Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

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.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONDesktop Fonts

How do I change the fonts used by the Mac OS X Finder?

In Mac OS versions gone by, you could choose any font you liked for your icon labels. You even had a choice of several fonts for use in your menus.

In Mac OS X 10.3, that flexibility is gone. You get Lucida Grande in your menus and as icon labels, love it or leave it. In the View Options window, you can change the type size-just not the font.

For now, Apple intends to remain conservative with the look of Mac OS X-both for “branding” reasons (to make Mac OS X instantly recognizable) and for technical ones (to make sure that it doesn’t open a Pandora’s box of interface hacks that wind up destabilizing the machine).

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 in Section 1.4.1.6.)

The command center for both of these functions is the System Preferences program (which longtime Mac and Windows fans may recognize as the former Control Panels). 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, ...