How to Customize Your General Preferences

Customize your general preferences on your computer to make it a pleasure to use! Here is a list of the basic features. Note that these settings below are part of OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, some but not all of these choices will be available to you.

Open up your System Preferences pane (either the gray gearbox in your Dock, or on the Apple Menu). Click on the first button, General.

1. Appearance. By default, dialog box buttons are blue, as is your menu highlight color, and several other elements on your screen. If you’d like, you can change this to Graphite, and the buttons will match the rest of the gray color scheme. However, I personally leave this on blue to make my options more visually obvious.
2. Highlight color. When you drag across text on your computer, it highlights in blue. But there’s no reason not to change this to a color you like better, like orange, purple or green. Add a little pizzazz!
3. Sidebar icon size. You can change the size of the icons in a Finder window. Make them smaller to see more all at once, or make them larger if your eyes are bad. If you make them larger, you can also make the column wider by holding your cursor over the right edge of the sidebar until you get a double-headed arrow, then dragging to the right.
4. Show scroll bars. Change this to Always, and you won’t wonder where your scroll bar went, or how to move up or down your page anymore. Highly recommended!
5. Click in the scroll bar to: Have you noticed that the gray “slider” in a scrollbar is  proportionally big or small according to how much of the page you can see, out of the total length? This setting changes what happens when you click above or below the grey slider. If you have it set to “Jump to the next page” your click will jump your insertion point one page at a time. If you set it to “Jump to the spot that’s clicked,” it will make use of that proportional location – if you click 3/4 of the way down the scrollbar, you’ll move to 3/4 of the way down your document!
6. Ask to keep changes when closing documents: Mountain Lion now autosaves documents made in Apple programs like Pages, Numbers, and TextEdit. In the past, if you quit a program without Saving, you would lose your changes. Now, it Saves automatically by default. But if you’re in the habit of quitting a program with the assumption that you don’t want your changes saved, check this box and every time you quit it will ask you if you want to Save Your Changes or not.
7. Close windows when quitting an application: Mountain Lion now Resumes your documents. In other words, if you leave a document open when you quit a program, it will open up again automatically next time. Personally, this saves me a lot of time, because I frequently use the same file, or don’t finish in just one sitting…and if I really am done with it, I simply click the red dot in the corner before quitting the program. But some people want to start fresh with a blank file every time, and checking this option will prevent documents from reopening by themselves.
8. Recent items: There’s a frequently-overlooked item on the Finder’s File menu that allows you to open up a recently used application or document. By default it lists 10 programs or files, so you can quickly reopen something you were just using. I like to change this to 20 or 30 items, which generally gives me everything I could possibly need.

Watch the video!