OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual

Menulets: The Missing Manual

See the menu-bar icons in Figure 4-10? Apple calls them Menu Extras, but Mac fans on the Internet have named them menulets. Each menulet is both an indicator and a menu that provides direct access to certain settings in System Preferences. One lets you adjust your Mac’s speaker volume; another lets you change the screen resolution; yet another shows you the remaining power in your laptop battery; and so on.

To make the various menulets appear, you generally visit a certain pane of System Preferences (Chapter 9) and turn on a checkbox called, for example, “Show volume in menu bar.” Here’s a rundown of the various Apple menulets you may encounter, complete with instructions on where to find the magic on/off checkbox for each.

Along the way, you’ll discover that secondary, hidden features lurk in many of these menulets, if you happen to know the secret: Press the Option key.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Desktop Fonts

How do I change the fonts used by the 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 fonts for use in your menus.

Nowadays, that flexibility is gone. You get Lucida Grande in your menus and as icon labels—love it or leave it.

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