Finder and System Preferences
Finder may look a little unfamiliar but you can tweak it to your liking
The Finder has had a serious overhaul in Big Sur. From the new look windows, with full-height sidebars, to the new rounded Dock and the return of shaded icons, there’s plenty to take in visually. However, it’s the addition of Control Centre and the changes to Notification Centre that are the most significant. Here’s how to adjust them.
Manage Control Centre items
Some items can be either in the menu bar or in Control Centre, or both. Launch System Preferences from the Apple menu and choose Dock & Menu Bar. Scroll through the list under Control Centre, and click each one in turn. For those you want to add to the menu bar, check the ‘Show in Menu Bar’ box. Select ‘when active’ or ‘always.’
There’s an item here that’s new in Big Sur, Now Playing. It’s similar to the Notification Centre widget and displays the name of media currently playing on your Mac, along with the app that’s playing it, and controls for playing/ pausing, and skipping. You can choose whether it sits in Control Centre or in the menu bar and whether it’s displayed permanently or only when there is something playing.
To add modules to Control Centre that aren’t currently there, scroll to Other Modules and choose which to add to Control Centre.
2 Add or remove items from the menu bar
Not everything in the menu bar is accessible from Control Centre. Under ‘Menu Bar only’, you can choose whether to display Spotlight, Siri, or Time Machine, and specify how you want the clock to appear.
3 Drag items from Control Centre to the menu bar
If going to System Preferences is too much hassle just to add an item to the menu bar, you can click on Control
Centre, then click on the item you want and drag it to the menu bar. To remove an item from the menu bar, just short drag it in Control Centre.
4 Hide the menu bar
In previous versions of macOS, you chose whether to automatically show and hide the menu bar in the General pane in System Preferences. It’s now in the Dock & Menu bar section. Go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar, scroll to Menu Bar and check the box.
5 Check up on your battery usage
The new Battery System Preferences pane replaces Energy Saver. Click on it in System Preferences and you’ll land on the first section, Battery Usage, which
shows a graph of how your battery has performed over the last 24 hours or 10 days. The Battery pane is also now home to the options that were available in Energy Saver, like how and when to sleep, whether to optimise charging, and tools for scheduling startup or wake.
6 Choose whether your Mac plays the startup chime
Apple removed the startup chime in 2016 and most Macs released since then have started up silently. Now, it’s back, but you’re in control of whether it plays or not. Go to System Preferences > Sound and choose the Sound Effects tab. Check the box next to ‘Play sound on startup’.
7 Speak typing feedback
One of Big Sur’s new accessibility features allows you to have your Mac speak what you type as you type it. It’s tucked away in a new section of System Preferences’ Accessibility pane called
Spoken Content. Check the box next to ‘Speak typing feedback’ to enable the function. This section also contains the options that were previously in the Speech section of Accessibility.
8 Manage Notifications
When Notifications appear in Big Sur, many of them have a drop-down arrow in the bottom-right corner. Click on it to see options such as accept or decline calendar invitations, or reply to emails.