Remove Leather UI from Contacts & Calendar in OS X Mountain Lion
Skeumorphism seems to be here to stay, but if you’re bent on ridding OS X apps like Contacts (Address Book) and Calendar (iCal) of any traces of the stitched leather appearance, Mountain Tweaks makes it as easy as a couple of clicks for OS X Mountain Lion users.
Mountain Tweaks is a free download, just look for the tiny ‘here’ text on the page rather than clicking the blue download/pay button.
Download and launch Mountain Tweaks, click the “Mountain Lion” tab, and then click the “Yes” buttons for both of the Leather entries. Restoring back to the leather appearance is as simple as clicking “No” under the same tab.
If MountainTweaks feels familiar it’s because it’s the sister app of LionTweaks, which serves the same leather UI removal purpose for apps in OS X Lion.
As of now there’s no way to remove the skeumorphic interfaces of Notes or Reminders, but it’s pretty likely those will be modifiable too once someone figures it out.
This is kind of crumby, to be honest. The leather removal actually replaces the window chrome with non-Mountain Lion titlebar graphics. It’s closer to native window trim, but this hack just draws attention to the incorrect window dressing.
this app broke my ical functionality!!! i cannot launch ical because “iCal may be damaged or incomplete”
Just curious. Is there a way to do this on the iPad? (iOS 5.1.1) I really hate the “Leather” look.
David
it isn’t perfect. you still get brown writing on the menu bar in calendar – which looks disgusting.
I wish the three top left buttons in Calendar weren’t brown when the app isn’t the active one and the shadows around the buttons and words weren’t brown. Maybe they will fix that with an update to Mountain Lion Tweaks
This is a great resource. I look forward to watching that list of Tweaks grow.
One quick one that I put into effect is to disable elastic/rubber band scrolling. To my knowledge, there are no “pull down to refresh” apps on the desktop Mac OS X.
In Terminal, type “defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -int 0” to disable
Does that work with all apps that use rubber banding?
Only one way to find out. I saw another command for app-specific effects. That one had something to do with com.apple.iTunes and the other preference files. Do some searching see what you can find.
You mean to say you’ve never used Sparrow or Twitter???