Macuillage

About nine months ago, feeling flush and in need of a fancy treat I plumped out for a black macbook. My first ever mac as it so happens, up to that day I’d always had a PC. When I got home and slipped the little black number out of its furry sleeve I marvelled at its newness. I cherished it. I kept it as clean as possible and as safe as cloud be. I didn’t tinker with any aspect of it, I even left the wallpaper as it was.

This may sound a little strange so I should probably explain. I’m not really that computer savvy – I can use them fine, but I just have no idea how they work beyond a simple grasp of the basics. However I love finding useful programmes and cosmetically customising as many things as I could. As a result my old desktop PC was riddled with problems – clogged drives, files all over the place, hundreds of applications and programmes once used and now forgotten. It had started consistently freezing every ten minutes. It even manage to freeze my iPod a couple of times.

As you can imagine this got pretty annoying. Hence when I got my shiny new macbook I wanted it to remain as fresh and untampered with as possible. Nine months down the line though I’m bored with the preloaded settings and I’ve returned to my tinkering ways.

As I looked around for some sort of guide to tinkering with macs I discovered Lifehacker. Now as I said I’m no tech wizz, I just wanted some fancy visuals and some useful applications. Lifehacker’s Flickr desktop showcase provided huge chunk of inspiration. Some were serenly simple and others were completely insane. I tried recreating a few I liked and got my head around some of the most useful tools.

So here’s my (certainly not definitive) rundown of useful resources for the amateur mac tinkerer:

Yahoo Widgets – quite different to your dashboard widgets, they lay right on your desktop and are in most cases highly customisable. Great for getting useful apps like weather, clocks, iTunes remotes etc..

Wakoopa – although part social network part, part directory, it’s a good place to find applications, from big names like Firefox and Adium to smaller niche tools and programmes. Also membership of the network isn’t compulsory to browse/search the directory.

MacThemes – a good sources for ideas, reviews and new products when it comes to desktop customisation.

Magnifique – a free theme manager of Mac  OS X Leopard. Great for easily getting rid of Apple’s aqua.

Candybar – a great programme for icon manipulation. Pretty much any icon you can see on your mac you can change with Candybar. Couple it with Iconfactory, a free icon database, and you’re off.

Geektool – a monitoring programme that feeds you info about what your mac’s doing at all times. Beware of this one, it’s a little beyond my ability (or needs) so I haven’t tired it myself, but the site does say “for Panther or Tiger” and there are a few meltdown stories of people using it with Leopard.

Wallpapers – and finally where wold be be without the most important aspects of desktop customisation. Well obviously Flickr provides plenty of good images to use. If  you’ve completely  run out of ideas though check out Lifehacker’s wallpaper exchange.