Two pop-up menus let you crank up or tone down Mac OS X’s overall colorfulness:

If you choose Other, the Color Picker palette appears, from which you can choose any color your Mac is capable of displaying (UP TO SPEED: The Color Picker).

These radio buttons control the scroll-bar arrow buttons of all your windows. You can keep these arrows together at one end of the scroll bar, or you can split them up so that the “up” arrow sits at the top of the scroll bar, and the “down” arrow is at the bottom—a much more Windows-like arrangement. (Horizontal scroll bars are similarly affected.)

You can also turn on these checkboxes:

Just how many of your recently opened documents and applications do you want the Mac to show using the Recent Items command in the menu? Pick a number from the pop-up menus. For example, you might choose 30 for documents, 20 for programs, and 5 for severs.

The Mac’s built in text-smoothing (antialiasing) feature is supposed to produce smoother, more commercial-looking text anywhere it appears on your Mac: in word processing documents, email messages, Web pages, and so on.

Here, you can control the degree to which text gets smoothed. Use the pop-up menu to choose a setting that suits your eyes—and your monitor. For example, Apple offers Standard for CRT screens (cathode-ray tube—that is, traditional, bulky, television-style screens), and Medium for flat-panel screens like laptops and almost all current desktop Macs. Or just leave the setting at Automatic, which gives text on the main screen the appropriate smoothing.

Either way, the differences are fairly subtle. Furthermore, unlike most System Preferences, this one has no effect until the next time you open the program in question. In the Finder, for example, you won’t notice the difference until you log out and log back in again.

At smaller type sizes (10-point and smaller), you might find that text is actually less readable with font smoothing turned on. It all depends upon the font, the size, your monitor, and your taste. For that reason, this pop-up menu lets you choose a cutoff point. If you choose 12 here, for example, then 12-point (and smaller) type still appears crisp and sharp; only larger type, such as headlines, displays the graceful edge smoothing. You can choose a size cutoff as low as 4 points.

(None of these settings affect your printouts, only the onscreen display.)

Click the Date & Time tab. If your Mac is online, turn on “Set date & time automatically,” and be done with it. Your Mac sets its own clock by consulting a highly accurate scientific clock on the Internet. (No need to worry about Daylight Saving Time, either; the time servers take that into account.)

If you’re not online and have no prospect of getting there, you can also set the date and time manually. To change the month, day, or year, you can click the digit that needs changing and then either (a) type a new number or (b) click the little arrow buttons. Press the Tab key to highlight the next number. (You can also specify the day of the month by clicking a date on the minicalendar.)

To set the time of day, use the same technique—or, for more geeky fun, you can set the time by dragging the hour, minute, or second hands on the analog clock. Finally, click Save. (If you get carried away with dragging the clock hands around and lose track of the real time, click the Revert button to restore the panel settings.)

You’d be surprised how important it is to set the Time Zone for your Mac. If you don’t do so, the email and documents you send out—and the Mac’s conception of what documents are older and newer—could be hopelessly skewed. Teach your Mac where it lives using the Time Zone map, as shown in Figure 15-5.

In the Clock pane, you can specify whether or not you want the current time to appear, at all times, at the right end of your menu bar. You can choose between two different clock styles: digital (3:53 p.m.) or analog (a round clock face). You also get several other options that govern this digital clock display: the display of seconds, whether or not you want to include designations for a.m. and p.m., the day of the week, a blinking colon, and the option to use a 24-hour clock.

Figure 15-5. To set your time zone the quick and dirty way, just click on a section of the map to indicate your general region of the world. You’ll see the vertical stripe showing your time zone. If you want to teach the Mac more precisely where you are in that time zone, now use the pop-up menu to specify the closest big city in that time zone. (Or, instead of using the pop-up menu with the mouse, you can also highlight the text in the Closest City box. Then start typing your city name until the Mac gets it.)

And by the way, your menu bar clock always shows the current time. When you need to know today’s date, just click the clock. A menu drops down revealing the complete date. The menu also lets you switch between digital and analog clock types and provides a shortcut to the Date & Time preferences pane.

Mac OS X comes with several ready-to-use collections of desktop pictures, ranging from National Geographic-style nature photos to plain solid colors. To install a new background picture, first choose one of the image categories in the list at the left side of the window, as shown in Figure 15-6.

