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]

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.

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.

Cue music, enter FunctionFlip. This app -- now a Preference Pane as of version 1.2, does what it says it does: it flips your function keys one-by-one. So if you want to free up F1 through F4, but leave F10 and F12 as volume keys, you can go right ahead. It's the kind of great idea that makes you wonder why Apple hasn't built it into the system preferences yet.

[via Mac Gems]

Although no release date for the Linux and OS X variants of Chrome has been announced, some details about the Mac version of Chrome are starting to emerge.

Yesterday, Amanda Walker, a Google software engineer, laid out some of the basics on the Official Google Mac Blog.

While individuals who excel at Mac development are building the Mac version of Chrome (and Linux developers are focusing on the Linux version), the different platforms are not operating on different teams -- everyone is part of the same group and working off of the same Chromium source tree.

As I discussed earlier, Chromium is available for developers to build on OS X -- the UI layer does not exist right now, but you can run tests in the TestShell.

When it comes to a release date for either Mac or Linux, Amanda won't give an estimate. In the blog entry, she writes, "we're not setting an artificial date for when they'll be ready--we simply can't predict enough to make a solid estimate." Fair enough, though obviously lots of Mac and Linux fans hope that it is sooner rather than later.

More details, at least about who is working on the Mac version, have also started to emerge. Mike Pinkerton, the project leader for Camino, posted in his blog that he is working on the Chromium project as a Mac developer. For anyone unfamiliar with Camino, it is a native OS X Gecko browser. Think the rendering engine of Firefox 2, with the interface and Cocoa-goodness of Safari. Up until FireFox 3, Camino was pretty much the only Gecko-based browser I used on my Mac. Interestingly, Pinkerton's former co-lead on the Camino project, Dave Hyatt, currently works at Apple on the Safari and WebKit teams.

Knowing how successfully the Camino team adapted Gecko to OS X, this gives me a lot of confidence in Chrome for OS X.

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Headline is a distinctive-looking newsreader for OS X that offers a different reading experience than you might be used to from popular RSS apps like NetNewsWire or Newsfire. To maintain a small desktop footprint, Headline lists stories in a compact one-column layout that can be quickly sorted using a dropdown. It displays the full stories using a slick, Quick-Look-like effect, taking advantage of Core Animation. And now this reader has reached its 1.0 release!

Headline definitely has potential, but with its major competitors switching to a free model, you're going to have to really fall in love with its unique UI to pay the $20 pricetag. That said, we do really like the minimalism of Headline, and it would be nice to other newsreaders develop a mini-mode that mimics the one-column layout. You might also want to check out Headline if you subscribe to podcasts via RSS, but aren't a fan of iTunes, as Headline can play them inline.

When it comes to download management, it seems like Windows has always been ahead of OS X. That might still be true, but it's definitely up for debate, thanks to a very smart app called Leech. It's got the basic features that all good download managers provide: you can use it from within the browser, and it allows you to pause downloads, or resume them after a crash. Good start, but Leech really shines when it comes to defining rules for different file types and hosts.

Let's say you want all .mp3 files to download to your iTunes library, all .jpg files in Pictures, and all DMGs on the desktop. Yeah, Leech will do that, no problem. It also handles post-processing, so you can expand those DMGs automatically, or play those Mp3s as they finish downloading. You can drag or copy-paste a URL into Leech to start downloading immediately, or shift-drag to choose a different location. And if you don't want Leech in your browser, you can use it on its own, too.

So why not Activity Monitor? Well, if you're just going to use it as a display in the dock, it's using way more system resources than you need. Its Dock readout also isn't as customizable as the one in CPU History, which lets you set the update interval, the width of the bars in the CPU graph, and the size of the icon in the Dock. The latest version also shows separate graphs for multi-core processors. It doesn't really do much, but CPU History gets its very specific job done with minimal hassle.

[via Daring Fireball]