If you want color icons back in your OS X Finder window sidebar but don’t want to deal with the existing procedures of manually installing SIMBL and the other components, grab SideEffects instead. SideEffects is a simple package that includes the three necessary components to add color back to Finder sidebar icons; SIMBL, ColorfulSidebar, and RelaunchFinder, all wrapped into a single easy to use installer to shorten the process considerably. Gone will be the drab grayscale icons, welcome back the color.

• Get SideEffects free from MacUpdate

SideEffects works with OS X 10.7.4 or later including Mountain Lion (supposedly).

For those wondering what is being installed and where it’s going, the files added by SideEffects are as follows:

SIMBL
/Library/ScriptingAdditions

ColorfulSidebar
/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins

RelaunchFinder
/Applications/RelaunchFinder.app

Also note that RelaunchFinder.app is also added to the active users login items so that the color icons take effect on each reboot or login.

Thanks to Simon for the tip, similar icon colorization is available for iTunes too.

There are tons of interesting pictures posted to Instagram all the time, but unless you’re using the iOS or Android app you can’t really see what’s going on there. That’s where Screenstagram comes in, it creates an attractive screen saver using an array of images pulled from either public photos or your personal Instagram feed.

There aren’t many options within the screen saver, but you can either specify a Instagram login and pull pictures from your own feed and who you follow, or just let it load from the “popular” public feed. For what it’s worth, Screenstagram is really at its best when you follow some interesting people who post things you actually want to see and not necessarily random photos from John Q Public.

• Download Screenstagram free from BarbarianGroup

If you’re not an Instagram fan you can also use Flickr feeds as screen savers, or go the oldschool route and build your own with a folder of pictures directly in Mac OS X.

Everyone loves a good wallpaper to beautify their desktop or homescreen. We try to post some of the nicer ones we find and to continue that tradition we’re sharing 9 more absolutely gorgeous wallpapers that have been sized for the new iPads retina display. Even if you don’t have a new iPad, the resolution of each image is a whopping 2048 by 2048 pixels which should be high enough to function as desktop backgrounds for most Mac and PC displays too.

Click the images below to open them in a new window, note the pictures hosted on InterfaceLift require manually selecting the screen resolution which will make it easy to get the perfect resolution for your display.

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Though almost everyone likes a nice photo screen saver and some of the funkier options out there, I’m also big fan of minimalist screensavers that do something simple like displaying just the time. That’s exactly what we have courtesy of Apple UI designer Robert Padbury, two beautifully simple clocks, either in 12 hour or 24 hour format, no other frills.

• Download the minimalist clock screensavers free from Dribbble
• Alternate screen saver: MinimalClock at iLoveColorz

Both are extremely lightweight and easy to install, all you need to do is download the .qtz file and drop it into System Preferences’s Screen Saver window to turn them into the active screensaver.

Because they are .qtz files, they are also very easy to edit yourself in Quartz Composer should you want to change the font and text styling, background or foreground color, rotation, or whatever else, though the default styling is very nice.

If you want something similar but with the date as well as the time, a screen saver called Today offers that, though it’s not as lightweight as this one.

Update: The original Minimalist Clock was pulled from Dribble for some reason, but you can find similar screen savers like Today, Fliqlo flip clock, and MinimalClock. We will update this post if the original screen saver returns.

Don’t like the dark user interface and color scheme of the Photoshop CS6 beta? You can easily change it by cycling through four different theme choices, ranging from the default darkest grey, dark grey, medium grey, and light gray.

Hit Shift+Function+F2 to lighten the Photoshop UI or Shift+Function+F1 to darken the interface elements. If you’re averse to keyboard commands, you can find the interface options within Photoshop Preferences as well.

This tip comes to us from the unofficial Photoshopsupport.com, thanks for sending it in Max!

Looking for some nice mellow wallpapers to add to your Mac, iPhone, or iPad? The DizzyUp collection features three beautifully subtle wallpapers in a wide variety of common screen resolutions and has also been updated to support the 3rd gen iPad retina 2048×2048 display. The wood paneling is my personal favorite of the group, but if you’re into minimalist wallpapers you won’t want to miss the other two dark & light wallpapers either, which feature unobtrusive gradients over a some gentle patterns.

• Grab each wallpaper from DizzyUp.co.uk

(BTW the light desktop background image looks great with a retro-fied Classic style Mac OS X desktop)

Heads up to 512pixels for the reminder these exist, and for pointing out the iPad retina update.

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Want to change a user name that appears at the login screen of Mac OS X? It’s very easy to do:

1. Open System Preferences and click on “Users & Groups”
2. Select the users name you wish to change from the left side
3. Look for “Full Name” on the right side options and click in the box, enter the administrator password to authenticate the name change
4. Type the new name as you want it to appear at the login screen



5. Exit out of System Preferences

Confirm the login name change took place by logging out or by locking the screen, both of which will bring you to the standard OS X login window. This is the same for OS X 10.7 Lion and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.

The full name/login name is not to be confused with the short user name of an account, which controls the directory name and SSH logins.

Looking for some gorgeous high resolution images for your new iPad? Here are a handful of gorgeous retina wallpapers, each measuring 2048×2048 pixels.

Click on any of the images below for a full sized version, though some of the links go to InterfaceLift and the iPad 2048×2048 version must be selected manually from their drop-down download menu, labeled as “new iPad (3rd gen)”. Enjoy!

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Many years ago before OS X, the Mac OS Finder was much more simple. There was no toolbar, no sidebar, no drop shadows, and each folder opened in it’s own window showing you only the icons in that Folder. That was basically the default desktop experience from Mac OS 1.0 through Mac OS 9, and you can bring much of that traditional simplified Finder styling to OS X with a few minor adjustments:

• Simplify the Finder – Open a Finder window and right-click on the toolbar, select “Hide Toolbar”, while at the same Finder window, hit Command+/ to show the status bar
• Ditch Drop Shadows – Use a free third party tool like ShadowKiller to remove shadows from OS X windows and menus
• Use Graphite Appearance – In System Preferences’s Appearance panel, choose the Graphite theme to remove the color stoplights and dull down the OS appearance
• Use Gray Wallpaper – Select the classic “Solid Gray Medium” desktop background color from System Preferences’s Desktop panel
• Hide the Dock – From the OS X desktop, hit Command+Option+D to enable automatic Dock hiding, move the cursor near the bottom of the screen to reveal the Dock

Suddenly OS X Finder looks more akin to retro versions of Mac OS from long ago, and each folder will open in a new window too, behaving like Mac OS System 9 and prior.

Mac OS 7 and OS X Lion are now not so far apart.

So going retro is fun and all, but is there a practical reason to simplify the OS X appearance? In some cases, yes. Disabling window shadows and using a plain color background uses less system resources and can actually help to speed up older Macs, though they’d be best combined with some other tips to breathe new life into an old OS X machine.

Can’t wait for OS X Mountain Lion to be released this summer? You can get many of the features of the next generation Mac OS X version right now. Whether you are running OS X Lion or to an extent, OS X Snow Leopard, read on to find out how to get everything from notifications, note syncing, synced reminders, iMessages, the simplified Safari UI, Twitter integration, AirPlay mirroring, and much more.

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