philippe::niquille | irregular niche market thoughts

Let me sum up my past experience of giving my Windows XP system a almost authentic OS X look, feel and usability with costs not higher than 10$.
Especially for those of you not believing me: READ on!

What did I use?

• Flyakite 2.0 - It’s the most important system “hack” to give all the windows, dialogs, etc. the typical mac look. It also replaces a lot of the icons, the boot logo, logon screen and start bar. I especially like it because it does not need any extra system resources because of some hungry skin program. Flyakite also installs Y’z shadow which gives all the windows and dialogs a nice shadow.
• RK launcher 0.4 beta - It is the best copy of the famous OS X programs dock. It runs very smooth on my machine and also minimizes programs with an awesome effect. Be sure to get the latest copy and not the one supplied with Flyakite (0.3 beta). Also download some zipped icons for the dock.
• Top Desk 1.3.5 - This is the best copy for Exposé I could find out there. I think that the 10$ are really worth it. So buy it.
  It runs very smooth and even renews the windowscreenshots upon a default settings change. That’s awesome!
• Spotlight search - There are three almost identical spotlight clones out “in the wild”. Spotlight clone, limelight and getchoo. I like the first one most because it kind of nicely sorts the results with icons.
  They are all based on Google Desktop search which is awesome fast once it indexed your harddisk. Be sure to get some plugins to extend it’s search ability.
• Konfabulator 2.1.1 - Well it’s like Dashboard on OS X; or should I say Dashboard is like Konfabulator (actually Apple copied this one..) But it’s cool anyway. Be sure to get yourself some cool widgets and don’t overload your desktop ;-).

I know, you want to see the results and some screenshots. Here you go:

This is the spotlight search and result menu. I just moved my windows start bar to the upper part of my screen and placed the image of “Spotlight clone” over the original Flyakite image.
I tried some other “menu bar” programs but they are crap. The windows standard start bar works most reliable.

And finally an image of Top desk when you have the whole full of all your open programs.

Goodies
OS X e is a cool site to keep yourself updated on windows “mac fake” programs. Also try the Aqua-soft forum. You need nice looking girls to smile at you from your desktop? Try skins.be.