Ebola Cola

Designers love to use Apple Macs, I’ve pondered over the reasoning behind this and it’s not complicated. Apple’s hardware is sleek, shiny and sophisticated. Their operating system is free from viruses, almost. But these aren’t the only things that attract users in the design field to Apple Macs. I think that the GUI itself is very important among other things, environment plays a significant role in your work and having a change in environment could drastically increase the quality of work that you produce.

So what if you can’t whip out hundreds of pounds to buy that shiny Macbook? You could always taste Apple’s tasty GUI for free using the ugly Windows operating system and a handful of tweaks.

First of all, unlike many themes for Windows no third party software powers the new task-bar and start-menu. It isn’t powered by Windowblinds or anything of that sort and enables you to run a very beautiful visual style while maintaining your computer’s processor and memory usage, or at least using it at a stable-rate as not to slow the machine down completely.

I won’t go into great details, but I will give a brief overview as to how you can achieve an elegant working environment.


Patch Windows and install a visual style

First of all, patch your Windows installation using Uxtheme multi-patcher. This allows you to run third party visual styles straight from the shell.

DeviantART tends to hold a lot of good visual styles, trawling for the most popular themes should be a good start. I used ‘Leopard X by kspudw‘.

There are many tutorials out there for installing these themes but if you’re too cool for that, try slapping your themes into C:\WINDOWS\Resources\Themes, changing the drive letter if needed. Double-clicking the theme file will apply it and it will show up on the theme list within your ‘appearance’ tab under ‘display settings’ and you can flip between themes as you would normally in Windows XP. You’ll find that after this has been done, there’s hardly any work left to do.

Add a docking menu

The mac-style menu at the bottom of my desktop is called RocketDock. It’s free and relatively easy to use, you can Google for various icons or try the official RocketDock icons website. Customize the settings in RocketDock to use the custom icons and voila. It just can’t get any easier.

Remove the recycle bin

Removing the recycle bin within Windows XP is as easy as checking a box. Try downloading TweakUI, a Microsoft powertoy that allows you to customize the Windows user interface far more than you can by default.

I tend to move most of my files into ‘my documents’ and linking to there via RocketDock. All shortcuts were removed leaving my desktop uncluttered and clean.

Bask in your beautiful environment

By now, your desktop should be polished to a mirror shine. You can access documents and applications easier than before using RocketDock, your desktop is clean and elegant, you no longer have to look at the default hideous, plastic Windows theme and you can alter most of it yourself to make working more efficient. Sure it’s not a Mac, but the GUI ain’t far off.