Self Service

improve Yosemite OS X 10.11 El Capitan will soon be upon us, but there is still some juice to be squeezed out of Yosemite. If you dislike translucent menus in Yosemite, they can be disabled by clicking ‘Reduce transparency’ in the Accessibility preferences pane. Even though it says reduce, this option actually turns it off altogether – and in windows, too. iTunes 12 mostly got rid of the old sidebar but you can still access a limited version of it by selecting the Playlists view at the top of the window. This is available whether you are browsing music, movies, TV shows, podcasts or audiobooks. Safari hides the full address of a web page, showing only the domain by default. If you want to be able to see it, you can just click the address field. To make it visible all the time, tick ‘Show full website address’ in Safari > Preferences > Advanced. Restrict the kinds of information that Spotlight finds by going to System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results. Just untick any category you don’t need, or drag more important ones up the list. Dashboard is much more convenient if you configure it to display on top of your Desktop, rather than as a separate space. Go to System Preferences > Mission Control and set the Dashboard pop-up menu to ‘As Overlay’.