Remove The Toolbar Button Background Images In Mail 2.0
by College
May 5th, 2005

For those of you that have got yourself a copy of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger and happen to use the Mail program, you may have noticed that the toolbar icons are rather ugly, well I think they are anyway : )



The buttons are comprised of two images each; the small icon and the round button. What we are going to do is remove the images that Mail uses for the button part so we get a cleaner, slimmer interface, as pictured below.



1) In the Finder hit the command-shift-G keyboard combo
2) Type in "/Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Resources/"



3) Press Go
4) Create a new folder called "TB_Button_Images" in the window that opens
5) Move the following images from the Resources folder into the "TB_Button_Images" folder:

    TB_Segment_InnerLeft.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerLeftInactive.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerLeftPress.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerLeftRoll.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerRight.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerRightInactive.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerRightPress.tiff
    TB_Segment_InnerRightRoll.tiff
    TB_Segment_LeftCap.tiff
    TB_Segment_LeftCapInactive.tiff
    TB_Segment_LeftCapPress.tiff
    TB_Segment_LeftCapRoll.tiff
    TB_Segment_RightCap.tiff
    TB_Segment_RightCapInactive.tiff
    TB_Segment_RightCapPress.tiff
    TB_Segment_RightCapRoll.tiff
    TB_Single_Middle.tiff
    TB_Single_MiddleInactive.tiff
    TB_Single_MiddlePress.tiff
    TB_Single_MiddleRoll.tiff

6) Launch Mail and Bingo! You should see a much nicer user interface in your Mail 2.0 application!


Addtional Notes and Information by Scott Chitwood
A large number of Mac users are griping about and finding alternate methods of reworking Mail 2.0. This thread in the GUI Customization forum at MacNN is well worth reading; make sure you check it out in it's entirety as a few bugs have been identified with some of the methods posted. Nonetheless, some great ideas have been expressed that deserve a deeper look.