I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick.
Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable.
Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.
The long answer is, if you're willing to disable systemwide security features, you can experiment with modifying the appearance of macOS, but to my knowledge no one has made a real attempt to in a while. Furthermore, the themes on display here fit a paradigm where the UI is a composite of bitmap images, whereas the modern macOS is largely built from vector graphics.
But if you vectorize every bitmap in an old theme, so that individual pixels of color are converted to vector graphic rectangles; if you learn how modern macOS builds its appearance; if you make a robust solution and thoroughly test it, so that it will work 100% of the time with every app ever; if you do _all_ of that, you will still be unable to _share_ your creation with most Mac users, because very few of us would disable systemwide security for the sake of running a third party system enhancement.
That's one of the major contributors to the success of Mac OS 9 theming: third party system extensions were commonplace, they were the backbone of the ecosystem, and Apple had no mechanism for preventing their use.
1. Kaleidoscope (the most common OS 9 theme system extension) runs fine under emulation, so if you just want to _enjoy_ these themes, your best bet is the SheepShaver emulator (in my opinion).
2. Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. And then you can build theme support on top of something like that. But most applications wouldn't use that desktop environment for their own UI.
Yea but why use a mac at that point? I don't see anyone on the linux side of things making anything that acknowledges why people use macs in the first place; the entire ecosystem is built to reproduce the IBM PC (...in a unix/like environment). Particularly with its disastrous keybindings and perplexing UI decisions.
Queue a Mac-to-Linux user to contradict this, and there's plenty of them, but we Mac users are truly the dictionary definition of the sunk cost fallacy in more ways than one.
This has been my own observation as well. Although I do have to say, System76's COSMIC DE has been the first one that is actually making me consider going to Linux full time since I've switched to Mac from it. macOS has only been continuing to annoy me more and more lately.
The problem for me is hardware. Asahi isn't there yet, and I'm not giving up my M4 Pro MBP. There's no other laptop on the market that checks all the same boxes. But for now, I've just bypassed the mac's weak points by using Aerospace, and if I'm honest with myself I don't want to give up the ecosystem integration either.
I ask myself that with increasing frequency. Looking at all the Linux options feels like wandering through Akihabara, but one day the macOS that remains will be so unlike the macOS I enjoyed, that I'll jump the fence.
Anyway, if someone does make a new Mac desktop environment, it'd probably be for fun more than anything. Or a Terry Davis scenario.
There was a time, though, long ago…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity
…the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming.
That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.
EDIT: actually it looks like this is significantly older than that. I definitely didn't know enough to theme OS 9 when it was my main driver.
Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.
I was lurking around the equivalent Windows community in roughly the same era (well, a couple of years later) and it was nothing like this. Far fewer people had the patience for WindowBlinds (the Kaleidoscope equivalent) or deep OS modding, and they tended to all be the same few types of person with more-or-less the same tastes—mostly the kind of guy who thought that an RGB fan in a brushed aluminum tower PC was the height of self-expression. (Basic Windows Plus themes were way more primitive than what was possible with the right tools.) It's astonishing to see what looks like the entirety of the pre-dot-com-crash web's wonderful, weird diversity reproduced in perfect miniature over in the Mac space.
Although I keep scrolling, and I haven't found a legit NeXT theme yet. There are a few that get close but nothing with the actual UI assets. Maybe this is an opportunity...
EDIT: For those curious, here's roughly what themes on OS X looked like in the 2000s: https://macgui.com/downloads/?cat_id=10
"I remember mama"
wow!
Also, special mentions for obscure GUI clones:
- Xerox Star: https://macthemes.garden/themes/ede837fa5df1-xerox-star/
- QNX: https://macthemes.garden/themes/c46eae6cd818-mac-qnx/
- Solaris CDE: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8ba34a581676-macsolaris/
- the classic X Athena widgets: https://macthemes.garden/themes/533452549350-xlook-athenaxlo...
- Rhapsody, because obviously: https://macthemes.garden/themes/b0c635d1faf0-rhapsody-k2/
Modern theming systems have high DPI support which is in theory an upgrade, but the desktop appearance zeitgeist has skewed so flat and dull that the extra pixels make no material difference.
Yeah, this is definitely one of the saddest things about modern UI fashion. We have the highest-resolution, highest-DPI, cleanest-looking extra-bright, extra-deep-black HDR OLED screens, and... we've got flatter UI than ever, UI that would've looked dull even on a 90s CRT.
Actual Mackintosh design included!
There are quite a few NeXT-inspired ones but I can't judge if they use the actual assets or not https://macthemes.garden/search/?q=next&page=1
Wayback of her themes page, which repeats the 300+ number and says they're only available on CD-ROM now (as of 2006): https://web.archive.org/web/20060502073323/http://www.gate.n...
Rate My Professor page (last review in 2011, seems a bit less enthusiastic than the earlier ones): https://www.ratemyprofessors.com/professor/554604
FIU Math & Stats Dept. lists her as retired faculty: https://case.fiu.edu/mathstat/directory/retired-faculty/
Perhaps you might consider reaching out to her and asking her for an updated collection. :)
As for my obsession with NeXT themes, I think I'll stick with Scott Naness's work, although Leo Prieto's checkbox and radio button are definitely more authentic. (The original controls are simply too large to fit in the available space, but Scott is the only one to get the window frames right.)
