First Things to do When You Get a Mac

If you’re here chances are you just got a new Mac as well! So, after having one for the past 7 years here are 5 tips that I recommend everyone doing when you first get a Mac. These few tips will help you fully enjoy the entire Mac OS experience

As some of you may know by now. I just recently purchased a new MacBook Pro! Financially, it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do. But I feel like i’ve been more productive since getting it so here’s to wishing it brings me in more money that it leaked out.

Anyways here are the tips that I’ve found to be super useful.

Update OS
Personalize Trackpad
- One Click
- Three Finger Drag
Personalize the Dock
- Right Side
- Auto Hide
- Group Icons

Other Tips:

Touch bar/Fingerprint Reader
Personalize The Toolbar (Battery Percentage)

Update MacOS

If you’re reading my blog then you’re probably a deal finder and aren’t buying a brand new laptop but much rather a laptop from the clearance/refurbished section. And often in that case your laptop is shipped out to date. So go update your OS (right now we’re on Mojave) and get all your latest software.

Make Your Trackpad Intuitive

Enable tap to One Click

System Preferences –> Trackpad –> Tap to One Click

Your productivity will seriously sky rocket after this. Because if you’re coming from a PC. Or just never knew this existed, being able to just click and tap things immediately will be a complete time saver.

Enable Three Finger Drag

System Preferences –> Accessibility –> Mouse and Trackpad –> Trackpad Options –> Enable dragging “Three Finger Drag”

Links to Articles That Did The Same Thing

Apple Support: Turn on “Three Finger Drag”

Upgrade Your Mac Dock

So not a necessity but if you work alot on visual things (ie. photoshop, final cut, etc) I like to maximize my screen real estate so I actually hide my doc and put it on the right. I’ll show you how I do that now.

Move the Dock to the Right

System Preferences –> Dock
Right click dock –> Dock Preferences…

Select your Preferences
- Postion on screen: Right
- Minimize windows into application icon
- Automatically hide and show the Dock
- Show indicators for open applications

Naturally Hide and Reveal Your Dock

So if you leave it at that, I usually find that the dock animation moves too slowly and I’m all about that efficiency so I actually recommend reducing the animation speed. So you need to do that through the terminal window. some nerd tingz.

Open Up Terminal

Press Command + Spacebar –> Type in “Terminal”
Open Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal

Remove Dock Animation Completely

All you gotta do is just copy and paste this line into your terminal. The dock will flash to restart and will then take on the effects.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -int 0;killall Dock

Smoother Animation (Quick Hide and Reveal)

Same, just copy and paste this code into your terminal. You’ll notice we use float instead of int so we can use decimal points.

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.12;killall Dock

Restore The Defaults

In case you don’t like any of these. You can go back to normal by just copy and pasting this:

defaults delete com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier;killall Dock

Links to Articles That Did The Same Thing

OSX Daily: Change the Animation Speed of Hiding & Displaying the Mac OS X Dock

Group Your Dock Icons

So another thing that I like to do with the dock is to group up my icons. This is also done through the terminal, basically whachu doing is just creating and empty icon.