The spam-filtering POPFile system is powerful, great, and makes dealing with the torrents of spam I personally receive every day much, much easier. But the various “skins” that it ships with look, frankly, not very hot. They remind me of something out of a bad, 1996 web service, nutty descriptive names notwithstanding (“Strawberry Rose”, “Lavish”, the spine-chilling “Outlook” or “Windows”).
I don’t mean to totally diss the developers who have created or contributed to POPFile; I know they are trying to reach a broad audience, and have to make some concessions for the diverse number of platforms POPFile can run on. But, I can be an interface asshole sometimes, and today, instead of carping about how POPFile looks, I tried to do something about it.
So: as a more design-friendly counterpoint to my decidely geeky instructions on how to install POPFile on Mac OS X, here’s a skin I whipped together. I called this skin “os x”, even though it doesn’t really look like an OS X application. The overall OS X feel was what I was trying to accomplish, albeit sans images.
Installation of this (or any other POPFile skin) is simple: it’s a single, lone CSS file. Just download the CSS file (right-click and save to disk), and put it in the skins directory inside your POPFile folder. My POPFile folder is located at /Library/POPFile; yours may be in a different location, depending on where you installed it, or if you’re running a different operating system.
To get POPFile to recognize the new skin, you’ll need to restart POPFile. If you’re running the default settings, clicking here should stop POPFile.
To restart POPFile, either restart your computer (if you’ve installed the StartupItem, or if you’re running POPFile as a Windows service), or launch a terminal window and start it up manually. Again, this really depends on your OS, so I’ll leave this in your hands.
Now click on the Configuration tab, and you should see a “Use Skin” select menu. Select the item called “osx”, and hit apply
Hope you like it. Drop me a line if you have any comments or suggestions. Keep in mind that I spent a grand total of 15 minutes creating this, so it’s not the best design or code ever. But, it’s better for me, and I guess that’s all that mattered at the time.
