Wunderlist 2 is awesome, but how do I get back the dark wood background?

We’re really excited to see Wunderlist release the newest version of their great free todolist app.

The new collapsable interface, the snappy native feel of the newer app, with a bunch more features outlined on their site. After being stuck on all the awesome things and starting to use the application I found myself really really missing the dark wood background though that tons of people on our team loved.

So since the team at Wunderlist is busy working on a slew of other things and likely dropped this background for their own reasons, I figured I would write about how you could get it back your own way.

You can add any backgrounds you want naturally if you don’t mind spending a minute like I did making a background in photoshop.

Once you have the image you want to change (they use the following size and setting)

Simply open your Applications folder and navigate to /Applications/Wunderlist/ and edit the contents of the package to see all the resources used in the UI and application.

Want to skip the description and just see a quick copy/paste approach for doing it yourself.

Follow these steps.

1. Grab the image here and save it to your desktop. (I saved it as wlbackground11.jpg to simply override the purple background they have which I will never use)
2. Since we’re going to be editing the contents folder which by default is a locked file and only accesible by the user accounts wheel and system it’s easiest to just open terminal and issue a copy command.
3. sudo cp /Users/REPLACETHISWITHYOURUSERNAME/Desktop/wlbackground11.jpg /Applications/Wunderlist.app/Contents/Resources/
4. Step three will ask you for your password since you are trying to run a super user command (that’s what sudo is for the non unix/linux lovers)
5. Open up Wunderlist and change background choosing the “purple background we just replaced”

Obvious things to consider:

• Yes when you update the program if they roll out an update you might have to replace this step if they ship a new contents package.
• Yes I could have taken the time to replace the thumbnail image as well or changed any other element of the UI if I wanted to (thats how contents packages work)

So wrapping up instead of complaining again to the fine folks at Wunderlist I just took it upon myself to bring back the dark wood texture. If you missed the dark wood background like I did or found this useful or useless let me know I’m just @petesena on twitter.