Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Yosemite Edition

General

This pane is mostly about how things look on the screen: windows, menus, buttons, scroll bars, and fonts.

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 red, yellow, and green buttons in the corner of every window. If you, like some graphics professionals, find this circus-poster coloring a bit distracting, then choose Graphite, which renders all those interface elements in various shades of gray.

• Use dark menu bar and Dock. When you turn this checkbox on, the backgrounds of your menu bar and Dock turn dark gray. Here again, Apple probably had visual artists in mind—but it looks cool and calming no matter who you are.

• Highlight color. When you drag your cursor across text, its background changes color to indicate that you’ve selected it. Which color the background becomes is up to you; choose a shade from 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 (see the box on the next page) 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 the icons in the Sidebar (The Finder ...