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.

Purple Galaxy

Grass Blades

Dark wood

Rain Drops

Antelope Canyon

Scottish Highlands

Walpa Gorge

Millau Viaduct

Alamut Mountains

Some of these were found by @RetinaiPadWalls on Twitter, a great resource to follow for wallpaper needs. Follow @OSXDaily too for the latest updates and some other tidbits that don’t make it to the web.

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.

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!

Thanks to @RetinaiPadWalls on Twitter for a handful of these, they tweet nothing but high-res iPad wallpapers and are worth a follow. While you’re there, don’t forget that you can follow us on Twitter too.

Check out our wallpaper archives too, though many are geared towards traditional resolutions.

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.

Get the Wallpaper – NGC 3190 Galaxy

First things first, let’s make OS X Lion look a bit more like Mountain Lion. The easiest way is to get OS X Mountain Lion’s lovely new galaxy wallpaper and set it as your default, click on the image below to download the full sized version. This is amongst the most basic thing you can do, but who doesn’t like a good wallpaper anyway?

• Grab the wallpaper now

Sign Up for iCloud

iCloud is deeply integrated into OS X Mountain Lion, from file save dialogue boxes to just the simple ability to sync things like Contacts, Reminders, Notes, music, apps, and more. The good new sis that much of this is already available to users of OS X Lion and iOS 5 or later. You should have set it up already, but if you haven’t done it yet, do it now and start syncing things between iOS and OS X now. It’s free, there’s no reason not to use it.

• Set up iCloud now for iOS and OS X

iMessages – Messages for Mac

iMessages has come to the Mac to replace iChat, allowing for unlimited communication and file transfers between Macs, iPad, iPhone, IPod touch, without ever using a single SMS. Messages for Mac is a public beta that is available to download right now from Apple. This will replace iChat, but you can always uninstall Messages and get iChat back if you want.

• Download the beta from Apple

Notifications Center – Growl

OS X Mountain Lion brings Notifications Center from iOS to the Mac desktop. For OS X Lion users, you can mimic similar features by getting the free Growl fork for Lion to start getting notifications from compatible apps. Like Notifications Center’s alerts, Growl alerts will pop-up on the right-side of the screen, although there isn’t a fancy swipe gesture to reveal and hide the alerts panel like there is in OS X Mountain Lion, it’ll get the job done.

• Grab Growl Fork free

Unify Safari URL & Search Bar – Omnibar

Safari in Mountain Lion cleans up the UI and combines the URL and search bar into a single bar, much like Chrome. We’ve covered Omnibar before, you can either get the full-fledged SIMBL version or grab a Safari Extension directly from Apple’s Safari extensions site, just click on Search Tools, find OmniBar, and click “Install”.

• Get SafariOmbibar (requires SIMBL)

AirPlay Mirroring – AirParrot

AirPlay Mirroring is built into OS X Mountain Lion and will allow you to mirror your Mac screen to an Apple TV. This is a great feature, but rather than waiting, you can mirror your Mac elsewhere right now with the help of the AirParrot app. It costs $10 and is a cinch to set up, created by the same guy who built the Reflection app that mirrors iOS to Macs, that latter feature is lacking in OS X 10.8, however (fingers crossed).

• Get AirParrot now for $10

GateKeeper

GateKeeper is Apple’s new initiative to prevent malware on the Mac. It does so by providing a choice to users to only allow apps from certified developers or the App Store. It’s not a necessary feature to use in OS X 10.8, but if you want to get something similar in OS X Lion there are a few ways to mimic this. The simplest way? Only download what you know is safe, either from reputable sources or from the Mac App Store. The hard way? This is a bit more technical, but anyone running OS X 10.7.3 can enable the basis of GateKeeper through System Policy Control right now, though the use is limited outside of developers. If you’re interested in the latter, here’s what to do:

sudo spctl -- enable

Disable system policy control command-line tool “spctl(8)”

sudo spctl --disable

If you don’t know what you’re doing, you should probably keep it disabled for now so you don’t accidentally prevent yourself from installing apps and get encumbered with developer logs. For the curious, you can read more about spctl at Apple.com.

Share Sheets

Share Sheets is OS X Mountain Lion’s built-in social functionality, allowing you to easily send a tweet, upload a picture, send a link to Safari’s Reading List, email and message just about anything, post pictures to Flickr, upload videos to Vimeo, and more. Share Sheets work from just about anywhere, and the simplest way you can mimic the feature now is to sign up for a Twitter account. Then grab the free Twitter for Mac client, (follow us there while you’re at it) and learn to tweet from anywhere. You can take things further by adding Share Bookmarklets for your web browsers from Twitter and Facebook too.

