Lion Finder sidebar color?

I agree. Please bring color back, Apple!! ITunes and Finder icons are so BORING without color. Also please bring color back to the sign in screen for OS X Lion. All this dull grey is unbearable. What a drab world of computing without color. It's like going back to black and white TV. Come on now!

It ain't gonna happen (that Apple will bring these colors back). I miss them, too, and was aghast to find them missing. But Apple clearly is intent on making Mac more like iPad, with the Finder being faded into non-existence. No Finder, no colors.

Just look at the recent announcement of Mountain Lion; the whole message is that from now on, Mac takes its cues, its look and its feel, its operating principles from iPad. End of story. (Which makes a lot of sense, product positioning-wise, for the more Mac looks and feels like iPad (a far more popular machine, at this point), the more Windows-owning iPad owners will feel comfortable switching to a Mac, too, if it's really a desktop machine they want.)

We can complain, we can whine, we can protest, but nothing, I believe, will change Apple's mind about this. Big people - perhaps Mr. Jobs himself - have made big decisions, and if nothing else, they are not about to admit the mistake they have made and reverse themselves.

They are certainly not going to waste their time on bringing back colourful icons. I like the grey, it's more elegant and refined.

Just what part of my iPad has monochrome colours?

What part of my iPad has mono finder sidebar and mono icons in itunes and iphoto?

Making it like an iPad is valid but in this sense Launchpad and other initiatives make it like an iPad not a finder sidebar icon when the iPad has no Finder!

I think they just made a mistake and for those who think it is refined then have an option to make it mono if that is what the user requires.

Reflect on the day iTunes had a white background causing eye strain and everyone complained then in the next version there was an option for dark or light background in grid view.

They do occassionally make mistakes as good as they are 😕

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Black and white photography is now considered "art".

But some people actually used the icons to look at and now they all look the same so why have icons in the first place?

With me, it has nothing to do with just LIKING the colors. It take so much longer to find the folder or whatever I have in the side bar. I can't quickly look for the green icon or the different shaped one. It just adds so much more time to my work.

I think the folder icons are quite clear so I fail to see how the lack of colour makes them harder to see, but that is my opinion.

I customize almost everything on my Mac. This includes custom icons for several of my apps on my dock and even my folders. Before they added this monochrome overwrite, I could get to a folder right away just by recognizing the icon for a certain folder. The monochrome is anything but refined and elegant as you put it. It's a eyesore. Sadly enough, this is one of the reasons why most of my family and friends haven't upgraded to Lion.

All they have to do is just give us the option to restore the color for those who prefer the color, without resorting to a hack.

I believe Apple would like us all to move away from the Finder. Hence the new Launcher app, or whatever it's called, which is a clone of iPad, and hence the ability of apps to pick up where we left them, and the new sandboxing and Gatekeeper that can lock Mac to the Apps Store, etc.

By making Finder less attractive and less usable - more grey, that is - and adding new ways of using the machine, we are gently being encouraged to move away from Finder and its icons and the general Mac-desktop paradigm that we've all come to believe was the top of the mountain.

I'm not so happy with it, not at all, but that's how it seems to me.

I strongly encourage development and I don't mind that they try different ways of doing things. The point is that monochrome is really a step backwards. I started using Mac's in 1987 and generally I found each new release of Mac OS an improvement. A few odd steps were made that were recognized and rectified later, see the "Apple menu" that was not present in 10.0, the "fan" only view of folders in the dock which makes it useless, the white background in iTunes, and now the one that's not rectified (yet) the grey icons in iTunes. iPhoto, Finder, sidebar. Whatever the reason may be, it definitely makes all these applications less usable. The icons in the Finder are my main point of orientation. By making them grey I have to start reading more.

Apple used to focus on US, the users. They mocked Microsoft for lack of user orientation. Now they seem to drift away from us who are loyal for so many years, to maybe please the masses that embrace the iPhone/iPads. I can't imagine however that this is really an improvement to them either. Making things hard to read can never be an improvement.

The design guideline of Apple was also to "grey out" icons that are not available. They still try this with different levels of grey but it is much harder to read/see.

The very very sad thing is that the programmers can probably restore the colored icons with just a few settings, but they don't/are not allowed. I'm OK with the fact that it defaults to grey, put PLEASE give us the option to restore color at system level for all applications.

John, I totally agree with you.

That's what came to my mind when I was thinking why they made this move. In my opition, they want to push people away from Finder because they are installing some "new" way of file handling. A hard to read Finder makes every alternative more attractive. In 10.8 it will be to store iWork files within the App like on iPad. I guess that is also why iCloud won't support syncing from Finder (according to how I understand those press releases).

I hope they'll come up with some useful alternative that is better than the failed usability of Versions.

i agree. the colour is such an important part for many people. especially those of us who customise our icons.

if apple is doing this to out the finder then at least they should let us enjoy using it until they get rid of it.

papalapapp - i agree i hate versions and locked files, duplicating, saving a version... not good!

Maybe some users like the less distracting grey. I am one of them, and so the colour itself for me is no problem. I have a mayor problem with the fact, that - except with the system-icons - the icons' shapes are replaced with the generic icon, i.e. all the non-system-folders look identical in the sidebar, which translates into a loss of usefullness.

It's annoying as well, that users cannot edit the order in which the sidebar-sections appear. For me, it seems very important to be able to see at a glance Shared section, but it appears below the favourites...

I agree with many of the other opinions published here and I am convinced that a solution could easily be found for those and other aberrations in Lion (e.g.: Why did they ruined AddressBook's and iCal's design???!!!) by just giving users some more options in the preferences to personalize.

i agree with you on the ical and address book. they over designed it. needs to be simpler for us old apple folks.

i think i could deal with finder being grey if, like you say, the icons werent all generic and were instead grey versions of the original.

i still think colour helps a lot of us to navigate quickly.

im one of those people and am gonna say it again... apple need to give us the option of adding colour back into sidebars of all mac apps.

I will agree with those of you who don't like the new grey sidebar icons. To me, it makes the icons all blend together and less meaningful. They might as well do away with the icons altogether. (Maybe that's the plan.)