Anyone else used to skin Windows to look like Mac OS?

This fun read from Tedium tonight took me back.

Did anyone else used to skin their Windows XP machine to look like Mac OS?

I used to do this with WindowBlinds dreaming of the day I could own a Mac. Surprisingly, my folks really loved it!

Nowadays I pretty much leave the OSes at defaults, Windows and MacOS.

Tedium’s a great email too btw. Worth subscribing to if you aren’t already.

When I started high school, my parents bought me a Compaq Presario, with Vista, which had only just come out, because school was Windows only to start with, and I was being asked to do assignments and work in Windows only programs(though by the time I got to Yr 12 it was 75 percent Mac 25 windows) and Intel Macs were still very new and we were still on G4 machines. I used to fiddle around with docks, top menu bars and all sorts of things to try and make it look and work like a Mac!!

But could you skin Windows to look like a Mac running Kaleidoscope…?

In my youth, in the first jobs I worked - all PC - I would at least always move the rubbish bin to the bottom right corner…

I was never that keen to make it look like a mac, for me it was making it look sort of linuxey. I had Windowblinds but mostly used WinSTEP, because the devs had asked me to do some skins for their earlier incarnations of it. One of them is still a friend and neither of us are involved with the project anymore because we both switched. I think I would be compelled to use it again, if ever I had to revert to Windows.

Here’s its most recent incarnation if anyone is interested. I was only involved from 1999 to 2002.
http://www.winstep.net

1 Like

I always found the taskbar more useful than the Dock (still do) so I never did much with it other than move it around to different parts of the screen.

That said the Menubar is definitely more useful on Mac. Wish Windows had something similar ootb.

Before I got my first Mac and I was just dreaming about having one, I remember installing something I think was called ‘rocket dock’ which mimicked the Mac’s dock. It wasn’t the smoothest but it worked

Yeah in the good old days when I still used Windows, I would skin it with 3rd party add-ons to completely change the look so that it looks almost exactly like Mac OS, at the expense of speed and memory actually.

Nowadays, I just use Macs at home and at work completely now, thank God.

I’d always wanted a Mac, when I finally got one it was definitely worth it. Even though it was an old 2008 MacBook Pro, didn’t even have backlit keys but it did have the new design

Once upon a time in my previous Windows life I would choose a custom skin, usually it was about making Windows XP look more like Windows 2000 since I didn’t like the new interface. Mostly I liked to leave things OEM… which has largely translated to how I do my cars, OEM+ :smiley: This meant I’d edit the standard background image to put a car or man on the green mountain, but honestly that’s about it. While there are still a few little tweaks I make (like inverting the scroll direction back to normal) I’ve mostly come to embrace the out of the box experience.

My (then future) sister in law always had the most obnoxious themes with whatever app she had that allowed her to switch. Full on cursors , colours, icons, backgrounds and sounds… my god the sounds.

But then these days I’m what you call a boring old man. I have the original iPhone ring tone from the TV ad (which was never actually on the iPhone) as my ring tone and the honka honka sound for my messages. Since my first iPhone.