This Mac tip is provided by Mark Greentree and was originally posted on Mark’s blog – Everyday Mac Support. For more of Mark’s tips visit his site, follow him on Twitter, or browse his archive of posts here.
How To: Customise Your System Preferences In Mac OS X Lion
As many of you would know the System Preferences is essential to how your Mac runs and operates. More importantly, as we are all different users, it allows us to put our own unique touch into the operating system.
For the first time on Mac OS X Lion, Apple has given us a little extra control with regards to how we view the system preferences. Or should I say how we hide the systems preferences. That is correct. No longer will you have to go digging deep to locate that one setting.
If you are an end user and have a tech support person deal with the running of your Mac then this makes perfect sense because they can then hide system preferences that you will not need to access thereby restricting possible confusion and fiddling which can result in mistakes being made which can change the working operation of your Mac.
In order to hide certain system preference panels you will need to load the system preferences and then navigate to View>Customise from the menu bar as shown below:
Upon doing this you will notice that each preference option will now have a tick box next to them and therefore you can deselect this thereby hiding the preference in question. An example of this can be seen below:
Now the one section I tend not to like too much is the ‘other’ area where applications such as Flash Player can use it as a dumping ground for their preferences as well.
Hence, in this example I will happily deselect the flash player preference area by clicking in the box. As you can see from the image below this is now deselected.
Now once you are done selecting or deselecting system preferences you will then need to click the done button located at the top of the system preferences window as highlighted in the above image.
You can also simply quit out of the system preferences and the change you have requested will be made.
Let’s assume we have clicked done and now the end result can be seen below:
The Adobe Flash preference has now been hidden with preferences contained within intact.
However, what would you do if you wanted to get it back?
Well simply follow the same steps by navigating to View>Customise from within the System Preferences panel.
You will then see the hidden preference area reappear and you can simply click in the click box or on the icon to reactivate it. Then click the done button.
Please note in order to change preferences you will need to reactivate the system preference in question.
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