{"id":178,"date":"2005-05-05T17:51:23","date_gmt":"2005-05-05T22:51:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/05\/05\/make-your-pc-work-not-look-more-like-a-mac\/"},"modified":"2010-08-24T15:13:48","modified_gmt":"2010-08-24T20:13:48","slug":"make-your-pc-work-not-look-more-like-a-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/2005\/05\/05\/make-your-pc-work-not-look-more-like-a-mac\/","title":{"rendered":"Make Your PC Work (not look) More Like a Mac"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/images\/windows.jpg?resize=400%2C100\" border=\"1\" alt=\"Windows\" hspace=\"4\" vspace=\"4\" width=\"400\" height=\"100\" \/><br \/>\nI recently switched jobs and went from working on a Mac all day to working on a PC. It was (as you might expect) an unpleasant shock to the system. I&#8217;ve spent a bit of time over the past few weeks making my PC run a bit more like a Mac. Here are some of the solutions I&#8217;ve come up with.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.randyrants.com\/sharpkeys\/\">Sharpkeys<\/a> &#8211; I used this to switch my left ctrl and alt keys. No more pinky-aches at the end of the day from reaching over for ctrl shortcuts. The biggest downside I&#8217;ve found is that it makes &#8220;alt+tab&#8221; awkward at first, but I got used to it fairly quickly. I also physically removed the &#8220;Windows&#8221; key that sits between the left alt and ctrl keys to avoid accidentally hitting it and popping up the start menu, and losing focus from whatever app I&#8217;m currently working in.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.palma.com.au\/winroll\/\">Winroll<\/a> &#8211; This is a feature that even OS X doesn&#8217;t come with, but that I found to be one of the most useful feature in pre-OS X Macintosh operating systems. It lets you to right-click the title bar of any window to &#8220;roll&#8221; it up, making the entire window the size of the title bar. Right click it again to expand it to normal size. If you&#8217;d like this functionality in OS X, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.unsanity.com\/haxies\/wsx\/\">WindowShadeX<\/a> by Unsanity offers it.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.otakusoftware.com\/\">Top Desk<\/a> &#8211; You&#8217;re never going to get a perfect <a href=\"http:\/\/www.apple.com\/macosx\/features\/expose\/\">Expos\u00e9<\/a> effect in Windows, but you can come close. I&#8217;ve tried everything out there and Top Desk is the one I&#8217;ve ended up keeping. It works smoothly and does not affect other applications,<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/atnotes.fr.st\/\">Atnotes<\/a> &#8211; If you like using stickies in OS X, Atnotes gives you all the functionality of stickies (and then some).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.ntwind.com\/taskswitchxp\/\">TaskSwitchXP<\/a> &#8211; There are several alt+tab task-switching enhancers out there, I&#8217;ve settled on this one which is similar to the task switcher in OS X. As a side note, for OS X, check out <a href=\"http:\/\/www.petermaurer.de\/nasi.php?thema=witch&amp;sprache=deutsch&amp;kopf=labor\">Witch<\/a> if you haven&#8217;t already.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sourceforge.net\/projects\/pdfcreator\/\">PDF Creator<\/a>&#8211; If you miss being able to print to PDF at any time, get PDF Creator. It lets you print to PDF anything you&#8217;d print anywhere else&#8211;and you don&#8217;t even have to reboot, imagine that. Make sure you download the file ending in AFPLGhostscript.exe.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.candylabs.com\/approcket\/\">Approcket<\/a> &#8211; One of the most useful apps in OS X for productivity is, in my opinion, <a href=\"http:\/\/quicksilver.blacktree.com\/\">Quicksilver<\/a> (or <a href=\"http:\/\/www.obdev.at\/products\/launchbar\/\">Launchbar<\/a> if you like to pay). Approcket attempts to match some of the functionality and look good at the same time, and in many aspects, succeeds. Initially it isn&#8217;t nearly as smart as Quicksilver, but with some training can become a useful part of your windows workflow.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/osx.portraitofakite.com\/\">FlyAKiteOS<\/a> &#8211; If you really want to make your PC look like OS X (personally I don&#8217;t care to do this), FlyAKiteOS is the way to go. It is fully customizable and uninstallable and adds about every visual OS X hack you can imagine (or only those you choose) to your windows system in one fell swoop. For example, if you&#8217;re a big fan of the Dock, there are a couple windows clones to choose from, it will make your boot and login screens OS X&#8217;ish, change your desktop, cursors, folders, icons, theme and more to emulate (to some extent) OS X. I find that while it&#8217;s a novelty to make Windows look like OS X, I always end up reverting back to the windows look to maintain some consistency across applications and because the speed hit you take with all the customizations isn&#8217;t worth it. Their site is always down, but you may be able to find it by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?rls=en&amp;q=flyakiteosx+download+mirror&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8\">searching<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211;Message from Certkiller&#8211;<br \/>\nNow you can pass <a href=\"http:\/\/www.certkiller.com\/certification-training-Microsoft.htm\">microsoft certification<\/a> exam by using latest <a href=\"http:\/\/www.certkiller.com\/MCP-certification-training.htm\">mcp<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.certkiller.com\/SCJP-certification-training.htm\">scjp<\/a> dumps  by certkiller.<br \/>\n&#8211;Message from Certkiller&#8211;<\/p>\n<p>There are plenty of other resources out there that will make your system look like OS X (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.konfabulator.com\/\">Konfabulator<\/a> etc.) but these are the ones that I&#8217;ve found to actually be useful in increasing productivity in the Windows environment when I have to use it.<\/p>\n<p>One last tip is to move your taskbar to the top of the screen. If it isn&#8217;t locked, you can just drag it up there. I set mine to auto-hide, otherwise applications get &#8220;stuck&#8221; underneath it. It doesn&#8217;t do a ton in terms of productivity, but it does at least feel a little more like home.<\/p>\n<p>Hopefully these tips will help you become more productive in Windows. If you have other tips and tricks, feel free to post them in the comments.<br \/>\n<!-- technorati tags start --><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right; font-size: 10px;\">Technorati Tags: <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/mac\">mac<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/macintosh\">macintosh<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/os x\">os x<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/software\">software<\/a>, <a rel=\"tag\" href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/windows\">windows<\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- technorati tags end --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I recently switched jobs and went from working on a Mac all day to working on a PC. It was (as you might expect) an unpleasant shock to the system. I&#8217;ve spent a bit of time over the past few weeks making my PC run a bit more like a Mac. Here are some of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppj2P-2S","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":323,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178\/revisions\/323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcusvorwaller.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}