There are plenty of people out there who would be willing to give Linux a try if Linux UI designs looked more like Mac OS X. Mac4Lin brings Apple's UI design to a Linux install near you, including great details like app icons and even the Dock. It looks like the Mac4Lin project had been stagnating for a while, but it's finally at v1.0, and looking good.

Mac4Lin works on a variety of Linux flavors, including Ubuntu 9.04 and GNOME 2.26, but there's no KDE version (yet). A lot of third-party apps that use GTK for skinning, like Firefox and Songbird, look great in Mac4Lin. An unstall script is also included in the latest version, in case you decent you don't like the OS X look, and you'd rather go back to your default UI.

My favorite chat client for OS X just keeps getting better. Adium 1.3.4. has been released, and it offers some major performance improvements, especially where Facebook Chat is concerned. It's also likely the last Adium release that will work on OS X 10.4 Tiger. As nice as it is to get stable updates to Adium, 1.3.4 is overshadowed by the release of 1.4 beta, which includes support for Twitter and IRC.

1.4b also has a ton of other improvements and fixes, especially in the area of group chats, including the ability to use separate styles for individual and group message windows. Why do group chats matter so much? Well, for one thing, Twitter for Adium runs in a group chat window, so the devs likely had to get that part of the interface running smoothly to roll out Twitter support. The impressive full list of changes and a download of the latest beta can be found at beta.adium.im.

Changing a desktop image on a Mac is no big thing. You can open System Preferences from the Apple menu or the Applications directory, or you can go straight to the desktop prefpane by right-clicking on your desktop. Changing the picture you see when you log in should be just as easy, but it's not. If you want to learn the Terminal commands to do it, then more power to you. For the average user, there's Loginox.

Loginox is an app with a simple drag-and-drop interface for swapping out your login image. That's literally all it does, but that's definitely enough. The only way it could work better is if the developers rewrote it as a prefpane, or if Apple decided to incorporate it into the existing desktop/screensaver settings.

[via Lifehacker]

We've showcased plenty of software before that brings Mac functionality to PCs - like Standalone Stacks, DExpose2, and Flyakite. What about all those fancy dashboard widgets? Surely there's a way to utilize them on your Windows desktop.

Why, of course there is - with Kludgets! It's an open source project built on Webkit and Nokia's QT framework. On the author's site you'll find four basic widgets to get you started and there are plenty of places to find more on the net - like WidgetWorld.

The first Kludgets beta was just released last week, so bear in mind that not all widgets are going to work and you may encounter some stability issues.

If you're a Mac user stuck using a PC at work and are jonesing for your widgets, Kludgets is a simple way to access them.

[via Shell Extension City]

There are quite a few apps out there for OS customization junkies, but Magnifique for OS X stands out from the crowd for a few reasons.

First and foremost, it's free. Second, it doesn't require a full restart once you apply a theme, just a restart of the Finder and the dock. Third, there seems to be a pretty good community of theme designers and users around it, which means help with designing and using themes is readily available in the forums.

Although Magnifique seems to use its own file format for themes (you can't easily snatch themes from other Mac theming apps) there are nearly 30 themes available on the Magnifique website. Even better, you can also download them from within the app itself.

If you look around other Mac themes forums, you'll find some additional Magnifique themes. I haven't run into any problems or glitches so far, but you may want to turn off the "apply custom mods" option if you're running the latest iTunes or Safari 4, because the app-specific elements of some themes aren't as up-to-date as the system-wide elements.

[Via Lifehacker]

Tree is a novel, lightweight outlining and organizing app for OS X. It's similar to apps like OmniOutliner, but with an important twist: the "Treeview" mode turns your outline horizontal, so new lower-level items branch out to the right instead of down. Tree handles traditional outlines, too, with customizable labels, fonts and numbering.

Aside from the main selling point -- the horizontal Treeview -- Tree can also open and export outlines in OPML format, which means you won't have any trouble sharing with people who use most other outline apps, and you can also check out your favorite existing outlines in Treeview. Because Tree is meant to be lightweight, it doesn't have a lot of frills: custom fonts, colors and numbering are available, but that's about it.

All in all, it's a well-done app, but it also sports the same $40 pricetag as OmniOutliner, which I think is still the dominant Mac app in this category. Do you have another favorite outline app? Let me know in the comments.

I went looking for a Last.fm client for my Mac recently, and discovered that Amua is well worth considering. It passes the basic tests for a good Last.fm app: it scrobbles tracks, it lets you skip, love and ban songs, and provides access to artist, user and tag stations. It also stays out of the way in a menubar icon, and only shows its small, discreet current track display when you tell it to.

