Mon 7/25 Unbinding Address Book
My last post showed you how to remove the leather bound look of Lion’s iCal application. Today’s post will show you how to remove the binding, cover, bookmark, and pages from Lion’s skeuomorphic address book, and give it a cleaner design.
Follow Along
- Before you begin, backup your copy of Address Book by right-clicking on its icon in the Applications folder and choosing “Compress Address Book.app”.
- Download my prepared set of replacement Address Book resources.
- Right-click on your Address Book 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 Address Book and the binding, cover, bookmark, and pages will be gone.
Perfect?
Swapping Address Book’s skeuomorphic resources with more conforming replacements is not a perfect fix. The border around the Address Book window normally occupied by the book cover has been replaced with transparent images that allow for a cleaner look, but cause the Address Book window to stop short. If you are a developer with the ability to reverse engineer Apple’s Address Book .nib files I would love to hear from you.
Update:
Looking to unbind Address Book with an easy to use GUI interface? Give Lion Tweaks a try.