Your choices include Apple Images (muted, soft-focus swishes and swirls), Nature (bugs, water, Leopard outer space), Plants (flowers, soft-focus leaves), Black & White (breathtaking monochrome shots), Abstract (swishes and swirls with wild colors), or Solid Colors (simple grays, blues, and greens).

On the Screen Saver panel, you can create your own screen-saver slideshows—an absolute must if you have an Apple Cinema Display and a cool Manhattan loft apartment.

When you click a module’s name in the Screen Savers list, you see a mini version of it playing back in the Preview screen. Click Test to give the module a dry run on your full monitor screen.

When you’ve had enough of the preview, just move the mouse or press any key. You return to the Screen Saver panel.

Apple provides a few displays to get you started, in two categories: Apple and Pictures.

Pictures

The second category of screen savers are all based on the slideshowy presentation of photos. In Leopard, you can choose from three presentations of pictures in whatever photo group you choose, as represented by the three Display Style buttons just below the screen-saver preview.

• Slideshow displays one photo at a time; they slowly zoom and softly cross-fade into each other.

  Tip

  If you click Options, you get choices like “Present slides in random order” (instead of the order they appear in Apple’s photo folder, or yours); “Cross-fade between slides” (instead of just cutting abruptly); “Zoom back and forth” (that is, slowly enlarge or shrink each photo to keep it interesting); “Crop slides to fit on screen” (instead of exposing letterbox bars of empty desktop if the photo’s shape doesn’t match the screen’s); and “Keep slides centered” (instead of panning gracefully across).

• Collage sends individual photos spinning randomly onto the “table,” where they lie until the screen is full.

  Tip

  This time, the Options button offers the “Present slides in random order” button, plus a “Collage style” pop-up menu that lets you add each photo’s name and date to its white, Polaroid-style border.

• Mosaic will blow your mind; see Figure 15-7.

Tip

Click the Options button to specify the speed of the receding, the number of photos that become pixels of the larger photo, and whether or not you want the composite photos to appear in random order.

Figure 15-7. This feeble four-frame representative sample will have to represent, on this frozen page, the stunning animated pullout that is the Mosiac screen saver. It starts with one photo (top); your “camera” pulls back farther and farther, revealing that that photo is just one in a grid—a huge grid—that’s composed of all your photos. As you pull even farther back, each photo becomes so small that it becomes only one dot of another photo—from the same collection! And then that one starts shrinking, and the cycle repeats, on and on into infinity. How could Apple not have mentioned Mosaic in its Leopard advertising?

In any case, all of these photo-show options are available for whatever photo set you choose from the list at left. Your choices include:

• Abstract, Beach, Cosmos, Forest, Nature Patterns, Paper Shadow. These sets include Abstract, which features psychedelic swirls of modern art. In the Beach, Cosmos, Forest, and Nature screen savers, you see a series of tropical ocean scenes, deep space objects, lush rain forests, and leaf/flower shots. Paper Shadow is a slideshow of undulating, curling, black-and-white shadowy abstract forms.

  Each creates an amazingly dramatic, almost cinematic experience, worthy of setting up to “play” during dinner parties like the lava lamps of the Seventies.

• .Mac and RSS. One of the perks for paying $100 per year for a .Mac membership is the ability to create slideshows online, which can play back either on your own Mac or (if you opted to make it public) on anybody else’s.

  Yes, that’s right: You can now enjoy a screen saver composed of photos taken by somebody else on the Internet. (“Oh, look, honey, here’s some shots of Uncle Jed’s crops this summer!”)

  Click the Options button to specify, by clicking the + button, which member’s slideshow collection you want to view and how you want it to appear. (For example, you can turn off the crossfade between slides, crop the slides so that they fit on the screen, opt to present the slides in random order, and so on.)

  As a bonus, in this configuration screen, you can also specify an RSS feed’s address (Viewing an RSS Feed). The idea, of course, is that you’d specify a photo RSS feed’s address here, like the ones generated by iPhoto.

• Pictures Folder, Choose Folder. This is one of the coolest modules. It lets you transform your own collection of pictures—whatever you’ve got in your Home→Pictures folder—into a self-playing slideshow, complete with spectacular zooming and dissolving effects. (If you keep your photos elsewhere, click Choose Folder instead.)

• Library, Last Roll, Last 12 Months, Events list, Album list. If you’re using iPhoto to organize your digital photos, you’ll see its familiar album and event lists here, making it a snap to choose any of your own photo collections for use as a screen saver.

  FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION: The Password-Protected Screen Saver

  I like the fact that when I wander away from my desk, the screen saver protects whatever I was doing from prying eyes. But whoever walks by can just press a key to exit the screen saver, so big deal! I looked all over, and couldn’t find any way to make the Mac require a password before exiting the screen saver.

  You had the right idea—you were just looking in the wrong place.

  In System Preferences, click Security. There’s the checkbox you’re looking for: “Require password to wake this computer from sleep or screen saver.”

  You’re welcome.

• Use random screen saver. If you can’t decide which one of the modules to use, turn on this checkbox. The Mac chooses a different module each time your screen saver kicks in.

• Show with clock. This option, new in Leopard, just superimposes the current time on whatever screen saver you’ve selected. You’d be surprised at how handy it can be to use your Mac as a giant digital clock when you’re getting coffee across the room.

This tab is the main headquarters for your screen controls. It governs these settings:

From the dawn of the color-monitor era, Macs have had a terrific feature: the ability to exploit multiple monitors all plugged into the computer at the same time. Any Mac with a video-output jack (laptops, iMacs, eMacs), or any Mac with a second or third video card (Power Macs, Mac Pros), can project the same thing on both screens (mirror mode); that’s useful in a classroom when the “external monitor” is a projector.

But it’s equally useful to make one monitor act as an extension of the next. For example, you might have your Photoshop image window on your big monitor, but keep all the Photoshop controls and tool palettes on a smaller screen. Your cursor passes from one screen to another as it crosses the boundary.

You don’t have to shut down the Mac to hook up another monitor—just put it to sleep. Or just hook up the monitor or projector and then choose Detect Displays from the Displays menulet.

When you open System Preferences, you see a different Displays window on each screen, so that you can change the color and resolution settings independently for each. Your Displays menulet shows two sets of resolutions, too, one for each screen.

If your Mac can show different images on each screen, your Displays panel offers an Arrangement tab, showing a miniature version of each monitor. By dragging these icons around relative to each other, you can specify how you want the second monitor’s image “attached” to the first. Most people position the second monitor’s image to the right of the first, but you’re also free to position it on the left, above, below, or even directly on top of the first monitor’s icon (the last of which produces a video-mirroring setup). For the least likelihood of going insane, consider placing the real-world monitor into the corresponding position—to the right of your first monitor, for example.

For committed multiple-monitor fanatics, the fun doesn’t stop there. See the microscopic menu bar on the first-monitor icon? You can drag that tiny strip onto a different monitor icon, if you like, to tell Displays where you’d like your menu bar to appear. (And check out how most screen savers correctly show different stuff on each monitor!)

When you click Calibrate, the Display Calibrator Assistant opens to walk you through a series of six screens, presenting various brightness and color-balance settings in each screen. You pick the settings that look best to you; at the end of the process, you save your monitor tweaks as a ColorSync profile that ColorSync-savvy programs can use to adjust your display for improved color accuracy.

The Energy Saver controls are very different on a laptop Mac and a desktop.

On a desktop Mac, you see a pair of sliders; on a laptop, you have to click Show Details to see them (Figure 15-10).

Figure 15-10. Top: Here’s what Energy Saver looks like in its expanded condition on a laptop. (On a desktop machine, it’s far simpler.) In the “Put the display to sleep” option, you can specify an independent sleep time for the screen. Bottom: Here are the Schedule controls—a welcome return of the Mac’s self-scheduling abilities.

In any case, the top slider controls when the Mac will automatically go to sleep—anywhere from one minute after your last activity to Never. (Activity can be mouse movement, keyboard action, or Internet data transfer; Energy Saver won’t put your Mac to sleep in the middle of a download.)

At that time, the screen goes dark, the hard drive stops spinning, and your processor chip slows to a crawl. Your Mac is now in sleep mode, using only a fraction of its usual electricity consumption. To wake it up when you return to your desk, press any key. Everything you were working on, including open programs and documents, is still onscreen, exactly as it was. (To turn off this automatic sleep feature entirely, drag the slider to Never.)

Finally, “Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible” saves even more juice—and noise—by letting your drives stop spinning when not in use. The downside is a longer pause when you return to work and wake the thing up, because it takes a few seconds for your hard drive to “spin up” again.

