10.4: Change Address Book to new 'Unified' look

Jun 07, '05 10:04:00AM

Contributed by: r.d.flynn

Tiger only hintMany people have been looking at changing the look of the apps that ship with Tiger to the new "unified" look. I've seen how to do it with Safari and that inspired me to try it with Address Book. Whilst not perfect, at least it means that the metal look can be kept for those applications that really should have it -- i.e. the iApps and the Finder (although I would like to make the Finder have the unified look if possible!)

Anyway, on to the hint. You need to have Interface Builder installed (part of XCode, i.e. the Developer Tools). Find the Address Book app in the Applications folder and back it up!. Duplicate it or make a copy in a safe place, whatever, just make sure it is backed up. Close Address Book if you have it open (control-click the icon in the dock and choose Quit). Then control-click on the Address Book application and choose Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.

Then go into Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj. You should see a bunch of files. Some of them will have a strange icon that looks like a piece of sheet metal. These are the Interface Builder files (they have the extension .nib if you have extensions turned on). Find the file called ABWindow.nib and double click it. You'll see Interface Builder appear. Click just below (under the line) the header of the main window that looks like Address Book's interface (it says "Address Book"), and then choose Tools -> Show Inspector. An inspector will appear; from this, you need to uncheck the "Has Texture" option, and then the "Unified Title/toolbar look" will become active. Check that, hit save, close Interface Builder, launch Address Book, enjoy.

I'm going to try and see how many "metal" apps I can change like this - at the moment I think Safari, Address Book and iChat are do-able but I might be wrong. Anyone want to try out any others?

Comments (15)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050523090306788