Customize the settings on a new Mac

Here are some of the settings or preferences that I always change when setting up a new mac. Whether it's enabling the right mouse click button or getting your mouse to move faster, you can improve your mac experience by changing the default settings.


Enable the Secondary [Right] Click Button for the Mouse

System Preferences > Mouse

By default, macs do not enable the right click button on mice. The only reason to have to use control-left click to bring up an options menu is when using a laptop with a trackpad.




Show File Name Extensions

Finder > Preferences > Advanced

Just like Windows, the Mac OS hides file extensions by default. This may be good for computer novices, but not anyone who does a lot of work with graphics, videos, or other types of files that come in many different formats.




Increase the Mouse Tracking Speed

System Preferences > Mouse (keyboard and mouse in Leopard)

The preset mouse tracking speed is very slow. You can easily drag a slider in the system preferences to speed up your mouse to your own personal liking.




Other mac preferences for power users:

Turn off Time Machine and hide it from the Menu Bar
Time Machine only works with a mac-only formatted hard drive. Most external hard drives sold in stores come pre-formatted in FAT32, which is not compatible with Time Machine. If you allow Time Machine to run, it will prompt you to format (erase) your external drive so that Time Machine can use it to make backups.

Enable Hot Corners for Expose and Show Desktop
If you use a laptop, you can set keyboard shortcuts for Expose to show all windows, the desktop, or Dashboard. Even better than keyboard shortcuts are actually using the hot corners as they were intended--with your mouse. I've found that setting the two left corners of my screen to be hot corners is the most convenient and I don't activate them accidentally very often. I set top-left hot corner to show the desktop for when I need to access CDs and DVDs, flash drives, and external hard drives mounted on the desktop. My bottom left hot corner activates Expose to show the windows of all my running programs at a glance to easily access a different one.



Show Stacks as a Grid
The way you view Stacks as a Fan or Grid really comes down to personal preference. I find it's much easier to select what you want and see what's there when using the Grid option for Stacks.
When using the fan option, the more aliases [shortcuts] you add, the harder it is to find what you want.


The Fan view (left) and Grid view (right).




















To change how your stacks display, right click on a stack and select Fan, Grid, or List.

Five Important Things That are Different on Mac - Learn to use a Mac

Closing an application with the red X will not close the program
Closing an application with the red X will not close the program, it only closes the open window. To completely close an application. Go the Application's name in the top menu bar, Firefox, for example, and select "Quit Firefox" from the last item of the menu. All open applications will show on the dock with a blue oval next to them to signify that they are open and running.

Devices show up on the desktop
Flash Drives, Hard drives, and Discs will show up on the desktop. They must be dragged to the trash or right-clicked and "ejected" before they can be removed. The eject key on the keyboard will work to eject CDs and DVDs.

How to close a frozen application
To close a frozen or otherwise misbehaving program, remember Option-Command-Escape.

How to install small applications
To install applications that do not have an automatic installation, you must drag the appropriate .app file into the Applications folder. That's it, the application is "installed" and ready to be used.

Get up to speed on keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts on the Mac are nearly identically, except mac equivalent of the control key on the PC is the command key. It has a clover shaped icon (and on some keyboards an apple icon). All of common shortcuts including, cut, copy, and paste all use the command key.



Command + C Copy
Command + V Paste
Command + X Cut