• Grab Twitter for Mac free from the App Store
• Get a Facebook Bookmarklet
• Get a Twitter Bookmarklet

Notes – Evernote

Notes in OS X Mountain Lion will sync the Notes app between Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPods, or all of the above. It’s a long great feature, but frankly the Notes app is a bit limited, and you can get an app with the same universal syncing functionality for free right now. Evernote is a free powerful app that seamlessly syncs just about anything you can store in the app between a Mac, iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or anything else running the Evernote app. The service is free as long as you upload less than 60MB of notes per month, which if you think about it, is a ton of notes.

• Get Evernote free from the Mac App Store
• Get Evernote for iOS free from iTunes App Store

Reminders – Wunderlist

The same Reminders app that is on your iPhone or iPad right now is coming to the Mac, and it will be synced through iCloud. Wunderlist does this and even exceeds some of Reminders features, it’s a free app that syncs task lists between Macs, PC’s, iPhones, iPads, you name it.

• Get Wunderlist for Mac free from the Mac App Store
• Get Wunderlist for iOS free from iTunes App Store

That just about rounds it out, if we missed anything or you can think of anything to add to this list, chime into the comments below! Of course, if you don’t want to mimic Mountain Lion, you can set up a dual boot between OS X 10.7 and OS X 10.8 and try it out yourself.

Adding colorized ls output to the Terminal in Mac OS X is a good way to make navigating around the command line a bit easier on the eyes.

We’ll cover a customizable setting, and you can get a preview of color ls output by typing “ls -G” at the command line. The preview with ls -G will depend on the Terminals color settings and won’t necessarily represent the colors shown below, however.

• Open Terminal and type: nano .bash_profile

• Use the arrow keys to navigate to the bottom of the document and paste in either of the blocks of text below, depending on the terminals appearance (see man entry below for further customizations)

Colors for Dark Terminal Themes:
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=GxFxCxDxBxegedabagaced

Colors for Light Terminal Themes:
export CLICOLOR=1
export LSCOLORS=ExFxBxDxCxegedabagacad

• After the strings are pasted into .bash_profile confirm that it looks something like this in nano:



• Hit Control+O to save and open a new Terminal window
• Type "ls" or "ls -la" to confirm the colorized output

This will work with Mac OS X 10.6, OS X 10.7, and OS X 10.8, as long as you are using the bash shell. If you aren't certain what shell you are using, look in the Terminal window titlebar for "bash", or you can check with the following command:

echo $SHELL

The output will be "/bin/bash" if it's bash, and something else if not.

Don't forget that you can also change the appearance of Terminal windows instantly and change the Terminal wallpaper too.

Customizing LSCOLORS Manually
If the above color choices weren't doing it for you, you can set whatever you want. Here's the manual page on LSCOLORS if you want to give it a shot. The default is "exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad" but clearing out the .bash_profile color entry will remove any hideous color combinations too.

LSCOLORS The value of this variable describes what color to use
for which attribute when colors are enabled with
CLICOLOR. This string is a concatenation of pairs of the
format fb, where f is the foreground color and b is the
background color.

The color designators are as follows:

a black
b red
c green
d brown
e blue
f magenta
g cyan
h light grey
A bold black, usually shows up as dark grey
B bold red
C bold green
D bold brown, usually shows up as yellow
E bold blue
F bold magenta
G bold cyan
H bold light grey; looks like bright white
x default foreground or background

Note that the above are standard ANSI colors. The actual
display may differ depending on the color capabilities of
the terminal in use.

The order of the attributes are as follows:

1. directory
2. symbolic link
3. socket
4. pipe
5. executable
6. block special
7. character special
8. executable with setuid bit set
9. executable with setgid bit set
10. directory writable to others, with sticky bit
11. directory writable to others, without sticky
bit

The default is "exfxcxdxbxegedabagacad", i.e. blue fore-
ground and default background for regular directories,
black foreground and red background for setuid executa-
bles, etc.

