Three ways to change Lion's Finder window sidebar
It took me a little while, but I finally last weekend updated to Lion, and so far ... I think I like it. I kind of miss my old Spaces feature, and I did turn off reverse scrolling right away, but it does seem to run better than Snow Leopard, and Mission Control is pretty sweet. Another thing I'm not a huge fan of, however, is the new Finder sidebar -- it's pretty bland, and not quite as clear or useful as the one in Snow Leopard.
Fortunately, that's pretty easy to fix, and ZDnet has a few good ways to do it. This SIMBL plugin will put a little color back in those icons, if you like, and you can do a little plist tweaking in Lion to switch around the order of the various devices and sources listed on the side of the screen. Finally, if you're ending up with aliases in the Finder sidebar that lose the source they're originally alias'ed from, you can drag-and-CMD-drop them to erase them once and for all.
Apple of course makes all of these changes with good intentions, and maybe there are good reasons to do things like drain all the color out of the interface (maybe it allows you to focus more on the important stuff: your files in the other window). But for those of us who like the old ways best, it's good to know we've got options.
