By Graham K. Rogers

There are some major changes to System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion. Few preferences are unchanged, while some have subtle differences indicating a careful re-examination of the operating system. The General preferences were completely rewritten for OS X 10.7. The latest version has several more changes, although the panel is similar to what was available before.

General preferences has four sections which control the way that the Finder displays panels. The first section has three items, each controlled by buttons: Appearance, Highlight Color and Sidebar icon size. The first, Appearance, has two selections as before: blue and graphite. These change the color of displays like download progress bars. The wording at the side of the button has been changed to "For Buttons, Menus and Windows".

Selecting "Graphite" also changes the color of the red/yellow/green controls at the top left of a panel (for close, hide and minimize) to the same graphite color. This is to help those who work in graphics.

The Highlight color button, below, controls the way that a highlighted file name is displayed in the Finder, or the color of highlighted text. There are still eight default colors and Other which allows a user to choose any color using a selector.

This first section now has an additional button: Sidebar icon size (Small, Medium, Large). This makes a significant difference to the icon size in the Finder sidebar and some with specific needs may find this useful.

The placing of scroll bars at the side of a panel is controlled in the second section. Some controls have been removed. The section is in two distinct parts: "Show scroll bars"; and "Click in the scroll bar to" . . .

There are three radio button options for showing scroll bars: Automatically based on mouse or trackpad; When scrolling; and Always.

Below these controls are two items that control where the content moves to when the scrollbar is clicked: to the next page; or to the spot that is clicked. The control for Smooth scrolling (on or off) has been removed. Also removed is the checkbox to minimize a page or panel quickly by just clicking on the top of it. This may now be found in the Dock preferences panel.

The next section (3) has been revised considerably from the simple control of the number of "Recent Items" that can be listed. There are two new checkboxes: Ask to keep changes when closing documents; and Close windows when quitting an application. An explanation below reads, When selected, open documents and windows will not be restored when you re-open an application, which may save a lot of frustration from having to wade through several windows when all that is wanted is to open a new document.

Rather than the three buttons for Recent Items that were shown before, there is one for Documents, Apps and Servers: from 5 - 50, plus None. These are revealed in Recent Items in the apple menu (top left of the screen). This assists a user with a swift way to re-open a program or file. The Servers item allows a quick reconnection to a network connected disk or computer.

The last section on the panel is unchanged and has two controls for the way fonts are displayed. There is a checkbox for LCD font smoothing (when available); and lastly a control to turn off this feature for smaller fonts -- the size may be changed by the user -- as this feature may affect clear display of text. Available sizes are 4, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12.

As with many panels at the bottom is a circular button with a question mark icon, which opens a quick link to online Apple help.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.