Flickr has an endless supply of beautiful photos that make for fantastic automatically updating image screen savers in Mac OS X. All you need is a good Flickr stream and you can easily create a new screen saver from it, here’s how:

1. Find a Flickr photo stream you want to use and scroll to the bottom of the Flickr page, looking for the “Subscribe to” RSS link



2. Right-click on “Latest” and copy the URL (starts with api.flickr.com) into the clipboard
3. Launch “System Preferences” and open “Screen Savers”
4. Click the “+” icon in the lower left corner, select “Add RSS Feed”



5. Paste in the Flickr RSS feed URL you copied earlier

You can use your own Flickr stream or just pick one from the “Explore” or “Interesting” lists. General themed image lists can be had by choosing tags, groups, or pools, but not everything on Flickr has the RSS feed option.

For best results, choose a Flickr user that uploads high resolution images, and select the Ken Burns Display Style within the screen savers options.

Fix Grainy Screen Saver Images with a New RSS Feed
If you notice that the resulting images are not full resolution, you can run the Flickr feed URL through a third party service to create a new RSS feed that will use only the high res images:

• Go to BigFlickrFeed.com and paste the Flickr RSS feed into the URL entry
• Copy the output URL (www.bigflickrfeed.com/photos/username/) to the clipboard



• Use that URL to add as the RSS feed screensaver in Mac OS X

If you want some absolutely stunning high resolution landscape photos from around the globe, this Flickr user stream is hard to beat: http://www.flickr.com/photos/coolbiere/

You can also gather collections of images manually, place them into a folder, and create a custom screen saver that way.

Apple has a knack for picking gorgeous desktop wallpapers, and the all new OS X Mountain Lion is no exception. As you’ve undoubtedly seen in the developer preview information and screen shots, the new default wallpaper is another beautiful space themed image of a swirling blue galaxy (maybe a white dwarf, actually), a bit more subtle than the Andromeda galaxy wallpaper found in OS X Lion. It’s offered as a whopping 3200×2000 pixel image and you can download it below:

• Download the full sized wallpaper here

Even if you can’t can’t run the Dev Preview, you can at least grab the new wallpaper and Messages beta and pretend to run the latest OS X. Developers can download the Developer Preview now, and OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion will be released this summer.

Thanks Daryl

Boosting the speed of Mission Control animations can make Mac OS X Lion feel a bit faster when switching between windows, spaces, and apps within the feature. It’s easy to do and reversible if you decide you don’t like it, launch the Terminal to get started.

Speed Up Mission Control Animations

This will speed up Mission Control quite noticeably but still maintain a decent looking animation:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.15

Now kill the Dock to restart Mission Control:

killall Dock

Do a three-fingered swipe up or down to see the difference in speed.

Super Fast Mission Control Animations
If you want extremely fast animations, this is your defaults write command:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1

Again, kill the Dock for changes to take effect:

killall Dock

As you may have guessed, you can adjust the animation speeds by changing the number after the -float flag, the larger the number the slower the animation, and the lower the number the faster the animation. The default setting is probably about 0.2 or 0.25, meaning anything larger than that starts to be slower than default. Whole numbers become increasingly slow, similar to holding down the shift key.

Slowing Down Mission Control Animations
This is marginally slower, but can quickly become a nuisance with usability:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 1

Followed by:

killall Dock

Disable Mission Control Animations
This removes all animations, making Mission Control just snap in and out:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0

Killing the Dock is required for the animations to disappear:

killall Dock

The effect of disabling the animation is quite jarring and unless you’re trying to preserve frame rate for some reason it’s not very pleasant.

Return to Default Mission Control Animation Speeds

Want Mission Control to be back to normal? Use the following defaults command to clear any customizations, returning to the default setting:

defaults delete com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration; killall Dock

Check out more of our Misson Control tips.

The Command+Tab application switcher gets a lot use by many Mac OS X power users, and by default it will include the Finder in the apps to be able to switch to and from. If you’d rather limit the App Switcher to only swap between open applications and not include the Finder though, you’ll have to dig out the command line.

• Launch the Terminal and type the following:

sudo nano /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Info.plist

You’ll need to authenticate because you are using sudo to edit a system file

• Add the following strings near the top of the plist file but under “<dict>”:

<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>


That should look like this:


• Now hit Control+O to save the changes, then hit Control+X to exit out of nano
• Finally you must kill the Finder to relaunch it with the following command:

killall Finder

• Exit out of Terminal and hit Command+Tab again to verify the change

You can undo this at any time by editing the Info.plist file again and removing the two lines you added.

This tip and topmost image come from joshdzielak.com, we modified the process slightly and chose to use the simpler nano editor rather than vi.

Thanks for sending this in Dan