10 Fun Ways To Customize Your Mac Without Adding More Apps

You can highly customize what your Mac looks like without having to buy or download any new software. You can change the Destkop background, move the Dock, make folder names and icons more interesting, add notes and pictures with Stickies, change the system alter sound and so much more.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten ways you can customize your Mac.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 700 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.
Now here you see a basic Mac setup. It's using the default background and everything is setup just like it would be if you just installed macOS. But you can highly customize this and make it your own. For instance, your Mac can look like this instead. So how do you get from here to here. Let's start with changing the Desktop background. 
This is probably the most dramatic change you can make and you could really make your Mac your own by changing this background. Go to System Preferences and then Desktop and Screen Saver. Make sure you've chosen Desktop here at the top. Now you have a variety of options. You can choose one of Apple's desktop pictures and there are a ton of them. If you don't have an image of your own to use there are a whole bunch here that hardly anybody ever uses to make your Mac look different. But you can also reveal these sections here. Say go into your Photos collection. You can even dig down into certain albums. So I've already created an album of my Photos collection called Desktop Backgrounds. Anytime I have a photo that I think would make a good desktop background I throw it in there. So I could select one of these and you could see I have a unique desktop background. Now my Mac looks different than everybody else in the world. But not only can you use single images you can also set it to change the picture and have it do it every 30 minutes, or every 5 seconds, or when you login, or every time you wake up your Mac. You could also select whether it's just going to go to the next image in the list or it's going to select one at random. 
Now if you don't want to have this in your Photos app you can also go to any Folder you want. Hit the Plus button here and select any folder. Anything in your Documents folder, Pictures folder, anywhere in your hard drive and it will add it to this list of folders here. I already have a folder called Desktop Backgrounds and in it I've put all of these different backgrounds. So you can see I've got some abstract ones that I've downloaded online. I also have some ones that are from photos that I took. So I don't have to use the Photos app. You can do the same options here. You can have it change every 30 minutes or 5 minutes, or whatever. You can have it go in a random order or whatever you want. 
Now what you choose as your background is up to you. You can use a photo of yours. Take some pictures specifically while traveling or while visiting a beautiful spot near you to be used as desktop backgrounds that will be unique for you. You can take a big picture of a landscape or a closeup shot of some interesting texture or object. I'm going to choose this picture here that I downloaded from Stock Photography and it creates a nice shaded background here with some nice pleasant little objects. A nice calm desktop background.
So next let's choose some accent colors to go with this. So back in the main level of System Preferences I'm going to go to General here and I can choose the accent color and highlight color. So the default here is this blue. But let's say I want to do something a little different. Let's say I want to go with kind of a purple here. You can choose purple as the color that appears here like in Menus like this. I could also change the highlight color to something else. So let's make the highlight color, say, yellow. Now you can see the Menus are still purple. But when I highlight things, like for instance if I were to bring up the Finder window and highlight an item, you would see it's in yellow. So choose something that you like.
Now a lot of us have folders here on the desktop too. They can just look like the plain blue folders with the regular text underneath. But there's a lot you can do to customize them. Something I like to do is use emoji in folder names. You can use them in files names too. To give an example here under Pics I can hit Return here to select the name and rename it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add an emoji at the beginning. So I'll use Command Control Space to bring up the emoji viewer. Then I'm going to search for something that fits. So I'll search for camera and you can see there's a camera emoji. I'm going to select that and you can see how it inserts it there as a little character before the name of the folder. I can do that with each one of these. You can see how that's a really quick easy way to customize these folder names. But as I said you can also do the same for files.
You can also just customize the icons themselves. Select a folder here and choose File, Get Info or just Command i. Then you can click here and you've selected the icon. Now if I'm an artist I can draw something in the Graphics app and save it out as a semi-transparent icon and paste it in here. But since I'm not I just downloaded some things from online. There are tons of subscription websites where you can pay some money and then get all of these icons but you could also find free ones if you look online as well. Here's an icon I downloaded. I've double clicked on it to open it up in Preview. I'm going to do Command A to select  All and Command C to Copy. Then I'm going to go over here, make sure this is selected, and do Command V to Paste. You can see now I've got this icon in here. Because it's transparent, this really isn't white here in the background of the icon, you can see now how this is a transparent icon here as well. Here I can go and do the same thing with another icon. I can open it up on Preview. Select the image. It's important to do that and not just try to copy and paste the file itself but to get the graphic inside it. Then I'll go to this Idea folder here. Select it and Paste that icon there. I'll do the same thing with these two icons.
Another thing people like to customize is the Screen Saver.  So you can go into System Preferences and then Desktop and Screen Saver but now go to Screen Saver instead of Desktop. You can choose from a variety of things here. A lot of these use your own photos. So you can choose one of these and it will use your photos. You could select the Source. So I can select an Album inside of my Photo Library. So I could go to Photo Library and choose an Album. Or I can choose a Folder and pick a folder just like with Desktop images. I can choose whether it shuffles them or just shows them in order. I can also add a Clock to the Screen Saver so you see that.
