Pimp Your Desktop ‘Leopard’ Style

During WWDC ‘07, when the feature complete version of Leopard was debuted to the masses, many people had mixed feelings about the new desktop. Everything from “it looks like Vista” to “simply beautiful.” The transparent menu bar and the seemingly 3D dock certainly add eye candy to the interface, but by no means does it detract from OS X’s functionality.

If you are a fan of the new desktop, the good news is that you won’t have to wait until October to get your desktop to look like that. You also do not need to have Leopard. I have rounded up a few different ways that you can achieve the “Leopard look” today, in Tiger.

Probably the easiest way to get your entire system to have a Leopard-like looks is to use a ShapeShifter theme. There are probably many more themes than what I have listed here which were inspired by Leopard, but these are the two I have come across:

1.) Illuminous by Levi - This theme was inspired by Leopard and features skins for the Finder, Mail, Safari, and coming soon, iTunes. The theme is currently a ‘lite’ version, lacking certain variants and further improvements.

2.) Liger by spiderlama - This theme was created to mimic the Leopard previews that were shown at WWDC ‘07. The dock is still the same, but the author claims that a mod for the dock will come soon. Other known issues include the menu bar isn’t exactly like Leopards, Exposé doesn’t like it, and the Safari v3 beta doesn’t like themes.

Note: all information about themes is taken directly from InterfaceLIFT. I have not tested either of these themes, so I do not know what to expect if you try them out.

If you do not own ShapeShifter, or are not a big fan, there are other ways to mod your desktop to look like Leopard. This 9 page thread on the MacRumors
Forums pretty much has covered a large chunk of the different applications that could be used to pimp your desktop. One helpful poster has even combined all of the solutions discussed in the thread in one post for easy reference.

Using a combination of the wallpapers and applications found on the MacRumors forums, I was able to create a desktop that works for me (pictured below). It isn’t perfect, nor is it exactly like Leopard, but it looks nice nonetheless.

If you know of other resources people can use to pimp their desktop ‘Leopard’ style, tell us about them in the comments. What works for you?