Effective Tips To Change The Way Your Mac Appears and Behaves

Macs offer a simple, intuitive user experience. On the surface, it may seem like you cannot do much to tweak the system’s behavior or appearance other than the essentials like tinkering with the brightness setting or turning on dark mode. But there are plenty of hidden customization features waiting to be explored.

Without further ado, let’s get started.

Highlight Mouse Cursor

Has it happened that you’ve wasted precious minutes locating the mouse pointer? If several tabs and windows run simultaneously or you’re in the middle of a presentation, the cursor may become difficult to spot.

Fortunately, you can make the cursor more visible, and the solution is to choose to have the Mac highlight mouse pointer. You can change the color to highlight the cursor or increase its size. Alternatively, if you want the cursor to disappear, you can decrease its size.

To highlight the cursor, head to System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Pointer > set your desired options for outline color, pointer size, and fill color.

You can also enable the Shake Mouse Pointer to Locate option to make the pointer larger when you quickly move the mouse.

Click Reset to go back to default settings.

Use An Animated Login Avatar

No need to stare at the static selfie of yourself whenever your system boots up. Jazz it up using a Memoji or animated emoji as your login avatar. These icons are interesting to look at because they respond to your actions on the lock screen. For instance, you will see the character sleeping if you are away for too long.

Go to System Preferences > Users & Groups > hover the cursor over the login image and click Edit. Select a new animated avatar from the Memoji tab or create one by clicking the Plus button. Once you are done, click Save.

Set New Wallpaper

Bring your Mac to life by swapping the default wallpaper with something new. This will instantly refresh your system’s appearance. Navigate to the Wallpaper section from the Apple menu.

Select a static picture under Pictures, Dynamic Wallpapers, or Light & Dark Wallpapers. You can also choose a solid background color under Colors.

If you choose the Dynamic Wallpapers option, the wallpaper will automatically change throughout the day to match the time of the day.

Alternatively, you can choose a memorable picture from the Photos application and set it as wallpaper. This will truly make the Mac feel like your own. You’ll even be excited to turn on your system because the wallpaper takes you back to a happy place.

If you want, you can download pictures from the web and use them as wallpaper.

Use Custom Sounds

Extend your customization efforts to system sounds. Pick a different computer voice by going to System Preferences > Accessibility > Spoken Content > System Voice. The Mac alert sounds can be personalized in System Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects.

You can instruct your system to announce the time at specific intervals by going to System Preferences > Control Center > Clock Options.

Change Safari’s Home Page

A bunch of customization tools are added to Safari with every new update. If you use the updated Safari version, you can utilize the home page editor.

The browser’s home page can be updated with a new background, and you can choose the sections you want to see, like Reading List or Privacy Report.

Open the web browser and click the Settings button on the home page. Select a background from the collection or upload a picture by clicking the plus button.

While you are here, you can change the floating tab design. Opt out of it by going to Preferences > Tabs > Tab Layout.

Use a Custom Color Scheme

Various color presets can be mixed and matched for highlights and system accents. You can create a custom color scheme for your computer. This will instantly refresh the appearance of your device.

Head to Appearance by going to System Preferences and choose new colors under Accent Color and Highlight Color. The selected color scheme will reflect across boxes, buttons, selections, menus, and other system elements.

You can also consider enabling dark mode to refresh the look of your Mac. This mode will give your system a dark appearance, and the changes will reflect across elements like the app windows, the Dock, the menu bar, and the sidebars. So, the content will shine and make it easier for you to work in darker environments.

Additionally, you can enable Night Shift mode, and this will automatically darken the appearance of your system when the environment is darker. This also helps to protect your eyes against blue light exposure.

Besides these, you can enable Hot Corners to assign a specific action to the display’s four corners. The specified action will be performed when you hover the cursor on any of the corners.

Conclusion

Try these customization tips to give your system a new look. Once you do these, it’ll be a pleasure to work on your Mac.