Yosemite tips: Turn off translucency, tune up notifications

Q. How do I turn off the see-through effects in OS X Yosemite? Any other changes I should make?

A. Among all the changes in Apple's new Mac operating system, OS X Yosemite's translucency effects are among the most obvious and, depending on your taste, objectionable.

This feature is most obvious in Safari, where scrolling down results in a faint, ghostly image of the current page appearing under the browser toolbar. If that page has a colored background, the entire toolbar will change color.

You can also see this in the folder sidebars of Mail and the Finder, each of which offers a frosted-glass look at whatever's behind them — your desktop background or another window. And throughout OS X, app menus use translucency to remind you of what's behind them.

Apple says this feature provides "a greater emphasis on your content." I'm not sold; although translucent menus don't seem as much of a visual obstacle as opaque ones, the overall effect is distracting, the feature doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know, and the processor cycles devoted to generating these see-through visuals can't help my MacBook Air's battery life.

To turn off transparency, open the System Preferences app and select "Accessibility." Select "Display" in the left-hand column, then click the checkbox next to "Reduce Transparency." You may need to restart some apps to dispel that effect; for instance, an iMac's copy of Mail retained a translucent sidebar until I quit and re-opened the app.

(As Kirk McElhearn justifiably complained in the post at Macworld that revealed this option to me, a setting like this belongs under System Preferences' General category, where you adjust most other aspects of the Mac interface.)

Then I'd take a look at the information served up by Yosemite's Notifications Center. That part of the system now functions much more like the notifications list on an iPhone or iPad, showing both updates from apps as well as the weather (that part shows up blank until you allow it to check your location) and your schedule.

To change what appears there, simply click the "Edit" button at the bottom of Notifications Center. For example, I ditched the Stocks module (as a journalist, I can't invest in companies I cover, and obsessing over daily price changes is a mistake anyway), but added a world-clock module.

You can also add third-party widgets through the Mac App Store. The selection is small at the moment, with only 16 listed Thursday morning, but I expect that to grow as more Mac users take the free upgrade to Yosemite.

One other Yosemite change you may want to reverse lurks in Safari. In Yosemite, that browser no longer shows the full address of a website; unless you click there, you only see the domain name. To change that, open Safari's "Preferences" window, click "Advanced," and click in the checkbox next to "Show full website address."

Finally, if you have a Mac laptop but haven't enabled FileVault disk encryption, I would do so now. This ensures that if your laptop is lost or stolen, nobody can get at its contents without your system password. To activate FileVault, open System Preferences and select "Security & Privacy."

• Tip: Full-screen mode in Yosemite

The three buttons at the top left corner of most Mac windows appear a little different in Yosemite — like much of the rest of that release, they sport a flatter look — and also don't work the way they did in earlier OS X releases.

While the red and yellow buttons still close a window or minimize it to an icon in the "Dock" menu, the green button now often flips a window into full-screen mode. That can help with tasks like showing a presentation or a Web page without distractions, but it can also come as a surprise.

To exit full-screen mode, click the green button again; if you don't see those window buttons, shove the cursor into the top left corner and they should re-appear. In some apps, hitting the Esc key at the top left of the keyboard can also work.

If you want this green button to act as it did before, slightly expanding the current window, hold down the "Option" key as you click it.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.