As noted above, Energy Saver on a laptop offers quite a few additional controls (see Figure 15-10). That’s because power management is ten times more important on a laptop, where every drop of battery power counts.

The pop-up menus at the top of the dialog box, for example, let you create different settings for the two states of life for a laptop, when it’s plugged in (Power Adapter) and when it’s running on battery power (Battery).

Once you’ve indicated which setting you want to adjust, you can then use the Optimization pop-up menu to choose a canned Energy Saver setting, depending on where you want to fall on the speed-vs.-battery-life spectrum. For example, when you’re adjusting the settings for battery-only operation, you can choose Better Battery Life (screen and laptop go to sleep relatively quickly, your processor chip slows down, and the screen brightness dims) or Better Performance (screen sleeps after five minutes, laptop after fifteen, processor runs at top speed).

The Custom option just means “none of the above.” Whenever you adjust one of the sliders or checkboxes, Energy Saver automatically changes the pop-up menu to say Custom. Mac OS X remembers your settings here. If you choose one of the presets and then choose Custom again, your hand-adjusted settings remain in place.

Here’s a cool feature your PC never had: By clicking the Schedule button, you can set up the Mac to shut itself down and turn itself back on automatically (Figure 15-10, bottom).

If you work 9 to 5, for example, set the office Mac to turn itself on at 8:45 a.m., and shut itself down at 5:30 p.m.—an arrangement that conserves electricity, saves money, and reduces pollution, but doesn’t inconvenience you in the least. In fact, you may come to forget that you’ve set up the Mac this way, since you’ll never actually see it turned off.

Click the Options tab button to summon a few more controls, including “Wake when the modem detects a ring” (handy if you use your Mac as a fax machine), “Restart automatically after a power failure,” and “Processor Performance.” This last item is the quick fix for the thigh-scalding heat of a PowerBook’s metal case: Choose Reduced from this pop-up menu. Your chip doesn’t run nearly as fast now, but it’s still plenty fast for email, word processing, and so on—and it runs at about half the temperature. (You’ll gain some battery life, too.)

In Mac OS X, you can shift from language to language in certain programs on the fly, without reinstalling the operating system or even restarting the computer.

On the Language tab, you see a listing of the different languages the Mac can switch into, in the corresponding languages—Français, Español, and so on. Just drag one of the languages to the top of the list to select it as the target language, as shown in Figure 15-11.

Now launch Safari, TextEdit, or Stickies. Every menu, button, and dialog box is now in the new language you selected! If you log out and back in (or restart) at this point, the entire Finder will be in the new language, too.

Of course, if you’re really French (for example), you’ll also want to make these changes:

Figure 15-11. Top: This is the list of the 19 “system localizations” that you get with a standard Mac OS X installation. Bottom: Here’s Safari running in Dutch. Actually understanding Dutch would be useful at a time like this—but even if you don’t, it can’t help but brighten up your work day to choose commands like Spraakfunctie or Knip. (Alas, your success with this trick varies by program.)

While the Mac can display many different languages, typing in those languages is another matter. The symbols you use when you’re typing Swedish aren’t the same as when you’re typing English. Apple solved this problem by creating different keyboard layouts, one for each language. Each rearranges the letters that appear when you press the keys. For example, when you use the Swedish layout and press the semicolon key, you don’t get a semicolon (;)—you get an ö.

Apple even includes a Dvorak layout—a scientific rearrangement of the standard layout that puts the most common letters directly under your fingertips on the home row. Fans of the Dvorak layout claim greater accuracy, better speed, and less fatigue.

Use the list in the Input Menu pane to indicate which keyboard layout you want. If you select anything in the list, “Show input menu in menu bar” turns on automatically. A tiny flag icon appears in your menu bar—a keyboard menulet that lets you switch from one layout to another just by choosing its name. (To preview a certain keyboard arrangement, launch the Keyboard Viewer program described next.)

Figure 15-12. How do you make a π symbol? Top: Open Keyboard Viewer by choosing its name from the keyboard (flag) menulet. Bottom: Keyboard Viewer reveals the answer. When you press the Option key, the Keyboard Viewer keyboard shows that the pi character (π) is mapped to the P key. To insert the symbol into an open document, just click it in the Keyboard Viewer window.