2. This is targeted at distro maintainers, not end users.
Now of course Classic Mac OS was a security nightmare but I wish that a modern OS would try to replicate that incredible level of flexibility in a more secure manner. Will it be difficult? Sure, but I don’t think it’s impossible. I believe that something resembling the “app extension” architecture employed by modern macOS which runs extensions as sandboxed processes which are given access to special APIs would be a good starting point.
OTOH, yes, Gnome's blandnes sucks a lot. With Plasma and a bit less, XFCE, you can do far more with a desktop, even Budgie it's far better than Gnome3.
And I miss tons of GTK2 themes from its era. Bluecurve looked better than everything from today. OSX, Windows, Haiku, whatever. That theme looked colourful, positive and extremely usable, with proper and visible menues, buttons, scrollbars and so. Nowaday both OSX, GTK4 with Adwaita (far less with Zukitre) and Windows are a nightmare on usability.
Once you disable the overlay scrollbars under GTK4 and force the GTK theme to Zukitre (once installed) at /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh (a line with 'export GTK_THEME=Zukitre'), most of the dumb choices from Red Hat/FreeDesktop go away for the average Joe user.
Zukitre has gray widgets (not full white, damn UI pseudo-designers), usable buttons and proper scrollbars (again, disable the overlay settings for GTK). And, for sure, COLOR CONTRAST, damn it.
Mac System 7 did it fine; so did Platinum under Mac OS 8-9. Neutral gray colors, usable widgets. Ditto with OSX, but the stripped bars sucked at first, yet Tiger and Snow Leopard look perfectly usable. The same with Windows 95, even Windows XP and partially 7. Windows 10 is unusable with flat widgets with no contrasts and hints for Windows. Windows 11 it's even worse. Current MacOS, with the same overlay scrollbars and lack of contrast it's a huge downgrade from Snow Leopard.
Even the old Motif/FVWM under Unix had a nightmarish usability for the non-CS student, but it had 3D widgets on Motif/Athena (Xaw3D) and grabable window borders. Go try resizing a window under Gnome3 or Windows 10. Or moving a window at a quick glance.
UI designers should stop following trends and just give up on merging tablets and desktops. It doesn't work.
The nolstalgia is real. Thanks for your hard work!
> Turns out this action didn't have a keyboard shortcut until Mac OS X? Didn't know that!
Edit your Finder and/or System with ResEdit and you can add or change any keyboard shortcuts you want.
Don't do this on the running System suitcase. ResEdit will warn you about this too. Make a backup copy, make your changes to the backup copy, then boot from some other blessed System Folder (install CD is fine) and swap them out.
The mindset where you can edit anything on everything is what we truly lost when we lost the Classic Mac OS. These themes are merely one embodiment of that mindset. It's just Resources all the way down; Any user-facing String, any UI graphics, any icons, any cursors, any sounds, any menus, any window definitions, any dialogs. ResEdit can even be extended to support editing custom (non-Apple) Resource types, to say nothing of the more powerful third-party Resource editors like Resourcerer.
Applications' code even lived in `CODE` resources in the original 68k days before the era of PowerPC and Code Fragment Manager moved that stuff to the Data Fork. A classic 68k-only Application would be a 0-byte file if one copied it to a PC improperly and discarded the Resource Fork. It's literally all Resources and that's so cool!
Here's Apple's ResEdit Reference if you need it: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/ma...
Relevant Folklore: https://www.folklore.org/The_Grand_Unified_Model.html
Relevant Inside Macintosh: https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/pdf/Inside_Macintosh_Volum... (warning: massive PDF)
I highly highly recommend you and anybody else interested in Classic Mac OS spend some time with David Pogue's excellent Macworld Mac Secrets 5th Edition: https://archive.org/details/mac_Macworld_Mac_Secrets_5th_Edi... (there's a 6th edition that covers early Mac OS X topics, but that just muddies the water)
edit: and keep your unmodified System suitcase backup somewhere besides the System Folder to ensure the Startup Disk control panel can't “bless” the unmodified one instead of the edited one. You can tell which suitcase is “blessed” because it will have the “Picasso” Mac OS face laid on top of the regular suitcase icon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_folder#Location_and_%22...
https://www.macintoshrepository.org/1003-greg-s-browser
Greg Landweber was a huge contributor to the Mac customization scene at that time. I’d love to know more about his work, but never could find much online.
I can't disagree more.
Consumers haven't requested this, and up until this ability was taken away people did theme their XP, etc.
There weren't many options without hacking but changing the XP blue bar to silver or green regularly happened. People are just taught to accept that this is how it is now though.
I took my old white polycarbonate MacBook to the Apple store a few years back to get a new battery. I had a few people ask me about it, and even one lady asked at the genius bar whether she could get a MacBook in a colour. People pick aluminium chassis because the alternative is cheap gray, fake metal chassis. I miss the era of colourful iMacs and I think other people do too, and not just geeks.
You could even, if it didn't come by default already, have the active title bar in a different color.
Maybe 99% of people didn't use this. Maybe they hired an authoritarian at GNOME to make the adwaita "one theme to rule them all". But it used to feel like I the style choices for my own computer's gui belonged more to me as a user.
Often, that meant picking a theme that I liked, from the very active theme-design community (the garden lists more than 3000 themes, although I'm not a mac person) and then just tweaking a color here or there.
Accessibility looks nowadays like 1984 accessibility. Gray on gray, tiny buttons, tiny scrollbars, no text description, no distinction of elements.
We now praise dark mode as some big achievement, but... we -had- dark mode, before. The Mac Themes Garden has countless "dark mode" themes.
milesskorpen•10mo ago