Customizing your Mac OSX experience

Customizing your Mac OSX experience

As a designer, I like things to look good. This includes my desk, my computer, and of course, the operating system. That’s just one of the reasons I choose to use the Mac operating system.

But Mac OSX isn’t perfect for me by any stretch of the imagination. I’ll skip over the commentary about OSX 10.1 through 10.3 and the ugly pinstripes we had to put up with. And when Apple introduced the brushed metal look of the Finder and many applications, I liked it… for a very short while. Now it just annoys the crap out of me. I probably wouldn’t mind quite as much if the ENTIRE GUI was brushed metal, but this mix of Aqua white, gray and brushed metal is horribly annoying to me. I just want to stand in Steve Jobs’ office door and scream “PICK ONE ALREADY!”

Thankfully, I don’t have to put up with it. There are plenty of GUI hacks available for Mac OSX. And I’m not talking just about the overall theme, but functionality hacks and add-ons as well. The following are just some of the GUI goodies I love and use. If I left out your application or add-on, or one that you love to use, please feel free to add a link and description in the comments for this article.

Themes:
First off, the GUI appearance (theme). This is the largest and most important place to start when customizing Mac OSX. In the early days of OSX themes, there were a few “theme changers” out there. Over time, Apple changed the way the GUI works in OSX, and for the most part there are only two real theme changing options remaining.

Unsanity’s ShapeShifter is the premier theme changer, and thankfully it works quite well, at least on PowerPC-based Macs (an Intel Mac beta is available though, check the Unsanity weblog for more info and a download link). The beautiful part of Shapeshifter is that it doesn’t “change, remove or patch” the OS directly. Shapeshifter works its magic simply by intercepting the OS when it calls for a GUI element and redirects the call to the theme elements you have chosen. This makes it much safer and more stable than running dedicated installers that actually alter/replace the elements of the OS to accomplish their task.

The down side to themes on OSX is that there simply aren’t a whole lot of themes available. The complexity, restrictiveness and shear volume of GUI elements in OSX, combined with the extremely difficult to learn software to actually create a theme (and unfortunately there is only one application, ThemePark) prohibit most designers from even trying to create more themes. It’s not like Windows or even the old Mac OS with Kaleidoscope.

Thankfully though, there are enough themes by some very talented artists available to satisfy most users. While I make an effort to at least try most every theme I come across, I generally end up going with two themes that I’ve come to love; Siro and Eternal Aqua. They’re both clean, elegant themes that just “get out of the way” - and both include skins for Safari, iChat, iTunes, etc. The other theme I love isn’t a Shapeshifter theme, but stand-alone installer theme. Uno is basically Apple’s Aqua unified, and made a little cleaner with all Aqua windows (no brushed metal to be found).

To find more themes, you have to do a bit of roaming around. I generally visit two sites for this. The first being InterfaceLift’s theme section. The themes are organized and include a small preview to help you decide what you want. The down side to using InterfaceLift is that they only list the themes that are widely available by the themers themselves. This leaves out a lot of interesting new themes and mods of existing themes which sometimes are the best ones to use.

The second, and probably most complete resource for finding themes, is the MacThemes forums. Here you will find two areas to look in. The Modifications and Hybrid forum is just that. It’s where you can find releases of themes created by modifying original themes by someone other than the original theme designer. This is perhaps the best spot to start. The second forum is the Releases & Updates forum, where you’ll find completely original themes.

Keep in mind that in order to find themes in the MacThemes forums, you’ll have to wade through a lot of posts for icons and wallpaper images as well. But the posts are clearly marked and you won’t have a difficult time finding themes. Be sure to also check out their exhaustive Screenshot thread located in the GUI discussion forum as well.

Overall, MacThemes.net is THE place to go for GUI goodness!

Icons:
Everybody loves a good custom icon. I’m no exception. In fact, I love them so much that I have a few thousand icons in storage. No, not in a folder on an external drive, but conveniently stored in a database for easy viewing and retrieval. Pixadex by Iconfactory makes life easy for icon enthusiasts to store, catalog and apply their icons. One of the advantages of using Pixadex is that it can store just about any format for icons including .png images, Windows formatted icons and Mac icons. When you have a collection of them you like, you can also export them into an “iContainer” for easy storage or sharing.

And if you come across a set of icons that you want to replace your entire system with, look no further than CandyBar, a collaboration between Iconfactory & Panic Software. Candybar changes all your system icons (Finder, dock and applications) with the click of a button. Both apps are nearly must-haves for anyone with an icon affliction!

Now where to start finding icons. There are simply way too many icons available on the internet to list, but the ones I visit the most are InterfaceLift’s icon directory and IconFactory’s freeware icons. Of course, you can also visit the MacThemes.net’s Release & Updates forum and search through the threads for more as well. A quick Google search will bring up a list of more sites than you could possibly visit in a week.

For me, David Lanham’s Agau set and two “extras” packs are the perfect set of icons to match up with Apple’s Aqua, Siro or a whole host of other themes out there.

Desktop Images/Wallpapers:
You’re a designer for cryin out loud… make your own damn wallpaper! OK, so you’re lazy like me and just want to use someone elses. Again, there are too many sites out there, but I always check in on InterfaceLift’s wallpaper section which offers a searchable and sortable collection.

Another nifty site is Deviant Art. Deviant Art offers a huge collection of desktops, but they’re not the speediest site on the net, and many of the search/sort features of the site appear to be for members only - which costs money. If you have a small amount of patience, Deviant Art is worth taking a look at. And once again, I have to mention that MacThemes.net has a fairly extensive collection of wallpapers available in their forums.

