Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

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.

Changing Colors

Two pop-up menus let you crank up or tone down OS X’s overall colorfulness:

• Appearance. Choose between Blue and Graphite. Blue refers to OS X’s factory setting—bright, candy-colored progress bars, menu, and pulsing OK buttons—and those shiny red, yellow, and green buttons in the corner of every window. If you, like some graphics professionals, find all this circus-poster coloring a bit distracting, then choose Graphite, which renders all those interface elements in various shades of gray.

• Highlight color. When you drag your cursor across text, its background changes color to indicate that you’ve selected it. Exactly what color the background becomes is up to you—just choose the shade you want using the pop-up menu. The Highlight color also affects such subtleties as the lines on the inside of a window as you drag an icon into it.

If you choose Other, the Color Picker palette appears, from which you can choose any color your Mac is capable of displaying.

Sidebar Icon Size

This pop-up menu controls the size of ...