Technology. Without Error

Another post on trying to make your desktop look different. Last time I tried putting up a tutorial on how to get your windows desktop to look like a Mac.
News of the google chrome OS sure has been a hot one on the internet and I thought it would be a great idea to dress up your desktop before Google launches their first screenshots and spoils the party. Google’s design is all about simplicity and that’s what should be the focus of their desktop as well. So I decided to give it a no wallpaper look. Right click on your desktop > properties > desktop and make sure the wallpaper is set to none. Change the color of the background to white (or maybe even blue..)
Now at the center of this desktop design is an application called the circle dock. The circle dock is just the usual mac dock with the icons setup in circle(s) (you decide on the number of circles. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the circle dock’s options/settings to ensure that you get the best of this tutorial.
There’s no installing Circle dock, so you just extract the zip file and run the circledock.exe file. Now for the Google Icons. For the most original looking Icons I recommend the Simply Google Icon Collection by tempest.
You still need to get the big chrome icon, one of which I found here. Right click on the dock and change the center icon to the chrome icon. To link up all the icons to the relevant web applications, you need to create shortcuts to google chrome applications. You create an application shortcut, by right clicking the dock icon and pointing it to google chrome’s location and make sure you put in the website address in the arguments section of the shortcut for the dock icon. For example, for gmail the argument would look like:
–app=https://mail.google.com/mail
If you need help, try creating an application shortcuts from within google chrome. Play around with the settings and you should be fine. Be advised that Circle dock is still an alpha version.
Now to extent the tabbed feature to all applications, not just google chrome, to do this download a program called WindowTabs. But windowtabs is not freeware, but the trial version allows you to group upto 3 tabs with no time restrictions or nag screens. Install Windowtabs and you’re good to go. The final version:

I got a taste for Bumptop after my friend Vijay recommended Ted. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an invitation-only event where the world’s leading thinkers and doers gather to find inspiration. But, videos of all the presentations at the event are available for free viewing. And the content on Ted is quite remarkably polished and innovations presented at TED are nothing short of praiseworthy. 

Bumptop is the dream child of Anand Agarawala and was created at the University of Toronto. Currently the project is in private beta and is available for download only on an invite basis and I was lucky enough to get an invite. Here is the video from TED.

The Beta version does almost most of what is shown in the video and is quite smooth and polished for beta version.

You get a 3d room interface where you put your desktop icons and then you can just grow and shrink those icons using shortcut keys. The shortcuts are very easy learn and the interface is quite intuitive. But, I really think that touch interfaces would be the right arena to utilise bumptop to their fullest potential. The project makes complete use of the mouse and allows you to organize files on your desktop in best possible manner.

Bumptop is actually a boon for people who tend to have a lot of files on their desktop and need to organize (or disorganize) them. The ability to stack documents, form grids/groups, view images by shuffling through them and allowing you hang priority docs on the walls, combined with the real life physics engine makes Bumptop a shining example of what true Innovation we can bring about even with the current technology.

The collision detection system is really great and you would appreciate the way icons/others dangle when you hang them on the wall.

Bumptop shows that innovation need not always be about new technology, it can be about using existing technology to do new things in newer ways.

However, I did find that it ran faster on my slow XP machine with just 1GB of RAM than on my Vista machine with loads and loads of RAM + a Graphics card (Yeah, maybe I should turn anti aliasing off)

Many of my friends asked me to give them an invite to Bumptop, but its not possible for a user to invite others and the only way to get Bumptop is to sign up for their invite at their site. 

While I was waiting for the invite to come by, I did realize the existence of certain clones of Bumptop. One of them was Real Desktop. Real Desktop is quite a good product but the free version is extremely limited in what it offers and once you get an invite to Bumptop, you’ll not go back to Real Desktop (even if you had paid for it).

And before I forget! Here is what my desktop looks like now

My bumptop interface

Its been a long time since I made desktop customization except for the regular change of the wallpaper that I do…So, I decided it was time to spice up my desktop and decided to go for the MacOS look…I already had the best windows look, since I had Vista. So now how do I go about making my desktop looking like MacOS? First a little basics on the Mac world for all those MS Windows lovers out there…

Macs run the OS X which succeed the Mac OS operating system, and you might be interested to know that all of Mac OSX versions have been named after the big cats family like the OSX puma, panther, Jaguar, leopard and so on…The latest in the line of the cats is the snow leopard..and here we have a screenshot which should make things a bit more clear

Now that we know how the interface looks lets work on changing the interface..The first important part of the OSX interface is the “dock” which you will find at the bottom of the screen..
So, we download that one. I found two free alternatives to the “dock” for windows, one is Objectdock from Stardock and the other is Rocketdock from Punklabs. There are other alternatives too, but these are the two I decided to try out…Stardock has been a company synonymous with the best windows skinning programs like Windowblinds, DesktopX etc..and after trying out both of the products, I decided, much to my surprise that Rocketdock worked better for me, it was simple and easier to use..but I would say that making the choice is merely a matter of random selection.

Now we have Rocketdock installed, lets load it. Add icons, right click the dock to add new icons, separators and docklets (like clocks, weather icons etc..)
I write this post primarily for windows users and so I would know how much have come to love the convenience of minimizing to the taskbar. So, right click on the dock -> dock settings -> General tab and enable the “Minimize windows to the dock” checkbox.
The second app we need to download is, Objectbar. This is for the top bar and also to ensure that you continue to have access to your tray icons and to make the transformation complete.

lets get the last bit of the interface quick now, the wallpaper. You can get the original set here.
The dock icons are usually .png icons and you can download them as per your requirement from deviantART.

And this is how my desktop looks now…

The disclaimer part
I love windows and I love the mac as well. I do not have a Mac. All copyrights, trademarks, brandnames are all properties of their corresponding owners. This is not a post for Mac purists. It is for an ordinary windows user who wants to add some spice to his desktop. It wont change your windows to make it look and feel as good as Mac. you should get a Mac if you want the experience…

Update Aug.07, 2009: Get OSX font smoothing for windows as well!