71–80 of 82 posts
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.
I remember theming my mac and windows machines as a kid! Somehow all we're left with is corporate sponsored blandness and a user base who does not care about having fun with what they own, they just want a basic tool to browse the web. (and I guess ownership is much more muddied now anyway)
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
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> 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…
The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver. 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 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.
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...
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(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.
Here you go – I took a look on a Mac OS 9 VM, and the System suitcase is what you want; MENU resources; resource ID -16489 on here but expect that to vary by version. Select the menu item you want and you can set a “CMD Key” in the bottom right corner https://i.imgur.com/wcqQ27j.png 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…
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 on…
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.)
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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.
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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?
Accessibility looks nowadays like 1984 accessibility. Gray on gray, tiny buttons, tiny scrollbars, no text description, no distinction of elements.
