It’s easy to be distracted by other open applications and windows while using a computer, and sometimes even the best of us need a bit of help to focus. Lion’s full screen mode can be helpful, but when that’s not enough or when you need access to other windows and apps, then Isolator is your friend.

Isolator is a free application that provides an easy way to focus on a single application at a time by applying various filters to everything in the background, these are fully customizable and even if you aren’t interested in the focus and productivity side of things, can make for a nice way to customize the appearance of Mac OS X.

• Download Isolator for free from willmore.eu

You can choose to tint the background, blur it, use a bloom effect, turn it into crystals, or make the background black and white while everything else is colorful. Both the tint opacity and filter strength are adjustable by a slider, leading to plenty of customization options. Screenshots and a video of some of these effects and filters are shown below.
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The OS X 10.7.3 update brought with it a variety of subtle changes, including a minor adjustment to how the Launchpad background image style is switched. In previous Mac OS X versions, Command+B would switch between the background effect styles, but this is now achieved with Control+Option+Command+B.

Try it yourself by opening Launchpad and then hitting the Control+Option+Command+B keys to alternate between backgrounds with blur, unblurred, black and white, and blurred black and white. You can see samples of these background style effects below.

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Bored with how your iPhone looks? If you have it jailbroken, you can install iPhone themes and make the device look a lot different than iOS by using an app called Dreamboard.

If you haven’t jailbroken yet, backup the iPhone and then proceed with Absinthe for iPhone 4S on iOS 5.0.1 or Redsn0w for iOS 5.0.1 on other iPhones and iPods. Dreamboard is then found as a free download in Cydia, so search for it and install.

Many Dreamboard themes are available via Cydia, here’s a handful:

• Endroid - Android HTC lookalike with updating weather widget and clock, this is the default Android theme
• OS7 – Makes iPhone look like Windows Phone 7, complete with tile animations
• WebOS – If you want your iPhone to look like a now extinct Palm device
• Kindle Fire for iPhone – Gives the iPhone an interface like the Kindle Fire
• OS X Lion Ultimatum – one of the fancier themes, makes iOS look like Mac OS X Lion
• Apple Desk – looks like an actual desk, complete with iMac and keyboard

There are plenty more, and while a lot of the themes are free, others cost a buck of two. Some paid themes have to be downloaded manually and then moved to the iPhone with SSH and SFTP from a Mac or PC, others can be installed directly on the phone.

Heads up to Lifehacker for the basic theme ideas, but if you’re serious about theming the iPhone don’t miss iDownloadBlogs theme page for tons of videos on the process.

Stacks are a Dock feature added to Mac OS X a while back that let added an easy way to see the contents of Applications, Documents, Downloads, and whatever other folder placed into the Dock.

To change the icon size of Stacks, the stack must be shown as “Grid”, this can be set with a right-click. Open the Stack and use the following keystrokes:

• Command + to increase the icon size
• Command – to decrease the icon size

Size adjustment is made immediately and can be set anywhere from one extreme of huge, to small, or anywhere in between.

Hopefully a similar feature will be implemented for Launchpad, which is currently stuck at a single size, although it can be modified to be slightly smaller.

Mac OS X Lion can display messages that require acknowledgement prior to the standard login screen appearing. For administrators, this allows a user agreement or acceptable use policy to be displayed before users can login, and for personal use it lets users include a customized message before logging into a Mac.

How to Create & Set a Login User Agreement in Mac OS X

For OS X 10.7 or later:

• Open TextEdit and create an RTF containing the the user agreement login message, save this file named as “PolicyBanner” and be sure the extension is .rtf or .rtfd
• From the Finder, hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To Folder” window and enter the following path:

/Library/Security/

• Copy the previously created PolicyBanner.rtf to the /Library/Security/ folder



• Authenticate the file transfer by entering the administrators password

Note: /Library/ is different than the user ~/Library/, with the former being system-wide and the latter being user specific.

To confirm the policy banner is active, log out and log back into the Mac. The user agreement will popup before the standard login screen, and must be accepted before a user can login to the Mac.
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We have gone through tons of OS X Dock tips before, but with the help of a free Lion compatible app called Docker, we can apply many changes to the Docks behavior and customizations to the Docks appearance easily with just a few clicks.

