A place to keep my work.
Published on December 5, 2011 By Uvah In Personal Computing

I got a friend who just bought a Macbook and he wants to know if WB will work on his machine. I told him I wasn't sure. Anyway ... he would like to try it out if at all possible.


Comments (Page 1)
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on Dec 05, 2011

Don't think so.  Look up - "WinCustomize".

on Dec 05, 2011

The 'window' in 'Windowblinds' is a bit of a play on words but it actually refers to Windows the OS.

Short answer.... 'no' ...

on Dec 05, 2011

As mentioned, WB is a Windows application only, Mac'ers did have a similar thirdparty app, many, many moons ago, called Kaleidoscope.

It was discontinued about 8 years ago. I cannot remember the exact reason, but it wouldn't surprise me if Apple had had a saying about it...

"Hey, you guys. You're making our OS look cool. STOP THAT!"

Sad thing really, cause Kaleidoscope offered some of the greatest looking schemes ever made/seen.
I'm putting my neck on the block, and saying that many of the Kaleidoscope schemes made back then runs circles around -any- Windowblinds skins made even today.

I'd love to find an easy way to extract some of those Kaleidoscope scheme and play around with some of the graphics.
Have tried official and unofficial apps for extracting .sit files, but it's given me nothing but griefs and many a night of lost sleep....
(Got close to 4000 schemes to play with...)

on Dec 05, 2011

Yeah, I've got a MacBook pro that I got to replace my old laptop that flamed out (pretty nearly literally).

I got the MB mostly because I like the aluminum body, and I've got it boot camp'd to run windows.

Since I *really* like the customization options for windows that Stardock provides, I tried to look for something similar for osx when I boot to it, but there really isn't all that much currently available (some utilities to change the icons seem to be the only really current options available).

I will say, I would like it a lot if windows would do fonts as well as the mac, but for the most part, the main useful differences are pretty minor (good and bad points for both platforms).

on Dec 05, 2011

WindowBlinds can be run on a MacBook as long as you have a program such as Parallels installed which will allow you to run Windows programs.

 You would also require a copy of Windows Vista / 7 to install on the Parallels partition.

on Dec 05, 2011

I didn't think so. Thanks guys.

Sorry. Posted this before You mentioned Parallels. Didn't know it would be such a headache.

Make a new partition, put Parallels on partition, put Windows on Parallels on partition, put Windowblinds on Windows on Parallels on partion, put skins on Windowblinds ....... sheesh!

on Dec 05, 2011

I didn't think so. Thanks guys.

Hankers
WindowBlinds can be run on a MacBook as long as you have a program such as Parallels installed which will allow you to run Windows programs.

You would also require a copy of Windows Vista / 7 to install on the Parallels partition.

on Dec 05, 2011

Snowman
Mac'ers did have a similar thirdparty app, many, many moons ago, called Kaleidoscope.

Heck...I'd forgotten about that....but then the only Mac I've ever had was a recent Apple 2c ... all $5 of it...

on Dec 05, 2011

Hankers
WindowBlinds can be run on a MacBook as long as you have a program such as Parallels installed which will allow you to run Windows programs.

 You would also require a copy of Windows Vista / 7 to install on the Parallels partition.

 

I used parallels for a bit (trial version), and found it pretty useful and pretty cool in coherence mode (at least if I were going to work in OSX more than windows), but never tried to install windowblinds on it. Figure, at best, you'd get your windows apps skinned, and the osx apps would still look like osx (or, if not in coherence, it would run all in a single window, and would skin that like it would a normal windows install).

But, unless you want to spend most of your time in OSX and only use windows apps occasionally, boot camp seems a better option (you need a windows license either way, and with boot camp, it's running natively, and it even gets you drivers for the mac hardware, which is kind of cool  ).

Might have to try installing it with parallels, anyway, just to see exactly how well it works in coherence mode

on Dec 05, 2011

SysReqs:

Parallels Desktop 7 Switch to Mac Edition Requirements

Mac Requirements
  • A Mac computer with an Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, or Xeon processor.
  • Minimum 1.4 GB of memory, 2 GB of memory is recommended.
  • 1 GB of disk space on the boot volume for Parallels Desktop 7 Switch to Mac installation.
  • About 15 GB of disk space for each virtual machine.
  • Supported Mac OS versions: Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6.3 or later, Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.8 or later.

Note: Mac OS X Tiger v10.4.x is not supported in this version of Parallels Desktop.

To get information about your Mac OS X version, type of processor, and amount of memory, choose About This Mac from the Apple menu.

PC Requirements
  • 700 (or higher) MHz x86 or x64 processor (Intel or AMD).
  • 256 MB or more of RAM.
  • 50 MB of hard disk space for installing Parallels Transporter Agent.
  • Ethernet or WiFi network adapter for migrating over network.
  • USB port for migrating using the Parallels USB cable.
  • Supported Windows and Linux versions: Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, Ubuntu Linux 8.04.
on Dec 06, 2011

A looong time ago I only used Apple Mac products since it was the best for Artiststs/designers.....

Simple (stupid ?) question: Why go Mac nowadays ?

-I Really don´t see the Benefits anymore...

on Dec 06, 2011

There are none Andy. I'm trying to talk him into returning his Macbook and exchanging it for something a lot more flexible.  He likes the idea of customizing his display but doesn't like that there are so few apps available for Macs. He was only minutes away from purchasing Windowblinds.

on Dec 06, 2011

On the subject of Parallels, it comes with a feature to skin the windows apps to look more like OS X which is powered by MyColors.  You do have to turn this feature on in Parallels before it is downloaded and enabled though and I would always recommend anyone with Parallels does this.

However we do not sell any products which work on OS X itself.  I did see that there are some apps to skin OS X at least for older versions so they may have been updated for Lion.

on Dec 08, 2011

Neil Banfield
On the subject of Parallels, it comes with a feature to skin the windows apps to look more like OS X which is powered by MyColors.  You do have to turn this feature on in Parallels before it is downloaded and enabled though and I would always recommend anyone with Parallels does this.

However we do not sell any products which work on OS X itself.  I did see that there are some apps to skin OS X at least for older versions so they may have been updated for Lion.

 

Actually, you can apply the 'Mac OSX look' option in parallels at any time, it's an option in the menu, even after you've installed it (I used it when I evaluated parallels, it was cool ).

I've searched for customization options for OSX, but nothing current seems to be available (some icon changing programs seem to be the limit of what's out there). I think snowman is right, Apple apparently freaked out when their users decided to 'think different'

 

Uvah,

There's no particular reason for your friend to return / replace the macbook itself, it can run windows just fine (either as a stand alone install or with boot camp), unless he's managed to snag an old powerpc version

I've got my macbook pro running windows using boot camp, just because I do want to mess around with OSX from time to time (just for the heck of it), but I boot to Windows something like 90% of the time.

Depending on which macbook your friend has, pretty much the only weirdness is the trackpad, and really only in the difference between tap to click and press to click. Otherwise, it works quite nicely with windows. I'd use boot camp just for the ease of getting the proper hardware drivers, but windows works perfectly well on my current mac laptop.

 

on Dec 08, 2011

As an aside, I didn't expect that the 'mac look' option in parallels was a MyColors feature.

That's kind of cool

It does look good on the mac

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