Top Ways To Customize The Look Of A New Mac

The design of Mac OS X is appealing. But if you do not like it, you can certainly customize it to your liking. Let's look at some easy ways to customize the look and feel of your new Mac.

Change Desktop Background

Changing the desktop background is the simplest way to bring a big change to your Mac’s looks. The default background on Leopard is a purple Aurora image. It is very easy to change it. Just right-click on the default image then select “Change Desktop Background” from the contextual menu. This will open up Desktop and Screen Saver preferences window. Go to the Desktop tab and drag an image of your choice onto the large preview box on the screen. You can drag images to the preview box from three different sources. One is the Apple provided images listed under the preview box. These are dozens of good quality images for use. Further below these images are iPhoto albums and events. You can go through them to find your own images to use. The last source is a web-page or a Finder window from where you can drag a picture directly onto the preview box.

There are many websites to find out good images. You can also use Google Images to find free images of any size. In Google Images, select Large or Extra Large images from the menu when searching.

Customize Icons

You can change icons of many things like the hard drive, Finder, Trash, etc. Some icons can be changed by altering some settings on Mac OS X and some needs a utility to do so.

The easiest way to change an icon is to find an icon of your choice from a site or somewhere else and copy it. To copy the icon, o

pen up the Info box by selecting the icon then hitting the Cmd-l keys. The image you see in at top-left side of the window is the icon. Select the icon then open the Edit menu and select Copy. Next, just open the Info box for the folder/file you wish to change, click on the icon then from the Edit menu select Paste. Now the icon has been changed and you can close the Info boxes.

You can find millions of icons on the Internet. You can visit Icon Factory and download icons for your Mac.

If you have Corel Draw or Photoshop, you can do much more to the icons like adding a shadow, glow, etc. And after doing it, just follow the steps above.

There are great tools available that let you customize the icons the way exactly you want them. For this purpose, CandyBar is great. This little software will also allow let you change the looks of your Dock

Change Icon Size

You can change the size of icons on your Desktop and in your folders. To do this, right-click on your Desktop then select Show View Options. Move the slider to change the icons size how you like it. If you have a very few icons on your Desktop, try maximizing the size, it will look pretty good. It also looks good to maximize the photo icons in folders and it lets you see the photos without opening them.

Change The Dock

Do not overlook that you can also customize the size and location of the Dock from the Dock preferences pane. You can also access these options by right-clicking in an empty space on the Dock. It would look good if you reduce the Dock size and move it to the right side. You can also hide the Dock if you do not want to see it at all times.

In addition to the above, you can also organize your Dock as you want. Remove the icons that you never use, put in folders and applications that you use.

As mentioned above, use CandyBar to change other looks of your Dock, for example you can change the outline, texture and symbols.

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