Among the many changes to iCal in Apple’s OS X 10.7 Lion is a rather horrible leather effect.
Sometimes dressing up software in this way is useful – it makes it approachable, fun or easier to understand. But in this instance it clashes badly with the rest of OS-X which takes a minimalist approach. The leather-effect is distracting and out of place.
Fortunately, fixing this is fairly simple – just a matter of changing a few graphics files hidden inside your Mac.
What might go wrong
First, a word of warning. Alongside the graphics files you will have access to files that can have a profound effect on iCal. If you follow the instructions you should be fine. But if you accidentally move, rename or delete those files, iCal might stop working properly or you might lose data from your calendar. If you’re the kind of person who accidentally deletes files, don’t try this.
I’m not providing any technical support around this hack. If you choose to try it, it’s entirely your responsibility if you lose any data, waste time, need to re-install iCal or purchase any software or services to fix things.
How to get rid of the leather theme in iCal
You’ll need an administrator password. For most people this is the password they use to log on to their Mac, but if someone else administers your Mac (meaning you’re not allowed to install software and so on) then you’ll have to ask them for help.
- Make sure iCal is closed and that you have a backup of iCal.
You can do that by creating an empty folder on your desktop, selecting iCal and dragging it into the folder whilst holding the ALT key. If you do this, you’ll see a little plus sign in a green bubble when you drag it. Make sure you do it this way, otherwise you won’t copy the iCal properly, you’ll just get an alias.
- In your Applications folder, click on your original copy of iCal while holding the CTRL key so you get a pop-up menu and choose ‘Show package contents’.
This lets you see ‘inside’ iCal and look at some of the files it’s built from.
- Open the folder ‘Contents’ and then within that, open the folder ‘Resources’.
Inside, you’ll find the icons and background images which are used to draw iCal on your computer’s screen.
- Download ical_lion_silver.zip, open it up in your Finder and Select All.
These are plain grey versions of the background and buttons you will use to replace those that Apple shipped with Lion.
- Drag the files into the iCal: Contents: Resources folder.
You will likely have to authenticate this action (i.e. enter your password). You’ll be asked whether you want to ‘Keep both files, Stop or Replace’. Click ‘Apply to all’ and ‘Replace’ then enter your password.
- Close the ‘Resources’ and ‘Contents’ folders if they’re still open, start up iCal and hey-presto! you have a plain silver theme.
And that’s it. Good luck!