Expose is one of the most useful features of Mac OS X and it looks great too. Well, except for the window glow color, which a lot of people aren’t particularly thrilled with. You can replace the bright neon blue hover glow with any other color simply by editing and replacing some PNG files.

First pick your color from the links below (or edit the PNG files to suit yourself), then:

* Navigate to /System/Libary/CoreServices/
* Find the Dock.app file and right-click on it, then click “Show Package Contents”
* Within Dock.app, navigate to Contents/Resources
* Find the files called expose-window-selection-small.png and expose-window-selection-big.png
* Backup these files!
* Replace those files with the two of different colors from the downloaded zip files below
* Now restart the Dock by typing: killall Dock

Expose will now display the hover glow color based on the file set that you chose. If you want to switch it back to the default blue, simply repeat the process but use the blue backup files.

White – a bright white glow
Grey – a softer grey glow
White outline – a white outline as seen in the above screenshot, via CreativeBits

If you want to revert back and you didn’t save your own files, you can download the Expose outline backups here:
Expose default glow backups

[ via CreativeBits ]

Prior to Mac OS X, there used to be a Trash icon on the Desktop. You can replicate this functionality by creating a symbolic link of the Trash to a folder named Trash on your desktop, here’s how to do this.

Launch the Terminal and type the following:
ln -s ~/.Trash ~/Desktop/Trash

A folder named ‘Trash’ will appear on your desktop, and it has direct access to the Trash in the Dock. You can assign any icon you’d like to this folder to make it look like a Trash can. Any files or folders you drag here will be sent to the Trash as usual, but it lacks the ability to eject disks. If you want to remove the desktop Trash icon, just drag it to the Trash!

If you’ve been to Google.com today you can’t possibly have missed their logo honoring the late Josef Frank, a famous architect. The crazy looking Google logo is actually a take on Josef Frank’s wallpaper designs, which are intricately detailed and quite fancy.

After seeing these, I thought they’d look great on my iPad, so I decided to make a few Josef Frank wallpapers for the iPad. Here are four that I created fitting the iPad dimensions, but they’ll work on on your iPhone too. Enjoy!

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You can easily turn Spotlight into only an application launcher by adjusting the Spotlight search settings.

* Launch System Preferences
* Click the Spotlight icon
* Uncheck every item except for “Applications” and “System Preferences”
* Close System Preferences

Now your Spotlight menu will only return Application and System Preference results when a search is made, making for a very quick and completely integrated application launcher. Of course, you can use Spotlight as an application launcher even with the other search category items selected, but your search results will be a bit more cluttered.

Did you know that you can customize the backgrounds of any Finder windows in Mac OS X? In the screenshot above, the Finder windows are set to match the color of the Finder window sidebar. Changing the window background color is a somewhat unknown feature even to frequent Mac users, as reader Karim S reminded us when he wrote in asking: “I was wondering if you have any tips to change the background color of the finder’s windows. I would like to see the white turned into a light grey.” Setting the Finder window background to something is easy once you learn how, and here’s how to do it:

How to customize the Finder window background in Mac OS X

• To customize the background of a Finder window, open any window
• Once inside a Finder window, hit Command+J or navigate from the ‘View’ menu to ‘Show View Options’
• From the View Options, select ‘Color’ or ‘Picture’ under the Background submenu
• Using the color picker, select the color you want to use for window backgrounds. If you are setting a picture, navigate to the picture you want to set as the background
• If you want ALL Finder windows to have this custom background, click on ‘Set as Default’
• Changes take effect immediately, and you’ll see the new color or background picture in all windows
• Close View Options

That’s all there is to it. In Karim’s case he would want to set a grey background and then click on “Set as Default” so that all Finder windows have the same background.

You can easily remove the background customization and reverse whatever changes you made by just opening View Options again and selecting the ‘White’ background, which is the Mac OS default setting.

You may not know it, but OS X’s Mail.app has the ability to utilize plugins. Installing a plugin is not an overly difficult task. After the first install, the subsequent plugins become easier to get running. A lot of the plugins you download claim that installation is as easy as double clicking on the .mailbundle file, but my experience shows that it just wasn’t that simple! Thankfully, the work-around is simple and straightforward.

