iTunes 10.0.1 – Ping and gray icons
With 10.0.1, Apple made a number of major changes to iTunes that have gotten people upset. For some reason they made the color scheme for iTunes a boring gray, turning all the colored icons into dull gray ones. And they did a bunch of things to try and force to use yet another but different social network – Ping. (Name is oddly similar to Microsoft’s “Bing”, another product the world didn’t need.) Fortunately, some people have found ways to get around these mistakes.
There is a way to go back to color icons. This web page provides a link that will return the color icons – but make sure you’ve got things backed up in case of problems. I’ve tried it (iTunes 10.0.1 on MacOs X 10.6.4) and it seems to work fine.
Unfortunately for those of us not thrilled to use Ping, Apple has cluttered iTunes 10 with it all over the place. Its own sidebar on the right, and a little button on the bottom right hand corner to toggle it). A new entry in the “Store” menu in the leftsidebar. Drop down menus next to the selected song, etc.
If like me, you dislike this, there are some things you can do:
- Make sure Ping is turned off. You can do this in your iTunes account.
- To get rid of the drop-down menus, open Terminal, and type in the following (thanks to BaumDesign for this hint.):
defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE
- To disable the sidebar altogether, type the following the Terminal (this also gets rid of the genius button on the bottom, too. That doesn’t bother me either but it sounds like there are people who like that feature. If you’re one of them, then don’t use this command):
defaults write com.apple.iTunes disablePingSidebar 1
I haven’t found a way to remove Ping from the left sidebar. But since Apple gave it a boring gray icon, if you change back to color icons, then the Ping entry tends to get lost some anyway… Please post if you know of a way to remove or hide this!
