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Mac Themes Garden

damien.zone

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Re: Mac Themes Garden

#61

Post by tambourine_man »

antfarm wrote: post #45

Good memories! Back in the days I used Kaleidoscope to style my PowerMac (System 7.5) to look like BeOS, but most importantly, I had an extension that gave me the column browser in the Finder that I had seen on the NeXT Cubes at university. In most courses, I was the only student who used a Mac for homework assignments.

Probably not an extension, but this app?

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.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#62

Post by tambourine_man »

dylan604 wrote: post #44
WillAdams wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that much like minimizing a window to the Dock?

maybe if you squint while tilting your head as you look at it. tabs could be moved around and rearranged. minimizing to the dock has zero control

Also, you could read the window’s title without hovering it. And they would persist across restart, AFAIR.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#63

Post by WillAdams »

dylan604 wrote: post #44
WillAdams wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that much like minimizing a window to the Dock?

maybe if you squint while tilting your head as you look at it. tabs could be moved around and rearranged. minimizing to the dock has zero control

You can drag icons around in the Dock.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#64

Post by reddalo »

red_admiral wrote: post #53

I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange". 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 auth…

Nowadays, between non-native apps (e.g. Electron based ones), webapps and apps that force their own color scheme, it's practically impossible to have a unified theme across all apps.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#65

Post by red_admiral »

reddalo wrote: post #64
red_admiral wrote: post #53

I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange". 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 auth…

Nowadays, between non-native apps (e.g. Electron based ones), webapps and apps that force their own color scheme, it's practically impossible to have a unified theme across all apps.

Indeed. Accessibility? What accessibility?

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#66

Post by rainingmonkey »

red_admiral wrote: post #53

I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange". 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 auth…

KDE still does this quite well

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#67

Post by pocketarc »

red_admiral wrote: post #53

I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange". 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 auth…

It was the same thing with MySpace vs Facebook. Removing user customization may be better for... I don't even know what reason, but it has made all tech feel just a little bit more sterile.

We now praise dark mode as some big achievement, but... we -had- dark mode, before. The Mac Themes Garden has countless "dark mode" themes.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#68

Post by pocketarc »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #23
rhet0rica wrote: post #6

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…

Though they were a step down from Kaleidoscope schemes and appearance manager themes in terms of what they could do, those early OS X themes remain some of the nicest looking, highest fidelity themes on any platform. In particular, those made by Max Rudberg[0] hold a special place in my heart. Modern theming systems have high DPI support which is in theory an upgrade, but the desktop appearance zeitgeist has skewed s…

> 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.

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#69

Post by Eramdam »

rhet0rica wrote: post #6

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…

(Mac Themes Garden author here) Yes, Martha Royer is the one name I kept seeing when recording the themes (and I'm not fully done yet!) and the diversity of her creations was stunning to see. If I remember what I read from README files she left in her archives correctly, she made over 300 of these! (Website currently has ~200, hopefully by EOY I'll be done recording everything).

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

Re: Mac Themes Garden

#70

Post by Eramdam »

Lammy wrote: post #25

I miss this era so much. > 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.

(author of the blog post here) Oh! I didn't know that, do you have guidance on that (i.e: what specific resource types needs editing in ResEdit)? I wouldn't mind getting rid of QuicKeys and going with a native solution haha.
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