UsingMac.com - Mac Tricks and Tips, Wallpapers and Applications for Mac Users

Basically, you can change your Mac's appearance from inside Apple ▸ System Preferences ▸ Appearance. Inside this pane, you can change your Mac color appearance, window behavior, recent items or even font smoothing.

Let's see what you can do with it.

Mac Benefit 1: You don't need to click Apply like Windows. The changes will be applied instantly.

Color Appearance

Inside this pane, you will see that you have the default value for Appearance: Blue and Highlight Color: Blue.

Appearance

By changing the setting on the Appearance, you will change the look and feel of your Mac. Overall, this will change the look of buttons from Red-Yellow-Green into Graphite. I personally think that the Graphite Appearance appears to be more professional and less obtrusive to eyes.

Mac Benefit 2: The settings provided on your Mac are meant to increase your productivity, not the opposite way.

Highlight Color

And to change the color of highlighted text, you can do it by changing the color value of Highlight Color. You can choose any colors of your choice for highlight color by selecting Other... It's interesting to know that the change made to Highlight Color applies to not only selected text but also selected window when you want to perform window print screen.

Window Behavior: Scroll Bar and Title Bar

Scroll Arrows Placement

The first thing you can change in your Mac is where you want to place your scroll bar arrows. This behavior is controlled by two radio buttons labelled Place scroll arrows: Together or At top and bottom. There are also Terminal commands that have the power to give you more options for this setting:

1. Together at Left Side

   defaults write -g AppleScrollBarVariant -string DoubleMin
   killall Finder
   

2. Together at Both Side

   defaults write -g AppleScrollBarVariant -string DoubleBoth
   killall Finder
   

Scroll Bar Clicking

By default, clicking on the scroll bar won't directly jump you to the clicked place, but it will gradually move to clicked page, as it's set to Jump to the next page. However, if you're previously a Windows user, you will notice that the second option Jump to here is more familiar to you. This option will grant you the behavior of instant jumping to clicked page.

Smooth Scrolling

When this option is enabled, the movement of the scroll bar look smoother. However, it will be harder to quickly scan through the document when the Smooth Scrolling option is enabled.

Title Bar Behavior

By double-clicking a window title bar, you can minimize that window. But this can be done if and only if respected option is enabled.

Recent Items

This option is there to set the limit of extra Dock item called Recents Tile. This new Dock item can be made using Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
killall Dock

Mac Benefit 3: Hidden features of your Mac are useful but you still can live without activating them.

If you haven't executed this Terminal command, I don't think this Recent Items settings will appear on your Appearance Preferences Pane.

Font Smoothing

Anti-Aliasing Threshold

The anti-aliasing threshold for text can also be set inside this pane. It's controlled by the last option box. I prefer to set the threshold low enough, so that most of the readable texts are anti-aliased. You can try it yourself and you will notice the huge different between text without anti-aliasing compared to that with anti-aliasing.