Mac-like Theme for Windows®

Have you ever wanted to customize your PC to look like that of the sleek and beautiful Macintosh OS X Snow Leopard? If you’ve seen a Mac, then you’ve probably noticed its elegant and simple UI. Bringing the Mac-style experience to the Microsoft Windows® desktop environment is a bit tricky. As you probably already know, the two operating systems are designed differently. Apple tends to make their software simple to the common user, while Microsoft has their own ideas about simplicity. Now don’t get me wrong, both OSs have their pros and cons. I am merely stating that Macs have a beautiful UI. If you want to bring that look over to your PC, the first thing you are going to need is a Mac wallpaper. You can use an image search engine (such as Google Images) to find a wallpaper you like. Use keywords like “Mac wallpaper” to define your image search. I have also listed a few websites below that contain some Mac wallpapers.

-----Mac Wallpaper-----
Hongkiat.com
AppleWallpapers.net

Once you have your wallpaper set, the next thing your desktop is going to need is a dock. Windows® doesn’t come natively with the ability to dock apps so you are going to need to download additional software to achieve this. For the sake of simplicity and my own opinion, I believe the Nexus from Winstep is the best choice so I listed it below.

-----Docking App-----
Winstep's Nexus

Once you have the docking app (Winstep’s Nexus), right-click on the dock and select preferences from the menu. Go the the themes tab and choose “Leopard” from the list. Then go to the tasks tab and choose “show running apps in this dock”. (You can also set the dock to run at startup from the preferences window. By default, the dock should be already set to do that though.)

At this point, you should have both your wallpaper set and a docking app installed. The next Mac feature you need to emulate is the menu bar. For Windows® users the menu bar is built into most programs so an external menu bar is pointless. Anyway, for those of you who are determined to have a Mac-like menu bar for you PC go to the following link below.

-----Mac Menu Bar-----

iBar

Once you have downloaded and set-up the iBar, run it. By default, it should look very much like the Macintosh menu bar. You may want to change the start menu icon, so go to the edit menu and select preferences. Use the drop-down menu to change the start menu logo from the default to a custom image. The “set custom” button should become enabled. Press the “set custom” button and choose a picture to use for the logo. The image should only be 22x22 pixels in size. If you want to use an apple logo, but you don’t have one on hand, use an image search engine to find one. Remember, whatever image you happen to use must be resized to a dimension of 22x22 pixels. It is highly recommended that you use a 32-bit transparent image for the logo. Using a non-32-bit image just makes the start button look goofy when hovered over. You can also set the iBar to run at startup by going to the advanced options tab, and checking the “run at startup" option under the behavior category. If you want, you can also have the iBar completely hide the Windows® taskbar. (The Nexus dock, also has the ability to hide the Windows® taskbar. Go figure.)

Posted in: Apple,dock,iBar,Mac,Nexus,Snow Leopard,Theme,Winstep