OS X El Capitan: The Missing Manual

Designing Your Desktop

In some ways, just buying a Macintosh was already a renegade act of self-expression. But that’s only the beginning. Now it’s time to fashion the computer screen itself according to your personal sense of design and fashion.

System Preferences

Cosmetically speaking, OS X offers two dramatic full-screen features: desktop backgrounds and screensavers. For details, see Desktop & Screen Saver.

Graphic Designers’ Corner: The Gray Look

One of the earliest objections to the lively, brightly colored look of OS X came from Apple’s core constituency: artists and graphic designers. Some complained that OS X’s bright blues (of scroll-bar handles, progress bars, the menu, pulsing OK buttons, and highlighted menu names and commands), along with the red, green, and yellow window-corner buttons, threw off their color judgment.

Apple has been de-colorizing OS X ever since. The three-dimensional effects are less drastic, and the button colors are less intense. In Snow Leopard, both the menu and the Spotlight menu went from colorful to black, and in Lion, the Sidebar lost its color. In Yosemite and now El Capitan, OK buttons no longer pulse.

Tip

The Highlight Color pop-up menu lets you choose a different accent color for your Mac world. This is the background color of highlighted text, the colored oval that appears around highlighted icon names, and a window’s “lining” as you drag an icon into it.

But in case the color scheme still bothers artists, Apple created what it calls the Graphite look for OS X, which turns all those interface elements gray instead of blue. To try out this look, choose →System Preferences; click General, and then choose Graphite from the Appearance pop-up menu.

Dark Menu Bar and Dock

The System Preferences panel just described (General) sprouts another option: “Use dark menu bar and Dock.” When you turn on this checkbox, the menu bar, the menus themselves, and the Dock become dark gray and nearly opaque; see Figure 4-10.

Desktop Sounds

Desktop sounds are the tiny sound effects that accompany certain mouse drags. And we’re talking tiny—they’re so subdued that you might not have noticed them. You hear a little plink/crunch when you drop an icon onto the Trash, a boingy thud when you drag something into a folder, a whoof! when you drag something off the Dock and into oblivion, and so on. The little thud you hear at the end of a file-copying job is actually useful, because it alerts you that the task is complete.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: Desktop Fonts

How do I change the fonts used by the OS X Finder?

In Mac OS versions gone by, you could choose any font you liked for your icon labels. You even had a choice of fonts for use in your menus.

Nowadays, that flexibility is gone. In El Capitan, the font used by your menus and icon labels is a modified version of Helvetica Neue called San Francisco—and you can love it or leave it.

For now, Apple intends to remain conservative with the look of OS X—both for “branding” reasons (to make OS X instantly recognizable) and for technical ones (to make sure it doesn’t open a Pandora’s box of interface hacks that wind up destabilizing the machine).

If all that racket is keeping you awake, however, it’s easy enough to turn it off. Open System Preferences, click the Sound icon, and then turn off “Play user interface sound effects.”

And if you decide to leave them turned on, please—use discretion when working in a library, church, or neurosurgical operating room.

Figure 4-10. “Use dark menu bar and Dock” (left) offers a cool, soothing contrast to the standard color scheme (right). It’s intended to please the legions of Mac-based artists and designers; the menus and Dock become calmer and less distracting.