What is CoolViews?

We all spend a fair share of our time staring at icons and file names in the Finder. You have to admit that Mac OS 8’s List View looks, well, different. All that gray gets bleak before too long, doesn’t it? And those thin horizontal lines between each item — you either love them or hate them.

CoolViews is an interface tweaker whose sole purpose is to revamp the look of files viewed with the Finder. First, you can banish the gray. Pick any solid color to replace the gray, shaded sort columns in the List View. Next, you can do away with those separator lines (or not). CoolViews goes several steps further. You can shorten the Finder’s verbose date descriptions (why slog through “Mon, Nov 17, 1997, 2:42 PM” when “11/17/97” will do?) and resize the Finder’s columns so there’s more room to see long file names.

List View is the Finder’s most information-packed setting. If you leave most of your Finder windows in List View most of the time, you can save both screen real estate and time by changing the column widths and information displayed to suit your needs. Developers and other nerds will appreciate CoolViews’ ability to show files’ type and creator information in List View.

Savetz, Kevin M. (April 1998). Killer Customizations. MacAddict. (pg. 40).

Download CoolViews for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver