Mac Themes Garden

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.

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.

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

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.

Seems like somebody forgot to read the pamphlet[1].

1.: https://stopthemingmy.app/