As much as people like to say that I am an Apple fanboy, I don’t really have that many Apple products. Just only 4 iPads, 4 iPhones, a Macbook Pro 2008, a Mac Mini and a Macbook Air split among two of us, it isn’t really a lot.
Ok, I may exaggerate at times. Anyway, lately I have been browsing through the Lowyat forums especially on the Apple Byte section and found a thread dedicated to folks sharing what is on their desktop. I saw that they had beautiful wallpapers as well as a very clean desktop (suffice to say I have seen extremely messy desktops especially at work!).
A couple of things caught my eye, one of them was that they had changed the icons especially on the dock. So a quick search and a quick Google brought me to an app called LiteIcon. Good thing about it, its free. Second thing about it, it is really easy to use.
All I needed to do was to download a bunch of icons available free on the web (preferbly in the *.ICNS format or *.PNG works as well) and simply drag the icon to replace the default icon. As seen on the image above, just drag and drop. If you want to go back to your default setting, drag the existing icon away and it will automatically be defaulted back.
So that covers changing the icons.
The next hack that I saw was quite cool where a date and time was displayed on the wallpaper as well as the weather. So again I searched through the threads and came upon GeekTool.
GeekTool is free and it is a little bit more complicated to set it up. You can either Google how to set it up but the easiest bit for me would be to follow these instructions.
- Download the tool here.
- Install it on your Mac
- Run the program
- Google the term “geeklets“
- Click on any of the links and download the ones you like (basically the files which has a *.glet at the end)
- Make sure GeekTool is running on your Mac, then double click on the *.glet file.
- Once that is done, a message prompts up to ask if you want to run the script, select “YES”
- Then just adjust where you want the results to be shown on your desktop.
- Easy as pie.
Once you have done the steps above you get a nice mixture of customised icons and some cool widgets on your wallpaper as seen below.
Pretty cool huh?
