FolderTeint: darkness for your desktop
When it comes to my desktop and the icons that sit upon it, I have a fondness for darkness. It's not because of a fatalistic world view or any gothic tendencies on my part, I simply like my work to pop out against a non-distracting background. The black desktop is easy, but I've been looking for a fast and easy way to darken my icons without a lot of bells and whistles. And then I stumbled upon FolderTeint.
FolderTeint is free and Leopard-only. Using its slick interface, you can select which folders to affect and apply different effects to each selected set. The simplicity of the interface is what I like the most. The adjustment HUD only allows you to change the contrast, saturation and brightness of the icons, with an optional overlay color for hue control. It's perfect for making your system folder icons a nice, dark shade of grey. But to answer the question before it's asked: yes, it's also simple to make every folder a different shade of hot pink. Fortunately for those who regret their iconic 80s tribute later, you're always a click (and a logout) away from restoring the stock icons.
FolderTeint is free to download and use, but I'm certain that author Thomas Zoechling would gladly accept some PayPal love.
Update: Please read the comments carefully before downloading. While I've had great success with changing and reverting icons on a MacBook Pro running 10.5.1, not everyone has had such luck. Also be sure to note the author's response in the comments!Share
When it comes to my desktop and the icons that sit upon it, I have a fondness for darkness. It's not because of a fatalistic world view or...
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One unfortunate problem is that you cant really change the colors independently of the previous color. Specifically I couldnt get the effect used in the icon at the bottom, black folders would be awesome if one could make the folder identifiers lighter... maybe a negative button or something like that.
February 08 2008 at 2:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyAhh another thing: I've dialed the saturation down all the way and upped contrast and brightness a good way - nice result test it ;)
February 08 2008 at 10:53 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyGreat tool. I understand the basic way of changing the individual icons but it is awesome to have a nice tool doing just that... Marvellous work weichsel! Thank you...
A hint for users experiencing problems: maybe close all applications before applying the changes?!
I just wanted to say that I used this, dialed the saturation almost all the way down, the contrast near the saturation, and the brightness higher than the contrast, and my folders have never looked better! Thanks TUAW for posting this, and to weischel for creating this. Very cool.
February 07 2008 at 9:22 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyWhile this is a good idea, I would not recommend this piece of software. Every single time I logged out after making changes, my computer would hang, I was forced to hold the power button in. If it happened once, I wouldn't worry, but it happened every single time. Be warned, stay away.
February 07 2008 at 8:19 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHey thanks "weichsel"
Much appreciated! Nice to see a developer act so swiftly, hope this help iron out any bugs :)
If your icons aren't changing, a simple reboot will fix the problem.
February 07 2008 at 5:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyPersonally, to solve that problem of focusing on a visually oversaturated interface I really like Freeverse's think: http://freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=7013
February 07 2008 at 5:25 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyYeah, what the hell - my folders are gone too! That might be something to mention to users before linking to an app...
February 07 2008 at 4:55 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHey what gives? It deleted my original folder images and didn't replace them! Now what?
February 07 2008 at 3:45 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down ReplyHot Apps on TUAW
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