What exactly can you customize? Using Docker, you can: change Dock style from 3D to 2D, adjust translucency of icons, change the indicator style and color, change the color of the Docks outline, customize the Docks background to an image or a transparency, change the Docks position on screen, switch the minimize effect, increase the icon size beyond the default limits, make various changes to the app icons within the Dock, add spacers to the left and right side of the Dock, add custom stacks, and more.

• Download Docker for free from Blocksoft

Of course you can always revert back to the default settings at any point too. Here are a few different Dock styles that were quickly made with the help of the app:

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Recently we posted a Mac museum collection that featured an iMac using wallpaper that made it appear like you could see right through to the logic board. It turns out these images are from iFixIt, the company that likes to tear down Apple hardware.

In the process of documenting their teardowns, iFixIt also has taken high resolution images that work great for wallpapers, giving the illusion that there is no screen on the device, and instead making it look as if icons and windows are floating directly atop circuitry. It’s a cool effect, and they have a variety of freely available native resolution wallpapers in this style for the iMac, iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and even the Apple external Thunderbolt display.

• Find them all on iFixit.com’s blog or check out some more images below

If you don’t care about showing the exact hardware for your device, they all make great wallpapers in general. My favorites have to be the iPad and iMac, although the Thunderbolt chip is nice too:

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iChat Matte is a popular mod for iChat that removes the bubble aqua style text blocks and changes them to a flatter matte. The tweak works by replacing a few image files, but the official version hasn’t been updated for OS X Lion and an unofficial version floating around has the chat bubbles facing the wrong way. You can download that version yourself and switch them manually with Preview, or follow along the instructions below and download the attached images:

Replace the iChat Aqua Text Bubbles with a Matte Appearance in OS X Lion

This has been tested to work with iChat in Mac OS X 10.7.2:

• Open a Finder window and hit Command+Shift+G, entering the following path:

/Applications/iChat.app/Contents/PlugIns/Balloons.transcriptstyle/Contents/Resources/

• Locate the files “BigBubbleMask.png” and “BigBubbleGloss.png” and make a copy of them for backups, you can make a copy within the folder or copy them elsewhere
• Replace those two files with the versions below:




• Now launch the Terminal from /Applications/Utilities/ and enter the following command two strings:

sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chown root:wheel BigBubbleMask.png
sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleGloss.png;sudo chmod 644 BigBubbleMask.png

• Now relaunch iChat and send a message to see the flat matte text boxes

If you need a test AIM account to send a message to, the SmarterChild bot is defunct but will at least respond with some spamy nonsense that works for testing purposes.

Enjoy your new, cleaner customized iChat appearance.

We’re suckers for new wallpapers around here, and iOS 5.1 includes four new gorgeous background pictures sized at 1024×1024 for the iPad. Extracted from the iOS 5.1 beta releases, 9to5mac found and resized the images to fit the iPhone 640×960 display as well.

Grab them in a bundle from Mediafire or via the 9to5 links below:

iPad (1, 2, 3, 4)

iPhone (1, 2, 3, 4)

Many share similarities to those found in OS X Lion, the beach image looks like it’s probably from the same photo shoot as the one included on the Mac.

Just like you can add spacers between app icons in the OS X Dock (the left side), we can also add these same spacers to the right-side of the Dock, where the Applications, Documents, Downloads, and Trash icons live.

Launch the Terminal and paste the following defaults write string into the command line:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{tile-data={}; tile-type="spacer-tile";}' ;killall Dock

If you want multiple spacers added, just hit the up arrow and return to initiate the command again. Each execution of the defaults write command will create one additional spacer in the Dock.

After a spacer has been added, you can click and drag it around the Dock to fit between icons. If you want to remove it, drag it out of the Dock like any other Dock item.

As previously mentioned, if you’re wanting to put spaces in the left side of the Dock instead, use the following command:

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}' ;killall Dock

Notice the two commands are different, and the spacers can not be dragged from the left side of the Dock to the right, or vice versa.

Both of these commands work with Mac OS X Lion and prior releases.