The Mac’s quite famous for refined, simple and highly usable design. While some of the design cues found in the original Mac may still work just as well today as they did back in 1984, the single menubar doesn’t. Having a single, unified menubar back when no one had 27″ iMacs or dual-screen desktops was probably a logical, zen-inspired approach. Nowadays, the single menubar can be an annoyance. As for remembering shortcuts, well, that isn’t always practical for apps used infrequently.

Following my foray into building a Hackintosh Pro earlier this year, here’s a short update plus additional tips to help you folks build one yourself. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s my earlier post on building my rig using a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 motherboard. **INSTALLING SNOW LEOPARD ** The good thing is that Snow Leopard works flawlessly with the build. An even better thing is that digital_dreamer over at InsanelyMac has updated his Standard Retail DVD Install script and has made it Snow Leopard compatible.

A Snow Leopard follow up to this post is here. A couple of months ago I built a quad-core Mac Pro equivalent “Hackintosh” based on Intel’s X58 and Core i7. All components were selected for their compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard. My goal was to build as close a Mac Pro clone as possible using off the shelf parts, with the ability to do Apple Software Updates on a retail, unmodified OS X installation as you would with a real Mac.