Make an MAC Outlook

Source: http://www.taimila.com/

Let's start with some basic concepts. Gnome desktop has three different themes, which you can change (System -> Preferences -> Theme -> Details). These are Controls, Window Border and Icons. Even only by changing them, you can get a very nice desktop. There are many themes available and you can find most of them at Gnome-look. You can of course use any theme you like, but in this guide we are making OSX look-a-like and we must select the best ones for our purpose.

Download the following themes from Gnome-look. The first one includes the theme for window decorator and for controls. And the second one has a lot of OSX style icons.

• T-ish for Clearlooks by Tmilovan.
• OSX iconset by Kiddo.

After you have downloaded these packages go to "System -> Preferences -> Theme". System menu can be found at the left upper corner of your screen. Select "Install Theme..." and browse to the folder where you just downloaded packages above. After the installation of both of them, select T-ish from theme list and OSX icons from icon list (details of theme). It's a good start, but why stop here!

I have only few icons on my desktop and they are pretty big as you can see from the screenshots. I use Innex icons theme on desktop icons. I also recommend you to download OS-L iconset even though it's for KDE. It still contains many nice icons which you can use in menus or in your application launchers. (This part is optional, because we already have a set of icons)

Gnome panel customizing

Let's begin with the bottom panel. Our aim is to have a panel which contains only application launchers.

The first step is to remove all the other elements from the panel. In default ubuntu installation there are Recycle bin, Taskbar, desktop switcher and show desktop -button. These are added later to the top panel so don't worry. You can remove these elements by clicking right mouse-button on them and selecting "Remove from panel" from pop-up menu. Now you have empty gray panel. Next click right mouse-button on the empty panel and select "Properties". Change the Size of the panel to 50 and remove all the ticks form the selectionboxes (See screenshot). Then change to Background tab and select "Solid color". Change the Color to white, if it's not already, and move "Style" slider like in this screenshot. Now the panel is ready. Next we just add icons (application launchers) to it. You can simply drag and drop the icons from the desktop. Another way is to click right mouse-button on the panel and select "Add to panel...". Select "Custom application launcher" from the window and fill Name, Command and select some beatiful icon. You can also write a short comment about the program, if you will. (See screenshot)

The Top panel is little more trickier than bottom panel. But I choose not to change it except adding some panels back.

One stop solution

Of course, we can download complete themes directly and install them. Then we can modify in "Theme Details" as we like. Now I'm using MacOS-X Aqua Theme from http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=13548

Later on, we can change the thems or icons manuall at
~/.themes
~/.icons

PS: the following site aims to provide a more mac-like dock which is still in progress but promising: http://www.gnome-dock.org/trac

How to change icons manually

We should first look at the theme definition files in the folder ~/.themes/. To change the icons, we then goto the corresponding folder (name is specified in theme definition) in ~/.icons.

Now replace the unwanted icons in it can achieve the aim. However, we can get substituting sources from the following locatiosn:

1. /usr/share/icons/
2. /usr/share/pixmaps
3. Internet of course