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.
Mac Themes Garden
11–20 of 82 posts
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#12I would do anything to have Monkey Paradise on my current computer.
Incredibly I was thinking the exact same thing.
Computers used to fun! I miss the candy iMac theming.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#13It 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…
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.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#14It 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…
That Martha Royer page is amazing.
"I remember mama"
wow!
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
> 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.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#16I was so hyped for a moment when I thought that maybe this was a site for a new MacOS theme program. I miss Kaleidoscope.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#17Back 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.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#18I'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?
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#19As 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!
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#20I'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?
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.