Over the past years, we’ve covered a number of posts on how to tweak a small part of your PC into a Mac. For instance, if you want to add a Mac OS X Style Dock for your Windows, there are plenty of chooses from the guide here. We’ve also showed you the tweaks on how to add Mission Control on your PC, a feature Apple introduced in Mac OS X Lion. There are also tools to transform the way you launch the applications, such as a tweak utility that allows you to have a LaunchPad experience from Mac OS X Lion. The popular and useful spotlight search from Mac also has an alternative sibling on the PC.
This guide will be the guide you will need to use to transform your Windows into Mac OS X. With the latest Mac OS X Mavericks just around the corner, if you really want to try out some of those features, you might want to consider adding some or all of the tweaks below.
How To Add Mac OS X Lion Mission Control To Your Windows
There is this tool we covered before that allows you to have a Mission Control style overview of the current opening apps for your PC. The installation is easy, download this tool and install it. For more details tweaks you can check out our dedicated guide on how to configure and optimize Mission Control on Windows.
How To Add LaunchPad To Windows, Another Mac OS X Lion Feature
On the release of OS X Lion, Apple also introduced the LaunchPad, they later refined and improved some of the usability issues on Mountain Lion 10.8. This is Apple’s answer to try to merge their iOS into the desktop, of course Microsoft has a different approach to this. But in order to get this fully function and streamline the user experience, you can first disable the new Windows 8’s start menu. Then you can install this tweak and use it as the go to place to start your application.
We have a detailed guide on how to setup and install LaunchPad on Windows here. It allows you to create folders like iOS and search through a list of apps. It also have the same animation when you try to remove an icon/app from the launchPad. It’s a very impressive tweak that mimic the original LaunchPad very well from Mac OS X Lion / Mountain Lion.
How To Add Mac OS X Dashboard on Windows
Dashboard is one of the older features from Mac OS X, but I often use it just because of the quickness and easiness to access information you want. Many of the Mac dashboard widgets now have their mirror versions running on the PC. Take a look at this guide on how you can setup your PC to include Mac OS X’s dashboard.
Add Mac OS X Spotlight Universal Search Function To Windows
I admit, Mac OS X’s Spotlight feature is the one that I can’t live without. It’s so useful, really wish Microsoft can improve upon the search experience in Windows’s Start Menu. Yes they did make search better in Windows 8.1 to include Bing’s universal search. But for functions like quick preview, simple math calculations and the speed it returns the result, the search feature from Start Menu still falls short. If you are happy with the search from Windows 8.1 you can hold off to try this. But Launchy is the closest you can find to mimc the speedy search results you get from Mac OS X’s spotlight.
Take a look at this guide on how to configure and optimize the search speed and results for Launchy.
Mac OS X Dock For Windows
At the end you can’t expect people to believe this is a Mac when you haven’t tweaked or added Mac OS X style dock onto your PC. We have a dedicated guide and many choices you can choose from for this need. There are many third party tools out there that allows you to have the exact same look and feel you get from Mac OS X’s dock. So shop around and try out those tweaks, pick the one you like.
Conclusion
The tweaks presented here are just tweaks, they try to mimic the look and feel of the original features and tools from Mac. Some might be useful, some might not, it’s all up to you to decide which one works the best for you. If you really want to try out Mac we have guides on how to install a native Hackintosh on your PC or guide on how to install Mac as a VM running inside your existing Windows environment.