Sat 7/23 Skinning iCal
Matt Comi, of Big Bucket fame, showed us all how neat and tidy he is by removing the torn bits of paper from Lion’s iCal application. I will do one better by describing how you can go from Lion’s default leather bound calendar, to something a little cleaner.
Follow Along
- Before you begin, backup your copy of iCal by right-clicking on its icon in the Applications folder and choosing “Compress iCal.app”.
- Download my prepared set of replacement iCal resources.
- Right-click on your iCal application icon and choose “Show Package Contents”.
- From the window that appears navigate through the Contents directory and open the Resources folder concealed within.
- Expand the zip file you just downloaded to your Downloads folder, and copy its contents into the Resources folder you just opened replacing all when prompted.
- You will be asked to authenticate with your administrator username and password.
- Restart iCal and the leather bound look will be gone.
Perfect?
Swapping iCal’s skeuomorphic resources with more conforming replacements is not a perfect fix. The brown text of iCal’s title bar buttons cannot be changed with a simple resource swap, and I left the add event glyph alone so it would match the off color appearance of its pears. If you are a developer with the ability to reverse engineer Apple’s iCal .nib files I would love to hear from you.
Update:
Looking to skin iCal with an easy to use GUI interface? Give Lion Tweaks a try.