Here’s another nice background picture, by request, it’s the blue sky star field wallpaper that was shown in a recent screenshot of Mission Control. This one isn’t part of a pack, but it does include the base PSD file so you can make your own variations of the blue night sky if you are up for it.

You can download it here from DeviantArt

This wallpaper comes at 2560×1600 and was created by the same artist who put together the nice six pack of aurora backgrounds.

If you have trouble locating the download link on DeviantArt, it’s highlighted in an image below.
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By request, here is a great 6 wallpaper pack of original variations on the classic OS X Aurora style wallpaper, each image is 2560×1600 and looks great on any Mac (or iPad). This pack was sent in to us but we can’t track down the source again, so thanks to whoever that was.

Download them all from DeviantArt

If you’re not sure where to find the download link on DeviantArt, we’ve pointed it out clearly below:
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Of all the Launchpad tips and customizations, one that has been greatly desired is the ability to manually adjust the icon size of apps. A tip sent in by Rohan Agashe moves us in that direction, allowing you to change the Launchpad icon size down from the large icons in OS X 10.7.2 to the smaller Launchpad icons that were present in Mac OS X Lion 10.7.1.

This trick is limited to those who have an existing backup of Mac OS X 10.7.1 through Time Machine or otherwise. We are not going to provide old copies of Dock.app or the executable since it is part of OS X Lion and that would be against the EULA.
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Mission Control in Mac OS X Lion has a hidden motion blur effect that can be enabled quite easily:

• Enter Mission Control
• Press Command+M to enable motion blur

You can then see the blur effect by moving about with the standard Mission Control actions, from entering and exiting into Mission Control, clearing the desktop windows, switching between desktops, to selecting apps and windows.

It’s a nice effect, but the motion blur can get slightly choppy on older Macs or machines with less available RAM, which is probably why Apple didn’t ship the effect as enabled by default. You can always disable blur by pressing Command+M again.

Similarly, a blur effect can be enabled in Launchpad by using the same keyboard shortcut. Both of these bits of eye candy were seen in the original presentation for OS X Lion at the “Back to the Mac” event.
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The lightly shaded large linen wallpaper from the OS X Lion developer previews didn’t end up being the final shipping version, instead a linen tile came with the final release of Lion. This linen tile appears everywhere in Mac OS X 10.7 and even iOS 5, from Mission Control, to behind Safari windows, Notifications Center, LaunchPad and iOS folders, and a variety of other places.

We’ve uploaded both versions of the gray tile to this post and you can download it here, but there isn’t much reason to if you’re on a 10.7 based Mac right now because you can access them directly yourself.

Getting the Grey Linen Tile from the Mac OS X Finder:

• Hit Command+Shift+G to bring up the “Go To Folder” window
• Enter the following path:
  /System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/Resources/

• Locate the file named “NSTexturedFullScreenBackgroundColor.png” that is the linen tile that is ubiquitous in Mac OS X Lion

The Lighter Gray Linen Tile
There’s also a lighter version of the gray linen in the same folder, named “NSLinenBackgroundPattern.png”

The linen tiles make a great wallpaper, just be sure to set it to “Tile” in the Desktop & Screen Savers preference panel, rather than stretch, or it’ll look awful.

Nope, not the most thrilling post in the world, but we’ve been asked twice in the past two days about this and it came up again on Twitter yesterday, so hey, why not make a post about it. Enjoy.

If you are a fan of Mac tips and tricks and customizing OS X, you absolutely have to get TinkerTool for Lion.

TinkerTool is broken into 12 main sections covering Finder, Dock, General, Desktop, Applications, Fonts, Font Smoothing, Login Items, Safari, iTunes, QuickTime X, and Resume (OS X Lion’s Restore feature), each section has a handful of options ranging from UI tweaks to behavioral changes. The other great thing is that you can always return to the default state and undo all the changes you make, meaning there’s no threat of accidentally screwing something up.

A free download, the new version is updated with a ton of OS X Lion specific tweaks and customizations, adding to it’s already robust abilities. It covers tons of things we’ve discussed here in the past, and everything is enabled through the apps simple GUI by just clicking on checkboxes. No defaults write commands, no digging around in /System/Library/CoreServices/, it’s by far the easiest way to access many of the hidden features of Mac OS X.

• Download TinkerTool from the Developer for free here

If there’s only one app you get for customizing OS X, TinkerTool should be it.

This is a rather simple but beautiful tribute to Steve Jobs in wallpaper form. The image is of the Apple logo with silhouetted profile of Steve Jobs forming the bite.

Full size wallpaper here (2560×1600) or click the image above.

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If you want to customize the Terminals appearance a bit beyond the prompt and a custom background, you can make the Terminal much more readable by using this nice trick to add a separator and timestamp between each executed command. This also bolds the current command text and anything that is available from tab completion.

To get this to work, you just need to paste a script into your .bash_profile. Here’s how to do this, including how to make a backup of your existing bash profile in case you mess something up:
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If you’ve been using Nocturne to get the black menubar in Mac OS X but don’t care for any of the features outside of the darker menu bar, check out MenuBarFilter. All it does is turn the Mac menu bar color into a dark black gradient, closely resembling iOS.

Download MenubarFilter now or head to the github page.

MenuBarFilter is extremely lightweight, just uncompress the app and double-click on the Panda icon to turn your menubar black. There are no configuration choices or menu items, so if you want to quit the app you’ll have to find it in Activity Monitor and kill the process, or type this into the Terminal:

killall Finder

Why would you want to stop running this gorgeous little add-on? Bugs of course. MenuBarFilter certainly works in Lion but it doesn’t play that well with Mission Control or full-screen apps, and you’ll see some display artifacts and mismatched colors here and there. I’ve been using it since last night and as long as you don’t expect a perfect fit quite yet, MenuBarFilter is a very nice looking customization to Mac OS X.

Speaking of bugs, if you’re crafty and want to try and troubleshoot the display oddities yourself, you can grab the source code through git with:

git clone git://github.com/eece/MenuBarFilter

Thanks to TJ for the heads up in our comments

If you want to quickly style your folders or Launchpad with Emoji, you can access the Special Characters panel directly from the Finder in Mac OS X Lion:

• Click on the Finder or the Mac OS X desktop
• Pull down the “Edit” menu and select “Special Characters”

Here’s the weird part, and this could be a bug or maybe it’s intentional, but if you right-click on an item from the Special Characters panel and chose “Copy Character Info”, instead of getting just the icon into your clipboard you’ll get the full unicode and more, like this:

“🎃JACK-O-LANTERN Unicode: U+1F383 (U+D83C U+DF83), UTF-8: F0 9F 8E 83″

You can either just delete all the text after the Emoji character since it appears at the front of the string, or you can just get the icon by doing either of these:

• Drag and drop an icon from the Special Characters panel onto the desktop to create a .textclipping containing the special character or icon
• Drag and drop the character directly into a folder or file name

Even with it’s quirks, this is quicker than using TextEdit or another app to access the Emoji icons.

Thanks to ram who left this tip in our comments!