Lion Finder sidebar color?

The problem with Apples thoughs in finder simply was, that it has to be document centric, they just did not recognize that the document itself is the navigation in about 80% of all cases (the ones which do not user color flow)

Either way I am rather sure as we speak there is a load of people who currently try to write apps which bring the colors back, the first one who will drop such an app in the app store will make a load of money.

While not cheap, I suppose "Path Finder" could be the solution? In the meantime I will be watching macosxhints.com in the hopes of some intrepid person finding a hack.

Path Finder is a whole other beast entirely—it's a complete Finder replacement. It's amazing, really—I used it for years while Apple got the Finder into more useable shape before Tiger. Check it out.

I never even tried it, but I heard a lot of good things about TotalFinder.

H

Pathfinder is only partially the solution, it basically has a set of non finder icons which are color and a set of standard icons which are as color blindness infected as the ones from finder (well no surprise it has inherited them)

You can see it in this screenshot

I hope those guys will take care of that issue in their codebase.

I do have Path Finder which is great for heavy duty files management.

But since I do have TotalFinder, I don't use that much Path Finder... as said, only for heavy duty stuff. I do love TotalFinder for the multi-tab and the quick shortcut to have the window in front of you, etc...

Unfortunately, none of them do fix the missing colors for the sidebar icons 😟

I don't care much about menus, grey tool bar, etc... but the sidebar icons monochrome icons is just a wrong idea, really annoying. Now, we only have white and grey UI, with blue icon apps... Since each application, from Mail, to iTunes, to Finder and so on... do ALL of them have a similar layout with a blue left sidebar, with grey icons... we even don't know quickly which app we're focus... It's really slowing you down!

Even if there's a lot of great things on Lion, just for the bad UI colors, I sincerly regret the upgrade...

i REALLY, REALLY dislike the grey icons : they are bland, boring & ultimately undistinguishable one from the other - which at least for me slows down identifying them because i actually have to focus more on them than before to see which is which.....plain ugly !

at the same time they strike me as a contradiction considering all the effort put into making both Address Book & iCal look more ''realistic'' & ''automatically recognizable''

it also makes VERY little sense - at least to me.. - that they ditched the sidebar icons in Mail that actually were realistic & highly recognizable by now to most Mac users EFFORTLESSLY !

i too agree that being able to re-order things in the sidebar would be great since i also prefer my disks on top - it all strikes a bit too much like change for the sake of change !? what a shame !!

Keep reporting it here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

There now is an option to select Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion).

Report it until they change it.

I reported this issue and many other bugs in separated feedbacks.

When I first tried the DP of Lion I thought I would be able to copy the old big sidebar icons from my Tiger machine. (Those were my favorites) But the OS just grayscales them 😟

In many ways the current approach just feels like a big "F you" to any effort users might have done to quickly identify volumes. The other issue is you can't make the "your computer" the default folder that appears for new windows.

Apple may be trying to get people to belive that the notion of 'volumes' doesn't matter and we should all be in the big happy cloud, though I have a trust issue with the cloud.

The Lion icon domination still stands in Path Finder's sidebar as well.

I believe I have a possible solution. All of the OS X icons are stored in Mac HD / System / Library / CoreServices / CoreTypes.bundle Right Click and show package Contents. Then go to Content / Resources in the bundle.

Here you can see all of the Sidebar***.icns files that make up the new gray sidebar Icons. I backed up the whole folder then I tried duplicating and renaming the standard color HomeFolderIcon.icns to SidebarHomeFolderIcon.icns and renaming the gray SidebarHomeFolderIcon.icns to X_SidebarHomeFolderIcon.icns. This should have worked (I did this with folder icons back in the day).

However, after a reboot the home folder was gray, but with no detail, just a shadow. I am guessing this is because the color icns files contain 4 resolutions (including the big 512 and 256), while the gray icns contain only two resolutions (I believe 32x32 and 16x16?).

I have not had time to mess around with it yet, but I think if I make a set of icons in the same two small resolution icns format as the gray ones out of the large color ones it will permanently replace them. This could be delivered as a nice package that you drop in the bundle and are good to go.

-Stan

Your method looks intriguing, but why can't you simply copy all the old (Snow Leopard) color.icns and paste them into Lion?

OT

Does your nick name mean you come from the city where they use to put saffron while cooking the rice? 🙂

/OT

That sounds about right. Let a third party fix an oversight, we buy it and then Apple will add that functionality back in a future update and charge for it again.

I'm just surprised the developers of Secrets haven't found a way to re-enable the colors for the sidebars, yet. I've been updating Secrets almost every day to see if there is an option, but so far there isn't.