By Graham K. Rogers

I have been looking at the changes to System Preferences in the latest version of OS X: 10.9, Mavericks. Some changes and additions are rather obvious: others less so. Some of the panels in System Preferences have seen some changes with a couple of additions and losses. The overall feel is that while there has been much work carried out under the surface, the interfacing for System Preferences will remain familiar to most users.

For most ordinary users, System Preferences is the core of the system: where much fine-tuning takes place. With OS X 10.9, Mavericks, there have been several changes to certain of the panels as well as software changes (under the hood).

When a user opens the System Preferences panel, by default icons are organized in five categories: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless, System and Other. The last showing preferences installed for third-party system tools. Using the View menu, however, I organize my preferences alphabetically and that has been the approach I took when rewriting the System Preferences files.

None of the preferences that are shown in Other have been included, nor is there anything on technologies installed which only become active when specific devices are attached.

Over the next couple of weeks I hope to have all the files collected in a single PDF and plan to issue this as an eBook as soon as time permits.

Before trying anything new, such as changing settings or turning features on or off, users are urged to back up all data - you should be doing this anyway - and I take no responsibility for any havoc you might wreak on your own computer.

System Preferences in OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion: Alphabetical List