Apple only “allows” certain (rather ugly) colors to be set as a solid background color on OS X. I don’t even want to go into how utterly stupid I think this is…

Ok, here’s how you can easily set an arbitrary color on OS X.

1. Save this 1×1 transparent PNG to your “Pictures” directory.
2. Open the “Desktop & Screensavers” preferences pane in the “System Preferences”.
3. Select “Folders / Pictures”
4. Select the trans.png (might not be visible, but the image square is in the directory listing to the right)
5. You might have to select “Center”
6. Now you should see a color selector which lets you set your color.

Here’s how the preference pane should look like:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 09:47 and is filed under os x. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.