A lot of people I’ve talked to don’t know about customizing the Finder window background. This is very easy and requires no special software. So lets get started.

Open a Finder window and in the menubar navigate to View > Show View Options. (or ⌘ + J) From there you can choose a color or image for your finder backgrounds.

There are 3 options for backgrounds. A plane white background, colored or adding your own image as the background.

Here is a Finder window with a simple light blue color:

You can also tell Finder to use an image for the window background. I would suggest you use a large dimension like 1024×800 so when you enlarge the finder window you always see the image. But try to keep the files size down so load times are faster.

Here is a Finder window with a wood background:

This option can be used to create a transparent window look:

Send us your Custom windows!

I we would love to see your custom finder windows. Send us a link or images to caleb@thecustommac.com.

How to Change Finder Window Backgrounds is a post from: The Custom Mac

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The YouTube user LeopardOctober’s account has been removed and all his/her videos taken down and is now effectively ”erased” from the face of the internet by Apple. Sorry but that is the way the heads roll.

A while back we shared a Snow Leopard stacks video with you. Recently while reading Cult of Mac I Stumbled upon these videos of various builds of Snow Leopard from You Tuber LeopardOctober and found them very interesting.

This first one shows some very attractive changes to the Finder’s search options.

(Finder Preferences Video)

This next feature has enchanted me as well. Text Edit makes my world go round for its simplicity and power. If these new features are real… Well it would be awesome.

And for those of us who use Spaces it looks like life may get a little easier.

(Dock and Substitutions video)

LeopardOctober has his/her other videos locked from embedding. Here is a list of other Snow Leopard videos:

• A quick look: Snow Leopard Build 10A261
• QuickTime 10 – Snow Leopard build 10A286
• Finder QuickLook – Snow Leopard build 10A286
• Snow Leopard Welcome Movie?

So for more S.L. goodness visit his channel.

If you could pick on this to add to Snow leopard, what would it be? Be sure to comment and let us know.

Videos of New Snow Leopard Features is a post from: The Custom Mac

Finder has its faults. We all know this. It has come a long way since its birth. One of these faults is the poor organization options for the Finder’s sidebar. There’s no way to separate the items in the “Places” section of the 10.5 Finder sidebar, and that’s really annoying, especially if you have multiple folders of the same name there.

But there is a simple yet powerful solution to this problem. Jog (Or run with arms wide open) over to typoet.com/separators and download the separators and drag them to a place in the sidebar that you would like a separator. These “separators” act as fake applications but the serve there purpose well.

How to Add Finder Sidebar Separators is a post from: The Custom Mac

Did you ever try to use Quick Look on a zip file? Yeah it doesn’t work. Luckily there is a outstanding free plugin that can take care of this minor but incredibly annoying problem.

Zip Quick Look makes it possible to view a zipped archieved file’s contents using Quick Look. To install Just download the plug-in, drag it to /Library/QuickLook/(Create one if you don’t have it) and then restart Finder (right-click Finder in the Dock while holding the Option key and select Relaunch). Now when you Quick Look a zipped archive you should see the file’s contents.

Before and after installing Zip Quick Look:

Viewing Content of Zip Files with Zip Quick Look is a post from: The Custom Mac