Hate The Colorless Finder? Use SideEffects To Bring Color Back To The Finder’s Sidebar

Most Mac users have a love hate relationship with that oldest of Mac OS features, the venerable and maligned Finder.

Apple seems to be hellbent on making sure the Finder, the face of OS X, is viewed only as a gray vanilla artifact with no personality. Even the color has been stripped out of the Finder’s Sidebar but you can have it back and it won’t cost a cent.

Gimme My Fix Of Color

The Finder’s Sidebar can be a very useful feature that’s highly customizable (also something Apple doesn’t want us to do much of) and elegantly usable.

Where’s the color? All the icons in the Sidebar are the same, dull, lifeless, color-free icons you’d expect from the very company that Apple vilified in the famous 1984 TV commercial which introduced the Mac.

Add SideEffects to your Mac and the Finder’s Sidebar comes alive with colored icons that make Apple’s version of the Sidebar look positively anemic.

To be upfront about this, SideEffects is a bit of a hack, with pieces from a number of Mac developers, but it works very well.

Instead of ugly icons, you get icons with color, the way God intended them to be. And the latest version of SideEffects installs in an instant.

Look at the difference between the Finder’s boring gray icons, and what SideEffects provides.

Easy peazy, right?

Gone is bland, in is colorful.

Now that iOS and OS X’s interface is under head designer honcho Jonny Ive’s domain, we may see more color in future versions but for now you’ll have to use SideEffects to get there.

Installing SideEffects is either easy and simple, or a bit more complicated. As the SideEffects’ installation steps indicate, you may need to make some adjustments in System Preferences’ Security & Privacy, and General Preferences to get it to work appropriately.

Thankfully, uninstalling is even easier. This version even seems to work with TotalFinder, another little hack app that adds tabs to the Mac’s Finder.

Obviously, an app that monkeys around with your Mac’s innards is subject to problems here and there, so your mileage may vary, despite free on the price tag.

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