Sunday, August 24, 2008

File Edit View... How to Make Your Mac OS X System Font Smaller!

Since the dawn of Mac OS X, new-to-the-platform users have cried "but the font is huge" followed closely by "can I really only choose between blue and grey?"...

I don't have a solution for the second problem, but I have a sorta-solution for the first one, and it got me pretty excited.

I saw a tip on TUAW explaining how to put the date in the menu bar. This got me pretty dang excited because I always refer there, and up til now had to click to get the date. This tip also has the added feature of allowing you to show the date as numbers, which is great, because usually I have to count on my fingers to determine what month it is.

Anyway, back to the point, by having a date format with this guy "/" in, I believe has caused the system font to be bumped down a notch (presumably to accomodate the date in the menu bar), and lemme tellya, it looks so much better. All the system context menus everywhere are using this slightly smaller font, and all the app menu bars too. I'm so pleased, everything is a tiny bit smaller.

Are you worried? I'm not, clearly this is a weird side effect that could disappear at any moment, and still only gives you one other font size choice (oh, and I haven't tried switching back, maybe it's broken forever). BUT how great does it feel to make a 0.5-point (estimated) change to the Mac OS X system font?


FORKING INCREDIBLY GREAT.

3 comments:

slaggybuttonit said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
slaggybuttonit said...

If that's a before/after screencap, I can't tell the difference!

Also, following the Appearance Manager link displayed the following pangram:

Cozy lummox gives smart squid who asks for job pen.

This place has this much better one (among others):

Amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes.

Haszari said...

Y' fckn weak mate, have you not zoomed in the image and measured it with a ruler?

Cos if you didn't, you're only short changing yourself.

PS mine is the green one and they look totally different. One looks "lil". Imagine one is Muppet Babies the other is real Muppets.

You could even, if you want, use the word "cuter" but that might be goin too far.

Thanks for the other comment you didn't delete, noted, the tech story post is comin' soon!