The Panda's Thoughts

A companion to Maniacal Meanderings, this is where I sort of kind of review things I suppose.

Monday, June 26, 2006

untitled

Nothing to see here

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Flyakite OSX

Flyakite OSX is a utility that can be used to skin your windows XP install so it will look, sound, and feel like Apple OSX. Once you download the program from The Makers, it is a simple matter of installing exactly the part of the program that you want. Only want to make your itunes look like its on OSX, no problem just select that box and leave the others blank (they are blank by default). If you just want Windows to sound like OSX you can do that too. An important thing to remember is that this is a massive sytem-wide change. The program will go into your registry and alter quite a few values, but don't let that stop you from running the program, an uninstaller is installed first so in the event of an install failure you can still uninstall everything that was installed. Also the uninstaller completely restores your system to its previous state, but should that not work for any reason, during the install the program sets up a system restore point for you so that you dont have to worry about it.

When compared side by side with a Mac running the real deal, the similiarities were striking. The main differences are in the fact that Flyakite doesn't really change the OS so much as it covers it in pretty. So your system tray is still there, and if you click on the apple in the upper left corner it will still pull down the start menu which has also not been altered in its layout, just in its look.

Another big difference between Flyakite and Tiger is that in tiger, and really every other iteration of OSX, the window buttons, the ones that control the minimize, close, and maximize functions are located in the upper left of the window. In Flyakite they maintain the Windows postioning by leaving them in the upper right of the window.

All in all Flyakite is impressive, the amount that it does change, from icons to sounds is incredible so I still think that even with its differences, if you are looking for a way to make up for the fact that you cant afford the actual OSX experience (and honestly, so few can, but so many want to be able to, myslef included) this is the way to go. On a scale of 0 to 10 bamboo sticks I give this a strong 9.

-Tech Panda