Add-ons for customizing (hacks):
Adding features and capabilities to your Mac can be a full time job. There are countless possibilities, and 5 minutes at MacUpdate.com or VersionTracker.com will illustrate that fact. Generally speaking, I like to keep my system modifications and add-ons to a minimum. It makes upgrading easier, there’s less to troubleshoot in the event of problems, and quite frankly I just don’t have the money to purchase all the apps I would like to. But here’s a list of some add-on and modifications I’ve used, or I really like – I don’t necessarily have/use them all, but I think they’re pretty cool.

FruitMenu:

For those who used OS9, one of the things you probably miss is the customizable Apple menu. With OSX, it’s no longer a built-in option. Enter FruitMenu, another Unsanity Haxie. FruitMenu not only allows you to fully customize the Apple Menu, but your system-wide contextual menus as well. You can also assign key commands to launch apps and open folders in the Finder, and have the Application menu change to the icon of the application you’re in rather than having just the name displayed. This little Haxie does a whole lot for only $10.

WindowShadeX:

Another feature of OS9 that many people miss is the ability to double-click the active window and have it minimize to just the title bar of the window. WindowshadeX brings the popular feature back in a big way. Sure, you could just use OSX’s built-in Expose feature, but it’s not quite as elegant as windowshading. Not only that, but this great little haxie gives you the ability to Minimize in Place which reduces the entire window down to icon size and floats it on your screen for future “expanding” and/or make your windows transparent. Very slick and only $10!

Other Unsanity Haxies:

Unsanity offers several other nifty haxies that customizes your OSX experience such as FontCard for giving you WYSIWYG font menus, Xounds for adding sounds to various actions such as opening and closing windows and folders, etc., Mighty Mouse for customizing your cursor, and Menu Master which allows you to add, change or remove menu shortcut keys in any application.

Dock:
Your options for customizing the dock are somewhat limited. You can use Unsanity’s ClearDock APE module which is free, or Transparent Dock which will cost you a few cups of coffee. I prefer Unsanity’s ClearDock simply because it’s free and it doesn’t break with every single OS update. Both add-ons will allow you to set the dock to be completely transparent, change colors of the “active” tick marks as well as a few other nifty options.

Of course you can also use an application such as Onyx (covered below) to pin the dock to the sides of your screen and a few other options.

Menubar add-ons:

ObjectPark’s MenuCalendarClock is one of those apps that perfectly fills little gaps in what I want from the OS. MCC puts the time, day and date (in many different customizable formats) in your menu bar along with a drop down menu containing a full calendar which offers either iCal or Entourage integration. There are a lot of apps available that do what MCC does, but in my opinion most suffer from either too much or not enough in the way of features.

You can also try YouSoftware’s YouControl to customize your clock, and add a calendar (with iCal integration). YouControl will also add other features to your menubar such as iTunes controls, an RSS reader and much more. But for $30, you should make sure you really want all that YouControl has to offer.

Services Menu Hack:
One little utility I absolutely love (yet another APE module) is ICeCoffee from Nicholas Riley. ICeCoffee ads a few useful features to OSX that I can’t imagine not having now that I’m used to them. The first is the ability to Command + double click a URL in many applications to open the page in your Web browser. But the best feature is the ability to add the Services menu right to the main menu bar in every application in OSX, rather than keeping it hidden in the application menu.

Deskshade:

I do a lot of screenshots for CreativeGuy. One of the things that annoys me is when I take a screenshot and you see the mess of icons that might be visible behind the window on the desktop. In comes DeskShade. Deskshade does a few things that make it a worthwhile $7 spent. First, it will “cover” all you icons on the desktop so that all you see is your beautiful desktop picture. Second, it adds a screenlock feature for some low-level security. And third, the crown jewel of this app, it acts as kind of an iPhoto for your desktop images, including the ability to alter the colors of any of your images. And finally, it adds a cool transition effect when you change your desktop image. The app lives in the menu bar and the icon is a tiny representation of your actual desktop image.

If you just can’t bring yourself to spend the $7 on Deskshade, you can give Desktop Sweeper or Desktopple a try. Both apps are pretty much a one-trick pony in that all they do is hide icons. I don’t find either of them nearly as elegant as DeskShade, but they do the job well and are free.

Onyx:

Onyx is one of those apps that I just can’t live without. While I could spend quite a bit of time talking about its many features, it’s the GUI-related features that we’re interested in right now, and Onyx delivers enough of them to make it worth the download.

All the GUI features are contained in the Parameters tab and include general features such as adding double scrolling arrows to your windows, changing the format of screenshots to a number of different file formats such as .jpg, .gif, .png and more. You can also speed up the speed with which the system displays “sheets” (the little message windows that slide out from the menu bar), turn off crash report dialog boxes, alter the number of recent items in your menu bar, etc. And those are just the general preferences you can set.

Once you move on to Finder, Dock, Dashboard, Expose and Safari preference tabs you’ll find a plethora of options to play with that are too numerous to go into - but are all self-explanatory and useful.

All the features of Onyx can be done via the command line interface, but it’s so much easier to have them all in one easy to use application. If you’re looking for a comparison tool, you can check out the free version of TinkerTool.

Service Scrubber:
While this isn’t really something you think of as a GUI hack, Service Scrubber can make using Apple’s Services much prettier. Service Scrubber allows you to restructure, change and disable individual Services that you rarely use.

In closing:
There are certainly a whole host of other interface hacks, add-ons and customizing utilities available, and more on the horizon, but the items mentioned in this article should get you well on your way to customizing your Mac to your liking.

A recent development has come to light this past week. Mac users from way back will certainly remember the king of all things Mac GUI on the Web was ResExcellence. The site recently shut down after many years of service. Without going into a lot of details, the site is back with new ownership and should be up and running quite soon. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. As I said at the beginning of this article, please feel free to add any nifty GUI customizing apps I didn’t list in the comments.