Some others here that are interesting are Album Artwork that shows artwork from your albums in your music collection which can show your personality a lot. I like that. You can also go to Message and just type a simple message so you get have anything there. An inspirational quote or something that kind of bounces around on the screen. You can choose when the screen saver starts. So like have it start after 2 minutes of inactivity. I choose not to use a screen saver myself. But in an office situation where you're often not at your desk but people can see your computer screen all the time it may be good to have a screen saver there just to hide what's on your screen and also show your personality a little bit to anybody that walks by.
Now you can also customize the Dock here at the bottom. Go into System Preferences and then to Dock and here you can change the size of all the icons and whether or not they magnify. So with it off nothing magnifies. But with it On you can set this level here and you could see as you move over the icons enlarge. You can also choose to automatically Hide or Show the Dock. If you don't want to have the Dock there normally but only when you move the cursor to the bottom of the screen have it automatically Hide and Show. You can also go to the extreme measure of moving it to the right side or left side of your screen. So this really makes your Mac look different because most people have the Dock on the bottom of the screen. You can move it here to the left. Also if you've got a very wide screen it may make sense to have it here on the left where you have a lot of space horizontally but maybe not a lot of space vertically.
Now another thing you can customize is this clock here that appears in the Menu Bar. So that's in System Preferences as well. This is under Date & Time. You have to Click on Clock here and there are time options. You can make it simply an Analog clock instead of Digital. You can have it display seconds, Flash the time separators the little colon there, Go to  24 hours without the AM/PM, or just get rid of AM/PM even with the twelve hour clock. You have the day of the week and the date as well.
Also you have Notification Widgets which is when you click on Notifications here and you're viewing Today not Notifications. Under Today there's all these widgets and you can customize those by clicking Edit and you'll see the ones you're using here. You can actually drag the order around and then you can add new ones here by hitting the Plus button. What you had here is going to depend upon what you have installed. But you can click on this App Store button and actually get more. There are a bunch of different apps that will add more widgets to the sidebar. Each widget here can be customized as well. For instance, World Clock you can go and add a new clock for a different location in the world and remove one. Then hit Done. Also Weather you can customize what cities are included here in Weather and you can add a new one.The Stocks widget allows you to customize which stocks are shown and change the order. You can bring up Notification Center widgets by clicking here but you can also go into System Preferences and then under Trackpad you can set, under More Gestures, a Notification Center shortcut. So now with two fingers from the right edge of may trackpad I can bring it up. You can also go into Keyboard and then Shortcuts, then Mission Control, and choose Show Notification Center and set a shortcut for that.
Another thing people like to do is to use Stickies to customize their Desktop. It allows them to put little notes on the screen that they can just see all the time. So I'm going to use Spotlight to run Stickies and then here I've already got a couple little notes here as examples. You can also add ones that have images in them. So I'm going to create a new note here. I'm going to drag and drop an image into it. It's important to make sure it's a good size already. If it's too big it can't be resized inside the note. So let's go and change this color here and shrink it down a bit and I can put that over here. So you can have a picture of your family, your friends, your spouse, your pets. Whatever you like just like you might have on a regular desk.
You can also make any of these windows float on top so they stay on top of other things. But you can always go to Stickies, Hide Stickies, or Command H with Stickies as the frontmost app and it will hide them so you can get them out of the way if you need the maximum screen space to get some work done. Then you can click on Stickies at anytime to bring those back. Also, go to System Preferences and there, under Users & Groups, with Login Items you can add Stickies to the list of Login Items so that it always launches automatically when you restart your Mac.
Also here in Login Items you'll see your User icon. This is something you see on your Login screen and a variety of other places. So you can click here to Edit and you can choose from a bunch of different defaults that Apple has. You can use your eye site camera to take a picture of yourself right now or any object you can hold up in front of the camera. You can choose something from your Photos or just Drag and Drop any image that you want into here and it will use that. So you can customize what appears when you first go to log into your Mac.
Now here's a bonus one that won't change anything that you see on your screen. It's about changing the Alert sound on your Mac. This sound you hear over and over again whenever you try to do something and you can't do it or your Mac just needs to send you a little alert signal. So if you go into System Preferences under Sound you'll see under Sound Effects you've got alert sounds. You can choose from some of these defaults here. You can also add custom ones. To do that go in the Finder and go to the Library which you can get to by choosing Go and holding the Option key down and choosing Library. Now under here look for a folder called Sounds. In here you can add a Sound File. I'll add this one here. If you have it in a different format that doesn't seem to work in this case you can always open it up in QuickTime player and export it from QuickTime player to get this M4A format. Now just simply change M4A to AIF. This will actually be enough to get System Preferences to recognize it. You're going to have to Quit System Preferences and then launch it again and now when you go back to Sound you'll see that custom sound there. So you can use anything as a sound. You could even record something. Say using QuickTime player you could record audio in that from your microphone. Record any sound you want. Just keep it short and then use it here as an alert sound. 
Another place you commonly sound is in the Mail app when you get new mail, for instance, or you send an email. So in Mail you can go to Mail Preferences and then in here you could go to General and then select a sound in here including custom ones that you just added to your Library.
So there's some simple and quick ways you can customize your Mac without adding any third party software.

