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Hacker makes iOS look like OS X Lion

by Elizabeth Fish

Do you happen to be one of those people that really love Mac OS X Lion? Or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, you feel Lion’s a bit too much like iOS?

Well, now it’s more than just similar, because if you happen to have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can now make sure that Lion never leaves your side, with a bit of clever hacking.

Hacker Timothy Elliot wasn’t satisfied with the themes available for jailbroken iPhones, so he created his own. His theme, dubbed Ultimatum, mimics the OS X Lion desktop, and it works with almost any iOS device. This isn’t actually Lion, of course, and while it looks almost identical to the real thing, it’s been slightly scaled down to fit properly on an iPhone’s screen. He created the hack due to Cydia’s lack of good quality themes for the iPhone, naming his creation the Ultimatum theme.

iOS

According to his forum post on Modmyi, he designed every image in Photoshop. The theme has everything you would expect from a decent OS X replica–a working dock and Finder menu, draggable windows, and real iOS-OSX crossover touches, such as a Launchpad and stacks for your iPhone apps. You can also bring up the phone’s status bar with a tap of the “Spotlight” magnifying glass icon in the upper-right corner.

Some of the most impressive touches, though, have to be the shrunken versions of Mission Control and Dashboard, and the lock screen that’s actually more like a Mac login screen.

You’ll have to do a fair amount of tweaking to get it all to work, but it’s not too complicated. You first need to jailbreak your device, of course. Then you’ll need Dreamboard, Modmyi’s free theme creator.

After downloading and installing the necessary components from Cydia, you can download the theme, open Dreamboard and simply install it there to get it running.

Obviously, the usual disclaimers about hacking and jailbreaking your device apply to this hack (do it at your own risk!).

iPhone screen

Also, while Timothy doesn’t explicity state that the theme won’t work on iPad, Technabob notes that, due to his busy schedule, Timothy has not had the time to build landscape mode support into the theme. Let’s hope that’s in a future update, because this theme is pretty awesome and deserves to be on the iPad’s bigger screen.

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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