I’m a big critic of most of the changes coming in OsX Lion. Simplicity comes at a price, and in this case the Mac App Store thrusts control of a huge part of the computer/internet universe directly into Apple’s controlling hands. We have the opportunity to empower new computer users with an advanced understanding, but instead Apple is letting simplicity reign. It would be shortsighted to say these decisions have no impact on our future culture.

That aside, for now I am still a mac user, and one thing I won’t miss is scrollbars. Since I’ve had a multitouch trackpad with two finger scroll, I’ve never touched the things, and now that I have replaced them with simple bars the screen feels cleaner and lighter. It takes about ten minutes, won’t slow down your computer, and won’t cause any problems. All we’re doing is swapping out one image for another, and I’ve done all the work for you. The only downside is that the scrollbar sits in front of a white background instead of being transparent. Mac doesn’t support transparent scrollies yet.

I think this works only on Leopard and Snow Leopard, but if someone could try it on Tiger and let me know that would be sweet.

1. Download ThemePark, a free tool that lets you customize tons of things in your mac theme.
2. Open my iOs theme with the new scrollbars in the application.
3. Hit Apply Theme
4. Log out and back in, or restart your computer.
5. You’re done! If you ever want to go back, open ThemePark and choose “Revert to Aqua” in the “Theme” menu. No risk.

I’ve also changed my startup screen to a sweet-looking black screen with the pwnage pineapple logo (pineapple..get it?) That’s takes even less time.

1. Download BootXChanger, another free tool.
2. Open it up and drag in the image files I created: either the Pineapple Logo (thanks to Dev-Team) or the Apple Logo.
3. Click to change the background color and drag the lightness slider all the way down to make it black.
4. Hit “Apply”. Rejoice! This one can easily be reset too.

Now you can show your support for good UI and freedom of application deployment, all in one go!