Feel comfortable with your Windows XP… join the Aqua community!

Have a look at this beauty:

larger view

Don’t you feel a bit bored stiff with the uninspiring Windows XP – or any flavour of Windows for that matter? So what do you do to get it to look better, are themes just enough? Sure, but add a nifty little utility like the Mac Launcher/Dock and you’ll take your computing experience to another level.

Unfortunately this path is frought with legal danger as the AquaDock developer M. Yamaguchi experienced with the “cease and desist order” from Apple. Still, the prgram is floating on the internet and you can google for it yourself! Once you’ve downloaded and installed AquaDock, you need to get some “docklets” for it, and yes the internet if full of those as well, one of the best sites I found that has loads of them is YzDocklets.com run by a gentleman called Haitham Al-Beik.

There is a small catch with getting the dockets to work as I’ve discovered.. you need a dll that is not distributed with the AquaDock archive. But, thanks to Haitham, he’s got a software developer kit that does include it! You can download that one from the tutorials page, unRar the archive and then move the “yzdocklet.dll” and “yzdocklet.lib” into the AquaDock program folder. With this done you can right-click on an empty space the dock and choose “Add Docklet”.

The icons the dock uses are 128×128 in size, so when you drag a standard Windows application and use it’s built-in icon, it will be a complete eye-sore! You need some nice icons or make some yourselves. The AquaDock accepts the standard .ico files as well as .png ones. Do a search for 128×128 and you will be again inundated with the number of outlets you can get your icons from, one of the best I found is DeviantArt and one of the best icon artists is a deviant (;)) called “foood“. The icons he created like the iCandy_Junior series are fantastic! You can browse various other artists and their freely available icon packs.. believe me this will be adictive, but the end result is that you will have a much nicer computer to work with. And if you’re like me spending some 8 – 12 hours a day on one, you will thank yourself for the effort.

Now, let’s take Windows XP and skin it with a Panther-like theme and you’re there! A shareware program called StyleXP takes the pain out of the theme business… it costs about $20 and I’ll be happy to dish that out. Once you download and install that one, click on the “Themes” link, then “Download More Themes” and that will take you to ThemeXP.org, look for the Mac OSX Panther 2004 theme (or any other you like of course) and you’re done… at least for now!

Enjoy 😉