If there was loss I was mourning in iTunes 9, it was the whitening of the grid view. What was Apple thinking! The only explanation Apple put the iTunes UI in the hands of racist designers ¹, because that white grid view does not look good whichever way you look at it. That and the rest of the milky UI that came with it. Luckily, the brilliant few from the Mac community are all over it. Presenting, the iTunes Dark Grid mode.

Damien Erambert at Chao’s Design, taking the help of Gniqu someone, has made an easy to install mod for iTunes. Just download the mod, and you even choose between different LCD styles, and window styles. You have to redownload the entire ‘modded’ application, which weighs in at 173MB. Worth it, but I’m afraid one will have to get it every time Apple releases an update. Hopefully someone point me to just the exact file (like the rsrc file) so we can replace it ourselves. [Big thanks to @Teucher for this one]

Now wait a minute. The grid is fixed for sure. But what about the ‘milky’ window colour? Personally I’m okay with it, but if it bothers you, there’s a fix for that by ‘tcmediatech’ on MacThemes forum. Weighing in at 17MB, it fixes a whole bunch of “UI” making iTunes look like a standard Leopard app. If the screenshot below is what you want your iTunes to look like, I’d say go for it. Also, I’m not sure how this mod works with the grid mod above. [Thanks to @sam_symons for this one]

All this of course is for informational purposes only, so if you blow up a fuse, please don’t hold me responsible. Instead, hurl abuses at those credited for finding these.