5 Commonly Overlooked System Preferences

The System Preferences panel has many overlooked settings. Here are my favorite 5.

5. Smooth Scrolling

One small but important feature I found inside System Preferences -> Appearance is called Use smooth scrolling.

Enabling smooth scrolling makes the page glide up and down the screen without any rigidness.

This only applies when using the page up/down, spacebar and home/end keys while navigating a page.

The difference here is subtle, but I’m a fan. I often use the spacebar while reading news feeds and it’s made the experience surprisingly better.

4. Great Screensavers Custom & Built-in

OS X has some great screensavers built right in. There’s the standard Flurry screensaver:

But there’s also iTunes Artwork, RSS Visualizer and Word of the Day:

Leopard added Arabesque, a vibrant grid of blurring dots, to the collection:

But you can also use custom screensavers. Apple also has a good variety of these, along with Google.

One really cool screensaver I found is called Lotsawater. It renders a cool water effect over your desktop:

3. Easily Search and Find

This isn’t so much a preference as it is a feature of System Preferences.

Finding preferences is extremely easy–even if you don’t know where to look.

The search box knows all of the options inside the panels, and will take you to the correct place when you hit enter.

2. Customize Default Alert Sound Effect

I wish I would have thought about customizing this setting sooner. The default Funk sound effect that plays as an alert is downright terrible compared to Morse.

There are a dozen alert sounds, so I suggest finding the one that best fits you inside System Preferences -> Sound -> Sound Effects.

1. Customizing Global Keyboard Shortcuts

Inside System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts you will find a list of global keyboard shortcuts you may want to change or disable entirely.

For example I find it annoying to have Front Row set to Command+Escape. Sometimes while pressing Command+` I slip and Front Row pops up and completely interrupts my workflow.

The solution here is either changing or disabling the Front Row keyboard shortcut.

You can set many other keyboard shortcuts here, including:

• Look up in dictionary shortcut
• Take Screenshot with your keyboard
• Super Zoom
• Invert screen colors
• and many more…