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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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.
Can’t decide which wallpaper to use as your desktop background? Me neither. Fortunately there’s a setting in Mac OS X that causes the desktop picture to change itself automatically at a user selected time interval, ranging from every 5 seconds to once a day or upon system wake. Essentially this means your wallpaper will change … Read More
We recently showed you how to manually change the login screen wallpaper, but if you don’t want to deal with resizing images and digging around in the filesystem, you can use a free app called Loginox. Loginox sets new background wallpaper at the click of a button, resizing the images for you to the native … Read More
NOTE: New instructions are available to change the login screen background image within OS X Mavericks. Please refer to those if you are looking to customize the login wallpaper in the latest versions of OS X. Here’s how to change the wallpaper that lies behind the standard login screen on OS X Lion & Mountain … Read More
The entries into the 2011 National Geographic Photo Contest make for some spectacular wallpapers, one of which was shown in a recent tip screenshot and requested. You can find them split between TheAtlantic and National Geographic: NationalGeographic: National Geographic Contest Entries Wallpapers TheAtlantic: National Geographic Photo Contest 2011 Most of the wallpapers are best on … Read More
Looking for a few more gorgeous wallpapers for your desktop? This pack of colorful aurora themed images should do the trick, with two variations of each image, one with a Windows 7ish aurora stripey look and the other a blurred faint aurora more reminiscent of OS X. They all look great, and with the 2560×1600 … Read More
Bored with Launchpads background? You can make some changes to it in Mac OS X Lion by changing the background images default blur effect to three other options: unblurred (shown above), black and white blur, or black and white unblurred (both shown below): Open Launchpad Hit Command+B to cycle through the background image effects Update: … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
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 … Read More
Mission Control in Mac OS X Lion has a hidden motion blur effect that can be enabled quite easily:
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 repeating pattern and tile came with the final release of OS X Lion and is still around in Mountain Lion and beyond. This linen tile appears everywhere in new versions of … Read More
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 … Read More
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.
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.
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 … Read More
