Skinning XP
I booted up my Windows XP machine to try out FlyakiteOSX. It’s a suite of tools to help skin your XP desktop to look a lot like OSX. If nothing else, you should check out the website. It’s a very slick Javascript implementation of an OSX desktop. It’s kind of a painful way to navigate a website, but it’s really amazing how well it’s put together. I hope the idea does not catch on though… I think one or two desktops is enough. I don’t need another one in my web browser.
In any case, the FlyakiteOSX suite works remarkably well. It doesn’t change many of the tiny user interface issues that I was hoping for (i.e. double-click on title bar still maximizes, unlike OSX which minimizes.) But it does add transparency to pop-up menus and a pretty drop shadow to every window. I have a reasonably speedy AMD box, so I didn’t notice if this was a severe drain on resources. It might stay on my home machine (which rarely gets any power-on time since I got the Mac Mini), but I probably won’t propagate it to my work PC.
Experimenting with that got me curious about getting widgets on my Windows XP machine, so I also tried out Konfabulator. This is actually a bit different from the Dashboard included with OSX Tiger. It allows widgets to run floating on your desktop, above your normal apps… Versus Dashboard which only runs on an invisible layer which must be summoned to the foreground. Konfabulator does have a layer which isolates just the widgets, so it ends up looking a lot like Dashboard. I haven’t experimented with many widgets, but the default ones are useful enough to convince me I’ll like it. This will be propagated to all of my machines. I may even use the OSX version of Konfabulator instead of Dashboard, just so I can be assured that any widget I grow to love will work everywhere I go.
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