like the background to change; options provided range from 5 seconds to daily, along with login/wake-up. If necessary, define how the images will fill the screen using the aforementioned pop-up menu. Your desktop background will at the appropriate times subtly cross-fade to the next image in the collection; if you instead want each change to be randomised, check ‘Random order’.
The final option within the pane seems rather lumped in, given that it’s about the menu bar rather than the desktop: ‘Translucent menu bar’ when checked makes the menu bar at the top of the screen slightly transparent. Uncheck this and it turns a solid light grey, which improves the legibility of menu items, especially if you’re using a complex desktop background.
Change and manage your screen savers
Click Screen Saver to access the screen savers pane. To the left is a selection of built-in screen savers; select one to choose it as the currently active screen saver (or choose Random to have one be selected at random whenever the screen saver is activated), and use the ‘Start after’ menu to determine how long your Mac remains idle before the screen saver starts. Optionally, a clock can be overlaid on the screen saver, by checking ‘Show with clock’.
Depending on the screen saver chosen, you may get options. For the various photography-based screen savers, you’ll see a Source menu, enabling you to define a source folder of photos to use. On choosing a new source, the screen saver preview will update accordingly. Checking ‘Shuffle slide order’ randomises the presentation from the selection of images.
For other screen savers, you’ll get a Screen Saver Options button that when clicked provides in-context settings for that particular screen saver. For example, Apple’s own Flurry enables you to adjust how many streams of colour appear on the screen, how thick they are, and how fast they move.
To the bottom-right of the pane is a Hot Corners… button. The options are shared with Mission Control and provide the means to trigger various OS X functions when you move the cursor into a screen corner. The first option is Start Screen Saver, and is a very quick means of activating the screen saver. This can be especially useful if you’ve also used the Security & Privacy pane to demand a password be entered to exit the screen saver.
It’s also possible to install third-party screen savers. Once installed, these appear below the built-in options. If you later decide you want to delete a screen saver, Control-click it and select Delete.
Dock
Many of the Dock’s preferences can be adjusted by Control-clicking the separator (a thin line) between apps and folders and choosing from the various options. However, the Dock pane in System Preferences is worth exploring, because it provides a very clear visual overview of all your Dock’s settings.
Size and Magnification determine the size of the Dock icons and how much they expand when the cursor is over them. Magnification is best used when you’ve so many Dock icons that they’re not easy to pick out unless zoomed; if you don’t like the effect, you can disable magnification entirely.
‘Position on screen’ determines the screen edge the Dock sits on. At the left or right edge, the Dock displays as a flat rectangle; at the bottom of the screen, it looks more like a metal shelf.
The ‘Minimize windows using’ menu provides two effects for when windows are minimised to the Dock: Genie and Scale. The former appears to ’suck’ the window into position, whereas the latter is a much simpler zoom that’s less taxing on older Macs and also a lot faster.
The remaining options adjust various behaviours of the Dock: ‘Double-click a window’s title bar to minimise’ does exactly what you’d expect; ‘Minimize windows into application icon’ sends minimised windows to the relevant app icon in the Dock rather than to the Dock’s right-hand side; ‘Animate opening applications’ makes apps bounce while launching; ‘Automatically hide and show the Dock’ makes the Dock disappear from view when not in use, and demands you move the cursor to the relevant screen edge to show it; and ‘Show indicator lights for open applications’ places a little white dot beneath the icons of apps that are currently running.
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