[HN Gopher] Mac Themes Garden
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Mac Themes Garden
Author : speckx
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-05-07 19:44 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (damien.zone)
(TXT) w3m dump (damien.zone)
| milesskorpen wrote:
| Such a blast from the past. Had so much fun with these back in
| the day, along with Winamp themes. I can't tell if I've aged or
| tech has aged such that this kind of thing isn't really around
| any more. Probably both.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Can these be installed on modern macs?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Nope.
|
| 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.
| rezmason wrote:
| The short answer is, sadly, no-- Apple has the modern macOS UI
| locked up.
|
| 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.
| rezmason wrote:
| I should have mentioned a couple other things:
|
| 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.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| > Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative
| desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz.
|
| 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.
| betterThanTexas wrote:
| I didn't have root access to my family computer during this era,
| and I will forever be angry at apple for not allowing us to
| continue this fun until today.
|
| 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.
| bix6 wrote:
| I would do anything to have Monkey Paradise on my current
| computer.
| cflewis wrote:
| Incredibly I was thinking the exact same thing.
|
| Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.
| rhet0rica wrote:
| It blows my mind how diverse these are, and how diverse their
| creators were. One single artist, Martha Royer, made over two
| hundred themes: https://macthemes.garden/authors/martha-royer/
| (They're not all _amazing_ in quality, but the sheer
| industriousness is staggering.)
|
| 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
| mr_sturd wrote:
| I remember trying to make my own on Windows XP. If I remember
| correctly, the theme files could be opened with an application
| which extracted resources from .exe and .dll files.
| Affric wrote:
| That Martha Royer page is amazing.
|
| "I remember mama"
|
| wow!
| sprash wrote:
| Seems like somebody forgot to read the pamphlet[1].
|
| 1.: https://stopthemingmy.app/
| WillAdams wrote:
| There was one theme, which had a feature which I _really_ wish
| had become a standard --- the title bar collapsing down to the
| size of the text when "window-shaded" by double-clicking --- I
| never liked that feature until that theme came along, and it is
| about the only thing about Mac OS 9 and earlier that I miss.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I was so hyped for a moment when I thought that maybe this was a
| site for a new MacOS theme program. I miss Kaleidoscope.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Back in the day, Kaleidoscope schemes and later appearance
| manager themes were one of my favorite things about owning a
| computer. Combined with Classic Mac OS extensions it seemed like
| there was nothing you couldn't do when it came to customization.
| Even modern desktop Linux, as vaunted as it is for its
| customizability, struggles to compare.
|
| 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.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| I'd totally pay to have these (especially a good vanilla Mac OS
| 8/9 theme) in a usable from on a Linux box today. I liked them
| then, and I'd still like to have them now. Anyone want to make
| one that works on Plasma/GTK and take my money?
| compton93 wrote:
| A guy on reddit was working on one named PrismWM but he went
| AWOL. There was a mac os 9 lookandfeel in JDK 1.1 that could be
| updated to a modern version of Java as well.
| davidmurphy wrote:
| As a lifelong Mac geek (I work for the Computer History Museum,
| where I organized our Macintosh 40th Anniversary and Lisa 40th
| events), I just want to say love this :)
|
| The nolstalgia is real. Thanks for your hard work!
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