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Customization of Aqua: Skinning OSX

M

modestmelody

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 23, 2005
18
0
Long Island, New York / Providence, Rhode Island
I am soon to make the "switch" (halfway, building a PC desktop and purchasing a Powerbook for college). Anyway, on Windows I have always been a stickler for customization, skinning, etc. For instance, right now I have no taskbar or icons on my desktop, I just have ObjectDock, a dock emulator for Windows. All my Windows and colors are themed as well. Is there anyway to have this kind of control over the OSX interface? I happen to love the interface as it is, however, I am a tinker at heart...
 
modestmelody said:
I am soon to make the "switch" (halfway, building a PC desktop and purchasing a Powerbook for college). Anyway, on Windows I have always been a stickler for customization, skinning, etc. For instance, right now I have no taskbar or icons on my desktop, I just have ObjectDock, a dock emulator for Windows. All my Windows and colors are themed as well. Is there anyway to have this kind of control over the OSX interface? I happen to love the interface as it is, however, I am a tinker at heart...
Click to expand...

Yep, you can customize almost anything on OS X, and most of it is easier then on windows.
 
NeoMayhem said:
Yep, you can customize almost anything on OS X, and most of it is easier then on windows.
Click to expand...

So...

How's it done? Element at a time? Are there programs that are well known to aid in skinning (like Style XP etc)?

I am actually totally in the dark on this one. The closest thing I found in my quick search was a program called Kaleidoscope but it appears to only support OS9 and was abandoned when OSX came out.
 
I like Candy Bar. Would it run good on a 1.33Ghz iBook 768MB of ram? or would it significantly hog resources?
 
This is what i did to mine... :)
 

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modestmelody said:
Very nice. That's the exact kind of thing I was talking about. Cool to know I have the options still. Is there anyway to get rid of the "bar" across the top? I don't like the white menu bar always being there, but I can/will deal with it if it cannot be hidden in anyway.
Click to expand...
The menubar can't be removed; however, perhaps some themes will make it more bearable for you.
 
me_94501 said:
The menubar can't be removed; however, perhaps some themes will make it more bearable for you.
Click to expand...

Unless some hack were to make the menu bar slide in and out like the dock or like the Win start bar set to hide, I don't think that'd be a great idea anyway. A Mac will not be overly pleasant to use without the menu bar....

To the earlier poster who asked about candybar -- I don't think it's a resource hog once you make the modifications. I think for most of its mods, it just replaces .png files that are hidden here and there amongst the system files....
 
mkrishnan said:
Unless some hack were to make the menu bar slide in and out like the dock or like the Win start bar set to hide, I don't think that'd be a great idea anyway. A Mac will not be overly pleasant to use without the menu bar....
Click to expand...

Oh I've used Apple computers enough to know that part. It's just that the damn thing is so ugly sticking up at the top. I am a minmalist. I like blank desktops, very few things other than what I am focusing on should be on the screen. What is on the screen should be pretty. I was just hoping for a hack to make it hide, or even to change the white to being transparent so it's just the text.
 
whiteangel said:
If you want to make the menu less visible you can try this. See if you like it.

Menushade
Click to expand...
Yeah, this works really well. You can have the whole menu bar disappear until you move your cursor over it.

I also recommend Unsanity's ShapeShifter. I've been using it for over a year and have never had a problem. Works very well.
 
modestmelody said:
Oh I've used Apple computers enough to know that part. It's just that the damn thing is so ugly sticking up at the top. I am a minmalist. I like blank desktops, very few things other than what I am focusing on should be on the screen. What is on the screen should be pretty. I was just hoping for a hack to make it hide, or even to change the white to being transparent so it's just the text.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you'd be a perfect match for fluxbox. Windows and OS X aren't the only choices you know :)
 
I wish icons could work like buttons. What i want/mean is to have the icon apear when i roll over and disaprear when i roll out of the icon; like buttons. But hey thats just me.
 
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