Mac App: CandyBar and SideEffects

Notice the difference in my Finder? Want to know how I did it? :)

I really never tweaked my Finder since Snow Leopard. I did not change the icons or turned back the colour to the side bar after it was removed in Lion. I thought a little customisation  will bring back some "excitement" to it. Good thing I came across interesting stuffs on my daily dose of Apple articles to make these changes.

CandyBar

CandyBar

First up, CandyBar. CandyBar has been recently updated to support Mountain Lion. The application is now for free but the level of customisation has been limited because of Apple's obvious restrictions. Another catch for it being free is that CandyBar is now unsupported. As Panic puts it, the developers behind CandyBar -- "Since we’re unsure about the long-term future of changing system icons, we’re not comfortable charging money for CandyBar, and we’re also not comfortable simply making it disappear, instead we’re going to make the current CandyBar free — but unsupported." It's better late than never so I downloaded the application and updated the system icons using their default presets. I was really amazed how easy it was to update everything. I can also easily restore the icons back to their original look. I'll keep the updated system icons for now and I hope CandyBar remains compatible to future releases of Mountain Lion. 

Get your free copy of CandyBar and read their article about the application on Panic Blog here. I also saw this old article from Macworld for CandyBar 3.1.2. This was the only comprehensive review I saw about the application. 

The CandyBar menu

SideEffects

SideEffects package

Now this was a tweak I read today. I actually saw it back in Lion but was afraid to tweak my Finder sidebar back then. I was more adventurous this time because the application was updated to be compatible with Mountain Lion. Just a warning though, this version of SideEffects is in beta so there's a risk involve in installing this tweak. The tweak can be easily removed though with the uninstaller included in the download. 

After the download, you need to downgrade the security in your System Preferences and allowing applications downloaded anywhere to be installed on your Mac (just return it back to its default value after installation). The tweak can be easily installed by double clicking on any of the .pkg files above. You'll be shown with the usual window for installing applications. Just have to continue with each stage and try to read on the texts displayed for you. The installation should be seamless and will display the colours back on your Finder sidebar. 

You can download the tweak on the developer's blog here.

One more thing...
This does not involve any tweak and is readily available on System Preferences. If you want to change the size of the icons on your Finder sidebar, open System Preferences and go to General. You should be able to see the Sidebar icon size there and change it the way you want. I actually just learned it now ü

Sidebar icon size

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About Carl

An Apple () addict, bookworm, moviegoer, photography enthusiast, rocker and blogger! Proudly Filipino!