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.
Cosmetically speaking, macOS offers two dramatic full-screen features: desktop backgrounds and screensavers. For details, see Tip.
One of the earliest objections to the lively, brightly colored look of the Mac OS came from Apple’s core constituency: artists and graphic designers. Some complained that the 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 the OS 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. Today, 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, 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.
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 5-10.
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, 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.
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.
