Section 3.5. Designing Your Desktop

3.5. Designing Your Desktop

In some ways, just buying a Macintosh was a renegade act of self-expression. But that's only the beginning. Now it's time to fashion the computer screen itself according to your personal sense of design and fashion.

3.5.1. System Preferences

Cosmetically speaking, Mac OS X offers two dramatic full-screen features: desktop backgrounds and screen savers. (That's not counting the pictures and colors you can apply to individual folder windows , as described on Section 2.3.7.)

The command center for both of these functions is the System Preferences program (the equivalent of the Windows Control Panel). Open it by clicking the System Preferences icon on the Dock, or by choosing its name from the menu.

When the System Preferences program opens, you can choose a desktop picture or screen saver by clicking the Desktop & Screen Saver button. For further details on these System Preferences settings, see Section 13.10.

3.5.2. Desktop Sounds

Desktop sounds are the tiny sound effects that accompany certain mouse drags . And we're talking tiny they're so subdued and sparse, you might not even have noticed them. For example, you hear a little plink/crunch when you drop an icon onto the Trash, a boingy thud when you drag something into a folder, a little whoof ! when you drag something off the Dock and into oblivion, and so on. (The little thud that you hear at the end of a file-copying job is the only one that's actually useful, since it alerts you that the task is complete.)

If all that racket is keeping you awake, however, it's easy enough to get rid of it. Open System Preferences, click the Sound icon, and turn off "Play user interface sound effects."

And if you decide to leave them turned on, pleaseuse discretion when working in a library, neurosurgical operating room, or church .