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For the first time since ShapeShifter (last updated Sep 12, 2007) there seems to be a good way to make and apply custom themes to Mac OS X.

“Flavours”

I’m hearing it may still be slightly risky to install prompting at least one OS X reinstall and may impact system performance especially on older Macs. I’m going to take the wait and see approach to see if the app continues to be supported and if the themes become less ugly. The community over at MacThemes is checking it out.

I’ve blogged a bit about themes over the past few years, so I thought I’d keep with the tradition.

How To Clean Install Mac OS X Lion.

Maybe it’s a bit OCD, but doing a clean install of a new OS can be a good practice. In a lot of ways it’s like having a new Mac again.

By doing a clean install you reduce the chance of running into incompatibility issues with previously installed software. It also removes old outdated software and files that just take-up space and clutter your filesystem.

I usually reformat my hard drive while I’m at it. This will take care of any data corruption and disk errors that may exist and also removes fragmentation…

With Lion instead of buying a physical disc you download it from the Mac AppStore inside of Mac OS Snow Leopard so by default it will upgrade your system and you are unable to reformat your drive because the installer is on the same drive.

You can easily make yourself a bootable install disk that will allow you to reformat your drive.

• How to burn a Lion install DVD
• How to create a bootable USB stick installer

Don’t forget to backup your data before reformatting! You’ll want at least your documents, music, and photos after the reformat and install.

I’m giving Total Finder a test run. It’s a Mac OS X Snow Leopard Finder extension that attempts to fix most of the Finder’s shortcomings by adding features like tabs and a split window view so you don’t need to have lots of Finder windows open at once. I’ll check-in later after I have a chance to play with it and post my impressions.

Here’s a good write-up on iconpaper.org Finder: Fix or Replace.

Inception dreams visualized in Mac OS X.

Yes this has been around the internet for a few days already, but it’s about the most simple and cool explanation of the movie. I’m also a big fan of both the movie and OS.

Aqua Extreme 3 theme for Mac OS X 10.5 & 10.6 by Max Rudberg.

Sweet Max is back! And with a theme I actually want to use with Snow Leopard!

Espresso 1.1 - Features some great new interface and workflow tweaks and additions. Immediately very useful is the new window for all your projects (shown above). [What’s new?]

Felt like posting a screenshot today. My desktop makes me want to play Dark Stalkers on PSP.