OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual

General

This panel is mostly about how things look on the screen: windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, and fonts. (It used to be called Appearance, but “General” is more like—yes, you guessed it—the iPhone and the iPad.) Nothing you find here lets you perform any radical surgery on the overall OS X look—but you can tweak certain settings to match your personal style.

GEM IN THE ROUGH: Mysteries of the Battery Menulet

If you’ve got a laptop, don’t miss the checkbox in Energy Saver called “Show battery status in the menu bar.” It puts a handy status indicator () in the menu bar that keeps you informed of your battery’s life.

Without clicking the menulet, all you see is an icon that represents how full the battery charge is. If you turn on Show Percentage from the menulet’s actual menu, then the menulet can also show how much charge remains, in percentage form.

If you click the menulet, however, you can see an estimate of actual time remaining on your battery charge, in hours:minutes form. (If the battery is charging, then you can click this menulet to see how much time until the battery is fully recharged, like this: “0:24 Until Full.”) Either way, the readout is counting down (or up) to that joyous moment.

If you’re seeing only the battery icon (no text) in the menu bar, here’s what the readouts mean:

Power cord in the battery. The laptop is plugged in, and the battery is 100 percent charged. ...