Keyboard Viewer consists of a single window containing a tiny onscreen keyboard (Figure 15-12). When you hold down any of the modifier keys on your keyboard (like , Option, Shift, or Control), you can see exactly which keys produce which characters. The point, of course, is to help you learn which keys to press when you need special symbols or non-English characters, such as © or , in each font.

UP TO SPEED: The Character Palette

There you are, two-thirds of the way through your local matchmaker newsletter, when it hits you that you need a heart symbol. Right now.

You know there’s one in one of your symbol fonts, but you’re not about to type every single key combo until you produce the heart symbol. You can’t help wishing there was an easier way to find those special symbols that hide among your fonts—fancy brackets, math symbols, special stars and asterisks, and so on.

The Keyboard Viewer (described above) is one solution. But there’s a better one: the Character Palette. To make it appear, choose Edit→Special Characters.

Most Cocoa programs have this command. If yours doesn’t, here’s the long way: Open System Preferences, click the International icon, click the Input Menu tab, and turn on the Character Palette checkbox.

You’ve just installed the Keyboard menulet.

Next time you’re word processing or doing page layout, choose Show Character Palette from this menu.

The resulting window rounds up all symbols from all your fonts at once. To find a particular symbol, click the “by Category” tab, and then click the various category headings: Arrows, Stars/Asterisks, Math, and so on. Or, for an even more mind-blowing assortment (musical notes, Braille...), choose All Characters from the View pop-up menu.

You can preview variations of the same symbol by opening the Font Variation triangle. You can also use the Search box to find a symbol by name: “heart” or “yen” or “asterisk,” for example. When you find the symbol you want, double-click it.

If you’re using a Cocoa program, the correct symbol pops into your document. (If not, you may get the correct character in the wrong font. In that case, change the font of the inserted character manually. To find out what font it came from, click the Font Variation flippy triangle to see the font name.)

Here’s how. Open the International panel of System Preferences, click Input Menu, and turn on the Keyboard Viewer checkbox. The window shown at top in Figure 15-12 appears. (Thereafter, you’ll be able to choose its name from the flag menulet at the top of the screen, as shown at top in Figure 15-12.)

To see the effect of pressing the modifier keys, either click the onscreen keys or press them on your actual keyboard. The corresponding keys on the onscreen keyboard light up as they’re pressed.

The changes you make are tiny, but can have a cumulatively big impact on your daily typing routine.

It may surprise you that the cursor on the screen doesn’t move five inches when you move the mouse five inches on the desk. Instead, the cursor moves farther when you move the mouse faster.

How much farther depends on how you set the first slider here. The Fast setting is nice if you have an enormous monitor, since you don’t need an equally large mouse pad to get from one corner to another. The Slow setting, on the other hand, forces you to pick up and put down the mouse frequently as you scoot across the screen. It offers very little acceleration, but it can be great for highly detailed work like pixel-by-pixel editing in Photoshop.

The Double-Click Speed setting specifies how much time you have to complete a double-click. If you click too slowly—beyond the time you’ve allotted yourself with this slider—the Mac “hears” two single clicks instead.

If you have an Apple Mighty Mouse—the white mouse that has come with desktop Macs since 2005—then the Mouse tab is a much fancier affair (Figure 15-13).

This panel shows up only if you have a laptop. At the top, you find duplicates of the same Tracking Speed and Double-Click Speed sliders described above—but these let you establish independent tracking and clicking speeds for the trackpad.

People have named their Macs for years (Voyager, Li’l Abner, PowerThang G5). Now they can name their keyboards and mice—and, indeed, must—to accommodate Apple’s cordless Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Here’s where you type in their names (so your Mac knows which wireless keyboard and mouse it’s “listening” to in a room full of them) and monitor their battery levels.

Mac OS X comes loaded with keyboard shortcuts for common tasks—and now you can reassign them to shortcuts you prefer. For a full discussion of the options on this pane, in Control the Menus.

“Sound effects” means error beeps—the sound you hear when the Mac wants your attention, or when you click someplace you shouldn’t.

Just click the sound of your choice to make it your default system beep. Most of the canned choices here are funny and clever, yet subdued enough to be of practical value as alert sounds (Figure 15-15).

As for the other controls on the Sound Effects panel, they include:

“Output” means speakers or headphones. For 99 percent of the Mac-using community, this pane offers nothing useful except the Balance slider, with which you can set the balance between your Mac’s left and right stereo speakers.