Install a .mailbundle file
The first step is to navigate to your Home folder (command-shift-h) in the Finder. Open the Library folder and then open the Mail folder. Look for a “Bundles” folder. If it doesn’t exist, you should create it (command-shift-n). Now place a .mailbundle file in the directory. For an example, I suggest using letterbox. Letterbox will allow you to view your mail in a three column view.

Enable the use of mailbundles
After you have everything in place, we need to tell Mail to look for and use .mailbundle files. Open the Terminal and type the following command:
defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles 1
If you were using letterbox, the next time you fire up the Mail application you should see your inbox presented to you using three columns. Very cool.

Dateline is a nice little utility that places a transparent linear calendar on your Mac desktop. It’s pretty customizable so if you want the dates to be horizontal or vertical, or the text color or their background colors to be different it’s just an easy couple of tweaks away. Perhaps the best part about Dateline though is that it integrates with iCal, so double-clicking on a date will launch iCal and show you your calendar for that day. It’s free, it’s lightweight, and it requires Mac OS X 10.5 or newer.

Dateline developer home
Download now

I’ve always preferred the way the original MacBook and MacBook Pro’s handled the function keys, in particularly the way F9, F10, and F11 are used to enter into Expose. For a while now the function keys have changed, they default to playing music, adjusting keyboard backlighting, and adjusting volume levels, I like these features but I would rather press the ‘fn’ key to access those since I have grown used to the older way of hitting F10 to enter Expose. Thankfully this is easily adjustable in Mac OS X.

Switch all function keys with System Preferences

If you want to switch the functionality of your Mac’s function keys so that you have to hold down the ‘fn’ function key to use the special features printed on each key, and retain the original Expose functionality of the F9 through F11 keys, do the following:

* Launch System Preferences
* Click on the “Keyboard” icon
* Click on the checkbox next to “Use all F1, F2, etc, keys as standard function keys”

While this enables things like Expose and Dashboard to launch as they did on the older keyboards, it disables all the other function keys unless you hold down the ‘fn’ key.

Switch only some function keys with FunctionFlip

If you want to just disable or switch the functionality of certain Function keys, you can use a utility called FunctionFlip.

* Download FunctionFlip from here
* Install FunctionFlip, it is a preference pane and will appear in System Preferences
* Enter System Preferences
* Click on “Universal Access”
* Click on “Enable access for assistive devices”
* Now enter the FunctionFlip control panel
* Select which Function keys you want to ‘flip’ the functionality of. In my case I set F9/F10/F11/F12
* Close System Preferences

Now the keys you selected will work as normal function keys and you will have to hold down the function key to do what is specified on the keyboard. Functionflip seems to work great but there’s a strange bug that causes the system beep notification to sound when you use the flipped keys, it’s nothing to be worried about just know that’s what the system beeps are caused by when you hit a function key.

The easiest way to change your Mac’s desktop background picture

* Right-click on the image you want to use as the Mac’s background picture
* Scroll down to the bottom of the contextual menu to ‘Set Desktop Picture’
* Done!

You can also use the System Preferences to change the Mac background:

* Go to the Apple menu and select ‘System Preferences’
* Click on the “Desktop & Screen Saver” icon
* Click the “Desktop” tab
* You can now drag & drop a picture into the little preview window and it will set automatically to that image

You can really clean up your Mac Desktop by hiding all the hard disk and drive icons that appear by default on it. Here’s how to adjust what icons are visible:

* Click on the Finder menu and select Preferences
* Click on the General tab
* Uncheck boxes next to hard disks, drives, ipods, etc

Changes take effect immediately and your hard disk will immediately disappear (Note this doesn’t really remove the icons in a deletion sense, it just hides them from being visually seen on the Desktop).

Any other icons you want cleared off the desktop you can simply just drag & drop them into another folder within your home directory, or elsewhere.

If you really want to have a clean and bare desktop, you can hide all desktop icons from ever appearing via the Mac OS command line.