[Miniryu]

Does anyone know the easiest method to create their own appearance theme? As a matter of fact, how can you make one period? There is an over abundance of Kaleidoscope schemes and not enough OS themes. I only have 64 megs of ram and and Kaleidoscope limits me. The schemes have a tendancy to be too guady as well. On the other hand, most of the themes are poorly done or unoriginal. We need to somehow promote appearance themes.

[dodita]

yeah, all themes out there are poor right ? http://www.litestep.net for Wintel should make Mac owners jealous.

[jog]

Miniryu is right - what happened to Appearance after Gizmo, Techno and Drawing Board?

[spicyjeff]

The whole theme idea was killed by Apple. They left the functionality in the OS but pulled their plans to supply themes.

[wulf]

You might like to check out:
http://www.macthemes.org/

...which is dedicated to developing OS themes (ie. not Kaleidoscope).

Personally, I agree that most user-designed themes are gaudy and unusable. Mainly because they use a lot of colour, and it is usually incredibly distracting to have unimportant functional elements of your windows competing for your attention with the content of the windows (a real-world example of "style over substance").

Platinum - and older MacOS themes - work so well because they are basically monochrome. With Platinum you can use an accent colour*, but a single colour will not clash with other shades of itself, or with greys...

[*OK it's actually two accent colours, but I always find they work best if they complement each other, eg. light blue, dark blue...]

In fact, even Aqua is mostly monochrome. Yes it has little coloured buttons, and blue accents (just like Platinum has accents), but essentially it's mostly black/grey/white...

less is more and all that =)

-Wulf