Section 102. Change General Color and Appearance Settings

102. Change General Color and Appearance Settings

SEE ALSO

76 Install a New Font

103 Change Your Desktop Picture

The most basic kinds of customizations you can make to the operating system are the ones that affect the appearance of the entire system (for your login sessions only, not other users'): fonts, interface element colors, and the items that go into the global Apple menu that always appears at the top of the screen no matter what application you're using.

1.	Open the Appearance Preferences Open the System Preferences application (under the Apple menu); click the Appearance icon to open the Appearance Preferences pane.
2.	Select an Appearance Color Mac OS X has two general color schemes: Blue (the standard Aqua color scheme, with blue scroll and progress bars and red, yellow, and green window control buttons ) and Graphite (which turns all these colored elements gray). Select Graphite if you dislike the vivid colors in Mac OS X; this color option makes for a much more subdued user environment.
3.	Select a Highlight Color By default, when you select text in applications, it is highlighted in blue. You can change the highlight color to any of seven predefined tones, or you can select your own highlight color by picking Other from the Highlight Color drop-down menu and then using the color picker to choose a custom color. TIP When selecting a custom color, bear in mind that the black text in most text applications has to show up on top of the color you choose when text is selected. If the color you pick is too dark, the text will be hard to read. Pastel colors work best. 102. Change General Color and Appearance Settings
4.	Customize Scroll Bars You can choose to have the arrows on the scroll bars in windows placed at opposite ends of the scroll bar, or together at the bottom or right side of the bar. Arrows are placed together by default; this is usually more comfortable for most users because it involves less mouse movement. You can also customize what happens when you click in a part of a scroll bar. Select whether you want Mac OS X to jump directly to the part of the window indicated by the part of the scroll bar that you clicked, or to move closer to that position by a single page with each click.
5.	Select the Number of Recent Items to Show By default, the Recent Items submenu of the Apple menu shows the 10 most recently launched applications, the 10 most recently opened documents, and the 10 most recently connected servers. You can configure the menu to show between 0 and 50 of each.
6.	Customize Font Smoothing Depending on what kind of display (monitor) you have, you might want to modify the style of text smoothing ( antialiasing ) that Mac OS X uses. If you have a CRT display (a deep, heavy, TV-like monitor) or a Mac that uses one (such as an eMac or older iMac), choose the Standard option. If you have an LCD (flat panel), choose Medium smoothing. You can also make the smoothing sharper ( Light ) or fuzzier ( Heavy ), depending on how you like your text to appear. You may decide to just leave it as Automatic , the default setting, which chooses an appropriate antialiasing setting for your display. KEY TERM Antialiasing The technical term for "smoothing," as with fonts or diagonal lines. Sharp differences aliasing between the colors of neighboring pixels (dots on the screen) are "softened" visually by changing the colors of intermediate pixels to colors somewhere in between. This has the effect of making text look smoother (and readable at much smaller sizes), pictures more appealing, and individual pixels on the screen virtually invisible. Text smaller than a certain size is not smoothed; you can define that threshold size , between 4 and 12 points, using the Turn off text smoothing for font sizes <n> and smaller drop-down list.