Customizing Your Mac

There are a lot of adjustments you can make to the way your computer works. Sometimes this is wonderful.

If you overdo customization, it can eat up a lot of time and become a maintenance nightmare..

This lesson is oriented toward OSX 10.6, Snow Leopard and OSX 10.7 Lion .

System Preferences

Select  ► System Preferences. You will see icons for preference topics. Click each one and you will see what you can change. Mostly the default values are fine. (When you finish with one topic, click Show all to go back to the list of all topics.)

• Date and time. I like to flash the time separators.
• Choose a screen saver and desktop picture.
• Expose/Mission Control: Hot corners and Fkeys. I set upper left to start the screen saver, upper right to prevent it. I don't use Spaces: some programs don't work with it.
• Security: (For OSX prior to 10.7) Don't turn on FileVault. It has been a source of problems. It really only protects users of the same computer from each other.
• Security, Firewall: set the protection to allow only essential services.
• Energy saver. Set sleep time. On my computer I set Graphics to higher performance and this seems to make a difference.
• Keyboard. Personally I hate the CAPS LOCK key: it does nothing but cause me trouble. So I click Keyboard ► Modifier Keys and set it to No Action.
• Trackpad (on laptops). Learn multi-touch.
• Sharing. Name your computer something short with no spaces or special characters, so it is easy to access from ssh .
• Print + Fax. Add your printer (see Lesson Two).
• Accounts. Laptops should have a password. Add your photgraph to your account. You can set up a list of applications to start whenever you log into your computer.

Web Browsers

 Install the Adobe Flash Plugin to enable your browsers to display Flash content. Keep it up to date: there are many malware attacks that try to trick Flash into infecting your computer.

In Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, I make a folder in the bookmarks toolbar called "daily" (by using Bookmarks ► Organize Bookmarks) and add my everyday favorites to it. Every morning, I click on the folder and select Open all in tabs to open all the listed sites, each in its own tab.

Make sure "Open 'safe' files after downloading" is NOT checked in Safari preferences. This is important for security.

Safari, Chrome, and Firefox support plugins, which you can add to your browser to change how it does things. For Firefox, I have installed:

• FlashBlock: no Flash animations till I say so.
• AdBlock Plus: strip out ads from web pages.
• Perspectives: improve security.
• Password Exporter: export all the passwords Firefox has saved into a file.
• Web Developer: tools for testing and debugging web pages.
• NoScript: don't run Javascript unless I permit it.

Dashboard

Hitting F12 brings up the Dashboard, showing "widgets" you have installed. I use Dictionary, Calculator, weather, phone lookups, and system status. You can get tides, movies, etc.

Applications at Startup

In  ► System Preferences ► Accounts, you can set up a list of applications to start whenever you start your computer.

Finder Preferences

It is useful to make a few changes from the default in the Finder preferences. I choose "show all extensions" so that file names will show the full name of the file, e.g. "Mail.app" instead of "Mail". I also disable the trash warning, to suppress a dialog box every time I try to empty the trash. I select "Customize toolbar" and add the "Path" widget to the Finder toolbar: it is helpful when you have several windows open and forget which is which, e.g. is this on my computer or a remote computer on my home network.