This panel lets you specify which sound source you want the Mac to “listen to,” if you have more than one connected: external microphone, internal microphone, line input, USB headset, or whatever. It also lets you adjust the sensitivity of that microphone—its input volume—by dragging the slider and watching the real-time Input level meter above it change as you speak.

The Apple marketing machine may have been working too hard when it called this feature “speech recognition”—the Mac OS feature called PlainTalk doesn’t take dictation, typing out what you say. (For that, you need a program like MacSpeech Dictate, www.macspeech.com, which is based on the same recognition technology as Dragon NaturallySpeaking for Windows.)

Instead, PlainTalk is a command-and-control technology. It lets you open programs, trigger AppleScripts, choose menu commands, trigger keystrokes, and click dialog box buttons and tabs—just by speaking their names.

Few people use PlainTalk speech recognition. But if your Mac has a microphone, PlainTalk is worth at least a 15-minute test drive. It may become a part of your work routine forever. Complete details are in the free downloadable Appendix for this chapter, PlainTalk Speech Recognition.pdf. It’s available on this book’s “Missing CD” at www.missingmanuals.com.

The conversation doesn’t have to be one-way; it’s even easier to make the Mac talk.

The Mac can read almost anything you like: text that you pass your cursor over, alert messages, menus, and any text document in any program. It can speak in your choice of 24 synthesizer voices, ages 8 to 50. Most read with a twangy, charmingly Norwegian accent—all but Alex, who makes his debut in Leopard and sounds scarily like a professional human voice-over artist.

Figure 15-16. At the outset, you see only six voices—the ones that sound the most human. Choose More Voices to see the complete list of 22. Then, for 15 minutes of hilarity, try clicking the voices in turn to hear sample sentences. Drag the slider to affect how fast each one speaks. (Clearly, Apple’s programmers had some fun with this assignment.)

To set this up, click the Text to Speech tab (Figure 15-16), Here, you can control which voice your Mac uses, as well as how fast it should speak. Click “Speak selected text when the key is pressed”; you’ll be asked to press the keys you want to use as a trigger (like Option-S). From now on, the Mac will read aloud any highlighted text, in any program, when you press Option-S!

If you have trouble seeing the screen, then boy, does Mac OS X have features for you.

If you have trouble hearing the Mac’s sounds, the obvious solution is to increase the volume, which is why this panel offers a direct link to the Sound preferences pane. (If your Mac doesn’t have external speakers, consider getting some.)

Fortunately, hearing your computer usually isn’t critical (except when working in music and audio, of course). The only time audio is especially important is when the Mac tries to get your attention by beeping. For those situations, turn on “Flash the screen when an alert sound occurs” (an effect you can try out by clicking the Flash Screen button). Now you’ll see a white flash across the entire monitor whenever the Mac would otherwise beep—not a bad idea on laptops, actually, so that you don’t miss beeps when you’ve got the speakers muted.

Figure 15-17. Whenever you want to press a multiple-key keystroke like Shift--D, press them one at a time. You’ll see ghost images of these keys superimposed on your screen, as though to show you which keystrokes you’ve added to your temporary collection. To “un-press” a key you’ve already pressed, press it again twice.

This panel offers two clever features designed to help people who have trouble using the keyboard.

Mouse Keys is designed to help people who can’t use the mouse—or who want more precision in graphics programs. It lets you click, drag, and otherwise manipulate the cursor by pressing the keys on your numeric keypad. (It’s not very useful on keyboards that don’t have separate numeric keypads, including laptops.)

When Mouse Keys is turned on, the 5 key acts as the clicker—hold it down for a moment to “click the mouse,” do that twice to double-click, and so on. Hold down the 0 key to lock down the mouse button, and the period key to unlock it. (The amount of time you have to hold them depends on how you’ve set the Initial Delay slider.)

Move the cursor around the screen by pressing the eight keys that surround the 5 key. (For example, hold down the 9 key to move the cursor diagonally up and to the right.) If you hold one of these keys down continuously, the cursor, after a pause, begins to move smoothly in that direction—according to the way you have adjusted the sliders called Initial Delay and Maximum Speed.

The Cursor Size slider is a godsend not only to people with failing vision, but also to anyone using one of Apple’s large, super-high-resolution screens; as the pixel density increases, the arrow cursor gets smaller and smaller. This slider lets you make the arrow cursor larger—much larger, if you like—making it much easier to see.