...strange...

I thought the skin was the only thing left that made it a Mac. It's insides are Unix and Intel, now. You take away the skin, and what do you have that's still Mac? LOL.

Just kidding. I use a Mac at work (PC at home). I love and hate both.

Hmmm... Apple aren't particularly known for allowing the user to customise stuff. Don't they like you to work how they tell you to work?

I also use both PC & Mac... but mostly PC - and Apple recently pissed me off. I went to an Adobe CS3 in assoc with Apple launch event in London... and was barely in the door before the baggy trouser brigade started banging on about how cool Mac's are and all that "we don't get viruses snigger snigger". Very childish. It got on my nerves so much that I felt ashamed to tell anybody that I owned a Mac, so as not to risk being stereotyped as one of those idiots... and just tried to defend my PC.

It did amuse me slightly when the host stated "and for PC users wanting to switch to Mac... you can now run windows on them"... to which a man at the back replied "Hang on... didn't Apple just build a PC that can now run OS?"

Sorry... way off topic there.

There is software available to skin your Mac, so you can go for that Alien vs. Predator look, or Hello Kitty style you've always wanted. You can also change your default icons too; and there are loads of icon packs available with various applications which make light of changing.

http://www.iconfactory.com/
http://www.panic.com/candybar/
http://unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter

I skinned for a while, then decided that Steve et. al. had actually done a good enough job, so reverted back. I must admit though that it does my head in when I look at Garageband against iTunes, against Finder against Safari. We've got like 4 different themes going on within the OS!

On a slightly different note, I technically skinned a Mac today- a Mac Mini. I peeled that shell off and whacked some more RAM in there. Much better. Scared me shitless doing it though.

Good point. The original OS skin looks so much niver than any mods that the community have knocked out.

I used to skin my PC's... but always messed things up and ended up with missing icons, and mismatched themes here and there.

I've learnt to just be satisfied with changing wallpapers every know-and-then to save me the headache.

Yep, lots of nice wallpapers out there. I seem to recall downloading a large zip file with loads of natural images at around 1280 x 960 which I now have set my Mac to rotate every minute (or so). Its great as I never get bored of looking at these nice desktops. I highly recommend downloading a load of nice images and doing this as it can seriously relieve the boredom.

I use UNO to unify the whole OS X interface and lovin it: http://gui.interacto.net/

so when i worked on a pc, i often played with skinning windows. it probably wasn't the smartest thing. i think i got plenty of spyware, and the likes, from doing it.

i'm now on a mac (and loving it) and am getting the itch to tweak the look of osx a bit. good idea or bad? does anyone know the dangers and downsides to skinning a mac?

Thanks for the link to UNO - been looking for something like that. Always thought it strange the themes in OS X differed across apps.