Comments: 7 Responses to “10 Fun Ways To Customize Your Mac Without Adding More Apps”

Dirk

4 years ago

Can you tell me where to find the pictures you used for changing the folder icons (Pics, Ideas, Recipes etc.)? They look great! Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

Dirk: Flaticon.com.

Hugh

Greetings: Looking at System Preferences under tab-Desktop: I see you have a folder named "Desktop Backgrounds" in your "Photos" and under "Folders." Is the Desktop Backgrounds-folder created twice; one in Photos App and one in Picture in the Finder. Hoping this is not confusing.

nick

hi Gary, quick note before my question. Under System Preferences>Desktop>Apple Desktop Pictures I noticed if you select certain photos on the top rows, the Change Picture option is greyed out, but if you select others, the option becomes available. Question: the Menu Bar shows my full User Name spelled out, how do I change that to just the icon? I can't find that option. Thanks

Nick: I think the ones that are grayed out are the system ones. They aren't stored with the others, so there is nothing to change to that is in the same location. To change the menu name, go to System Preferences, Users & Groups, Login Options and it is there.

Hugh: Not sure what you mean by "created twice" -- you'll see two different items there, both which happen to have the same name.

thanks Gary, always learn something from MacMost. I looked at that menu but hadn't realized Login Options was a clickable item, thought it was just the name of the screen :)

Comments Closed.

10 Fun Ways To Customize Your Mac Without Adding More Apps

Comments: 7 Responses to “10 Fun Ways To Customize Your Mac Without Adding More Apps”

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information