The macOS operating system provides numerous options for customization. In this video, you’ll learn about the System Preferences app and configuration options for displays, network adapters, printers, accessibility features, and more.
If you’re familiar with the Windows Control Panel, then you’re going to also be familiar with the functionality of the macOS System Preferences. The System Preferences is a one-stop shop for configuration settings for your operating system. So if you find yourself needing to modify the way that the keyboard is operating, the way the display works, or how you access the network, you’ll find all of those options and much more inside of System Preferences.
The display preferences in macOS give us control over what is shown on the different monitors connected to our system. You can set these up to be monitors that are side by side. Or you can arrange them to be in almost any configuration you’d like. You can also change where the menus are located in macOS so that, if you don’t like them on your main screen, you can move them to a secondary display.
And from here, you can modify the resolution used by your displays. You can change the brightness values. Or if you want to get into detailed color grading of each monitor, you can do that from within the Displays option.
The network settings available in macOS are very similar to the network settings that you would find in almost any operating system. You can modify network configurations for wired or wireless connections. And you can define IPv4 addressing and IPv6 addressing. You can choose to manually set those settings yourself. Or you can choose to obtain a DHCP address.
And of course, you can get into detailed network configurations of things like your DNS settings, 802.1x authentication, and other detailed configurations. For example, the detailed breakdown of this Ethernet adapter allows us to modify the TCP/IP configuration settings. We can update DNS, the Windows internet naming system, 802.1x authentication, specific configurations for potential proxies you might be using, and modification of the hardware settings of the network interface card.
Most organizations will have a number of different printers that are connected to the network. And you can identify and modify configuration settings for any of these printers from the Printers and Scanners option. If you have printers directly connected to your macOS system, you can share those printers with other people on the network or modify the permissions associated with each printer. You can also drill down into a printer to find out more information about what may be in the printer queue, what type of options or supplies might be required for this printer. And you may be able to view toner levels or ink levels for this printer.
macOS also includes options for privacy and security, so you can determine what information on your machine might be able to be shared with other folks. From here, you can allow or disallow access to different types of data, such as location services, the files and folders on your system, anything that you might have in a media or Apple Music folder, and other categories as well. If you use macOS, you may have seen this pop up while you’re installing or running new applications.
For example, if you’ve recently installed any online conferencing software and you start that software, it might ask if this software is allowed to use your microphone and your camera. That means, you get to decide whether each individual application will have access to information that could be sensitive or private. And if you’ve disabled access for an application, the application simply will not have access to that data. This means that you can configure your operating system to have the right level of privacy for you.
For example, you might want to set what applications can access your photos and what applications are not allowed access to your photos. If we click the Photos section, you can then go through each individual application and decide whether that app should have access to that resource, or you can disable access.
The Accessibility category can change the way the operating system presents information to you. So you can modify from a vision perspective what information is shown on the screen. You can change the information that you’re hearing and how you’re hearing that in the operating system, and make the OS itself something that’s easier to use for you. This also allows you to enable certain applications to have additional access to things like keyboard, mouse, audio, and video resources.
Some third-party accessibility apps will need additional access to some of the hardware of your computer in order to make that hardware easier to use. You’ll need to enable that access inside of the Accessibility option. This might also serve as a security feature. This prevents any third-party applications from gaining access to things like your keyboard without you specifically giving it that permission.
Each one of these different categories under Accessibility has a different number of options. For example, if we click the Zoom option, all of the options within that area will be specific to zooming into or out of information on your screen. You can change keyboard shortcuts, use the trackpad gesture to zoom. You can enable or disable the scroll gesture using modifier keys. Or you can use a modifier key for scroll gesture.
For example, on my macOS, the Control modifier key allows me to hold down the Control button and use my scroll wheel to be able to zoom in and out of information that’s on my display.
In a previous video, we talked about Apple’s backup capabilities. And if you want to modify anything relating to the Time Machine application, you can also do that within your System Preferences. This allows you to add or remove different storage drives for Time Machine. And these may be directly connected storage drives, or you may be connecting to this Time Machine volume across the network.
Once this is set up, it will begin performing backups automatically every hour. And you’ll be able to go back in time to the last 24 hours and look at different versions of the same file that may have been stored on your system. Once you get past 24 hours, Time Machine creates automatic daily backups for the entire month.
And then there are weekly backups done for all previous months. Time Machine will continue to backup all of this data every hour. And when it begins to run out of room, it will start deleting the oldest information so that it can continue to make these backups as time goes on.