I didn't realize it at first, but Amua uses iTunes to stream songs from Last.fm. Not a big deal to me, since I have iTunes open 90% of the time I'm on my Mac. If iTunes is a dealbreaker for you, then you might need to find yourself a different player. There are reasons to stick with Amua: it hardly uses any system resources, and it supports Growl. The main improvement I'd like to see would be hotkeys for the play/pause/skip functions. The iTunes hotkeys will stop Amua, but won't get it going again or skip to the next track on Last.fm.

Lee wrote a great post showing off 10 awesome Firefox themes, and I agree with him that there are a lot of shabby themes out there and it's worth digging up the good ones. Unfortunately, some of the coolest stuff Lee found isn't available for the Mac version of Firefox, or doesn't look as cool in OS X. Just so you don't think we're leaving Mac-using Firefox fans out in the cold, here's a handful of other great themes, picked especially to make your OS X browsing experience look gorgeous.

NOTE: These themes were tested on the latest official release of Firefox 3.0. I've seen some great 3.1-only themes in the works, and they deserve their own post in the future.

Mac users who have been waiting patiently for the arrival of Google Chrome, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. A member of the development team has posted a screenshot of the browser in the Chrome Group.

Though the rendering engine isn't actually doing anything yet, Chrome does correctly open new instances of the renderer with new tabs and close it when the tab closes. Chrome Developer Docs called for a "working browser window using the real multi-process infrastructure (not TestShell) by mid-February."

Time is rapidly running out on that goal, but you can bet the team will continue to forge ahead.

Linux users, you're next on the list - though likely you won't see much progress until after the Mac version is working.

[ via Google Operating System ]

Macs are getting more popular, so it stands to reason that we're going to start seeing more of this. As reported by our pals at TUAW, there's a Mac trojan floating around inside a pirated iWork '09 release that has appeared on various torrent sites.

While it may not be the specific torrent in the screenshot, Mac users may want to stay away from any iWork downloads until there's a bit more information available. Intego, who develop security applications for Mac, report that more than 20,000 people have already downloaded the infected torrents.

The trojan installs as soon as a user begins installing iWork, and then sends a notification to a remote server to announce a new host. It also installs into /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices with full permissions to read, write, and execute.

Yes Windows users, I can hear you snickering.

Nevertheless, this should serve as another reminder to all of us: be careful what you download, especially if it's from an unknown or untrusted source.

Enthusiasts love leaks, and early Windows 7 builds aren't the only OS that beta testers are sharing with the P2P community. Yes, Apple's upcoming Snow Leopard is starting to spread on popular torrent sites as well.

Currently, there are at least two builds. 10a190 was first to be appear (on The Pirate Bay, Mininova, and Demonoid), and now 10a222 has surfaced on Demonoid as well. No, you won't find the links to the files here, especially after Apple's full frontal legal assault on Wired the other day.

If you're brave enough to download it, keep in mind that these are still alpha builds, and may be extremely buggy. Some downloaders have stated as much, and caution others to be patient and wait for a later build.

But hey, where would the fun of playing with a leaked OS be if it was totally stable?

Camino is the dark horse in the Mac browser competition. It's the faster, lighter little brother to Firefox, and there's a solid base of users who prefer it over Firefox and Safari. Camino uses the same Gecko rendering engine that Firefox is built on, but its focus is on a speedy user experience instead of maximum extensibility. With the preview of version 2.0, just released, Camino has added and tweaked some things to make the browsing experience even better.

Despite some rumors that Camino would be switching to Webkit, the rendering engine shared by Safari and Google Chrome, the browser is stick with Gecko. Version 2 updates Camino to the latest version of Gecko, which should improve its ability to handle flash. It also improves support for web standards, scoring a 71 on the Acid3 test (that's the same as Firefox 3.)

In terms of new features, there's a "tab overview" mode that shows thumbnails of all your tabs. This is a big plus if you're someone who keeps a huge number of sites open at once. There's also a new menu within the browser history that shows your recently-closed pages, so you can get back if you closed something by accident. What's more, full content zoom allows you to shrink or magnify an entire page, not just the text size. All in all, a solid improvement for Camino.

Now that torrent technology has become one of the most popular ways to distribute large files, it's important to find the right Bittorrent client. If you're on a Mac, that's Transmission. I used to be a fan of Azureus (now called Vuze), but I switched to Transmission because it's less cluttered and takes up a lot less screen real-estate.

Transmission's not bare-bones in terms of features -- you can fine-tune your upload and download speeds, change ports, and check your ratio -- but its design is minimal and not too distracting. I don't want a busy-looking torrent app, I want one that I can set up quickly and leave alone until my downloads finish. Transmission provides that, while still letting advanced users get under the hood where they need to. It's also free and open source! That's why it's one of my favorite Mac apps.