Making OS X Look Like iOS - Quick & Easy
Before we get started I’ll answer the obvious question: why would you do such a heinous thing? Well, I like consistency - and so do others. Apple’s recent direction with the Lion UI has been to make things more like the iPad, so why should the overall skinning be any different. It’s also great for people who have never used a Mac before, or have trouble adapting from a Windows OS.
Changing Dock Icons
I thought I’d get the most obvious one out of the way quickly. Installing CandyBar (USD $29) is a great way to replace dock icons that contribute to an inconsistant experience. It helps to rectify debacles like the Twitter for Mac icon and present a unified dock. The next step is to install the Flurry icon set from Iconfactory. My experience with CandyBar so far has been a bit mixed. It simplifies the process of manually replacing the icons, but the fact that certain icons (like the Calendar) cannot be overridden, and the requirement to restart several times for icons to ‘take’ - kind of make the price of CandyBar seem a bit high.
Changing Growl Skins
Even if you’re a Windows convert like me, one of the first things you probably did was install Growl. The vast majority of applications can push notifications to Growl. It’s surprising that Apple hasn’t adopted Growl into it’s OS like a lot of their other innovations.
Theming it’s notifications to look like iOS is a bit cheesy, but extends the experience from the iPhone and iPad. You’ve got plenty of choice in terms of style.
My favourite:
More of a “Notification Centre” one:
More like what you’ll see in iOS5:
And That’s It
… only two steps. There are plenty more steps over on this page, good and bad. Simple things like changing the top bar to be black make sense, others such as hiding the hard drive to mimic the iOS file system are just a touch excessive. ■
