How To: Make a fake Mac
Out of curiosity, I decided to see how close I could get my laptop to looking like a Mac. As usually happens when I set out to do something like this, I discovered that there’s a both a hard way and a really simple way.
The hard way uses a bunch of different applications and tweaks, some of them are free, others are not, and overall it’s not even quite complete. But I wrote up a bunch of the steps before I found the easy way, and it could be fun to do them piecemeal, so I’ll list them below anyway.
What’s the hard way? Here’s the recipe:
* Obviously, install the widget engine before you download and run this widget. Also, the Firefox theme should be installed using Firefox.
After you’ve downloaded all the programs, go ahead and install the Yahoo! Widget Engine, Firefox, and TopDesk. Go ahead and download the volume widget. Once you’ve “run” the widget by double clicking on the widget file, hit “F8” to see the volume widget and you can place it where you want on your desktop by dragging it around.
Now go to the page for the iFox theme. Click the “install now” link, and allow the installation. Firefox will look like Safari the next time you open it. There’s a guide to a more complete makeover found here, but it looks like getting the final adjustments required having a program called WindowsBlinds. (This theme is slightly different from iFox, and it’s what I used).
The trickiest part of the whole operation is the ObjectDock. After you install it, follow a few steps to get rid of your windows taskbar:
After you install ObjectDock, start the app and load the dock with all the icons you want to be able to use. Remember that you won’t have a start menu after this conversion is complete, so just drag any icons you’d like to be able to access onto the dock.
Next, click the “configure dock” link. Adjust the size and magnified size to your liking, then set the “Position on screen” to “bottom.” Click Autohide if you want. Also, use the slider near the bottom to set the dock to be semi-transparent.
Then go to the “Dock Contents” tab, and click on “Hide the windows taskbar.” Also check to make sure that “Load ObjectDock on startup” is selected. Hit OK.
That should replace your taskbar with ObjectDock.
Now. Ready for the easy way?
Download and install FlyakiteOSX. That’s it.
Flyakite messes with a whole bunch of your system files and redoes your desktop entirely. The installer is pretty flexible, and it lets you choose what things you want installed on your computer, and it includes an uninstall that, while I haven’t tried it yet, should work just fine.
The full install is about 250 megabytes, but at the end of it all, your desktop looks like this:
[Image removed]
The only thing Flyakite didn’t come with was the expose-style funcionality I get from TopDesk. But it looks pretty good.