I’ve “launched” the Mac Themes Garden! It is a website showcasing more than 3,000 (and counting) Kaleidoscope from the Classic Mac era, ready to be seen, downloaded and explored! Check it out! Oh, and there also is an RSS feed you can subscribe to see themes as they are added/updated!
↫ Damien Erambert
If you’ve spent any time on retrocomputing-related social media channels, you’ve definitely seen the old classic Mac OS themes in your timeline. They are exquisitely beautiful artifacts of a bygone era, and the work Damien Erambert has been doing to make these easily available and shareable, entirely in his free time, is awesome and a massive service to the retrocomputing community.
The process to get these themes loaded up onto the website is actually a lot more involved than you might imagine. It involves a classic Mac OS virtual machine, applying themes, taking screenshots, collecting creator information, and adding everything to a database. This process is mostly manual, and Erambart estimates he’s about halfway done.
If you have classic Mac OS running somewhere, on real hardware or in a virtual machine, you can now easily theme it at your heart’s content.
An era of theming where you could change things. If you wanted flat and ugly, you could do that or if you wanted something gorgeous, you could do that too. Aaah what a great time to be alive.
Today you can barely change anything in gnome, windows or mac without massive suites of software like windowblinds, icon packager or other theme engines. (i think macos does not even have that any more since yosemite)
KDE is still rather themeable and i commend the devs for keeping it that way and not forcing flat and lifeless ui upon us.
Yeah, and it wasn’t just colors, corners and dimensions, You could move around window widgets and make macOS look uncanily like win3.1 or like win95 or literally have Monkeys hanging from the outside of windows constructed out of jungle trees and curvy branches. I love that site. I found my favorite theme from way back when: Onyx. (BeOS was a close second just because I liked the window bar being minimal size). It needs a way to vote for you favorite theme.