Doc Searls had an interesting link to a piece by Andrew Orlowski, who publicly abandoned OS X. It was an interesting read but what caught my attention was the following.

5. When Metaphors Roamed The Earth: Docks aren't necessarily evil. The popularity of the NeXT-alike shell WinSTEP on Windows, and the WindowMaker window manager on Linux shows that NeXT's original UI endures. It's a nice way to organise things.

Off to WinSTEP.

Winstep Software Technologies develops a suite of award winning, skinnable applications for the Windows 32-bit environment. The purpose of this groundbreaking suite is to provide usability enhancements to the standard Explorer shell while at the same time providing the user with unlimited flexibility. All Winstep applications are compatible with Win9x, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP.

It looked cool and I downloaded it. It's kind of nice having an alternative to how Microsoft wants you to organize things. There are a lot of ways to customize this package. It's sucking up some time learning it but I'm liking it.

First I dumped Outlook Express for Eudora, then IE was replaced by Opera. Now I'm moving away from the how Bill wants me to use my desktop. I hope he doesn't mind.