XP Users Cop a Feel of OS X*

[Mac Reporter]

Wired News reports
By Leander Kahney
02:00 AM Apr. 30, 2004 P
Look at the first desktop screenshot at left. It looks like a Mac OS X machine, right?

Wrong. It's a Windows XP box made up to look like a Mac.

Look closely, and you'll see that its creator has done a very good job; although the machine is running Windows XP, the interface is almost indistinguishable from an OS X machine.

Notice the dock, desktop background, menus, system font and icons for applications and folders. Even the keyboard shortcuts belong to the Mac OS X.

The system belongs to Kurt871, who won the latest monthly screenshot contest at AquaXP, a site devoted to turning XP boxes into faux Macs.
Read more.

[joel]

I've been a member of Aqua Soft since November 2002 (Aqua Soft is one of the oldest Aqua emulation sites). I remember I used to be so obsessed hunting for any sets of files that would make my WinXP look and feel like OS X. Entire weekends were spent tweaking Windows' system files, doing Photoshop jobs, and assembling various visual styles. (Trivia: At one point, a Japanese developer was directly asked by Apple to stop his project. Y'z Dock was the closest anyone ever got to emulate the OS X dock.)

All my interest in this literally stopped overnight when I got my first Mac. When I began to use OS X full time, I began to understand that even though you can get your WinXP to look like OS X, there's no way you can make it feel like one.

Something good has been turning out of all this. Even though there are some Mac users who continue to bash Aqua emulation, Aqua Soft is one community which has made others switch to OS X.

(Re: the Wired article, Duckie is one of the founding members of Aqua Soft. He's one of the best emulation artists around. Congrats to him for getting Wired's attention!)