[goMac]

Tuesday, June 1st, 2004, Carpe Stellarem releases second public beta of next generation OS X customization technology -

Carpe Stellarem today made available its second public release of Duality 5 and XTender.

Duality 5 is a major overhaul to Carpe Stellarem's popular theme software. It is now based on a new piece of technology named XTender. XTender allows OS X developers to change the behavior of any application on Mac OS X. With no licensing fees and a standardized platform for development, XTender promises to be the next big step in OS X enhancement.

Duality itself contains many new features. It takes full advantage of XTender, allowing for themes to be applied on a per-user basis. It also makes no permanent changes to your system, and does not require authentication or an Aqua backup.

Instant theme changing drastically reduces time in switching themes. After a theme is applied it is cached for later use. Subsequent changes using that theme are instantly applied. Duality can change themes many times faster than competing theme changers.

Duality's new interface simplifies theme management. Themes may now have their own unique icons. Additionally, themes may have their own descriptions, apart from the ones for each variation. The description is easily seen by the user, displayed next to the name of the theme.

XScheme support has been greatly enhanced. The XScheme format for themes now contains a new compression scheme, enabling XScheme's nearly half the size of comparable themes in the guiKit format. Duality 5 can now also import themes from the guiKit format.

More information and downloads are available at:
http://www.carpestellarem.com/Produc.../Duality5Beta/

Carpe Stellarem is a leading provider of server software for Mac OS X. StellarRADIUS is the first rate solution for securing large Airport networks. The popular StellarDNS software provides a native OS X Cocoa GUI for DNS configuration.

In 2003 Carpe Stellarem merged with Conundrum Software, makers of the popular theme changing software, Duality. Using our experience in creating innovative server solutions for Mac OS X, Carpe Stellarem is creating revolutionary enhancement utilities for Mac OS X.

[Adramelech]

My little review:
+ability to turn windows shade/shadow on/off
- incompatible with guikit's (you can convert them with GuiKitty, but that also takes time)
- needs longer to apply themes than shapeshifter
- preview didn't work

Although it has some good ideas, you can't deny that it is still a beta version.

[wibs]

Originally posted by Adramelech:
Although it has some good ideas, you can't deny that it is still a beta version.

I don't think he ever did.

For myself, I'm having a bit of trouble with it. AquaPro installed without a hitch, both variants of Good Grey could be applied but some elements were missing, and ProLCD only loaded 1 variant and it wouldn't apply.

I don't want to jump all over it, but I gave it a good 20 minutes of fiddling (even tried restarting after a simple logout didn't seem to make everything work). I really don't see much that's different from the first public beta, or maybe time has just made me forget the things that really didn't go well.

I'll reserve judgement until I see how it handles themes in xscheme format, but for now I'm still underwhelmed.

There's also a bit of FUD going on here. (definition for those unfamiliar with the term)

Originally posted by goMac:
Instant theme changing drastically reduces time in switching themes.

At first this got me excited (did they find a way to copy the Aqua/Graphite switching?), but I found out it just meant that theme applying was faster than what we're used to with ShapeShifter. Which is good, except that as far as I could tell no app skins were being installed, and those are what dramatically increase load time in ShapeShifter, so comparing the loading time of a guikit in ShapeShifter with no appskins to a guikit in Duality might as well be exactly the same.

Again, I want to see how it handles xschemes before really forming an opinion, but I have to make do with what's available I guess. I don't really see anything new that's positive in this release, but something old is that I prefer the theme changing interface to shapeshifter's. I'm not looking forward to scrolling through a long list of themes that have their own descriptions and icons in the list, though =-\.

[Frisbee]

Imported the guiKit file of my theme. Applied. My finder modifications are not present, the menu extras were disabled, and a lot of my text color mods are gone. Other than that... It works. Glad to see you're going to incorporate windowshade and window shadows into the prefpane. I personally think Unsanity should have done this with Shapeshifter ages ago.

[Ji Eun]

I think it looks super-promising. The not-yet-implemented features under 'window behavior' consolidate some useful freeware and shareware apps into one neat pane, and switching between themes is thus far much faster than Shapeshifter. Hopefully it will remain this speedy even as the bugs are ironed out.

As mentioned, the UI is really smooth-looking and well-integrated, but mousing between left and right sides (theme selection by scrolling on the left, theme variants in the dropdown menu on the right) might be a pain ultimately for us massive theme collectors. Shapeshifter's tree directory might be the best approach to theme/variant browsing and sorting.

The audio feedback is a nice touch, too. And guikit integration is pretty painless and rather impresseive in my opinion. Can't wait to mess around with your next beta. Good work

[jokell82]

I've had a few issues with importing GUIKits. SimpleX had a problem with the menu bar (aqua windows not in focus were missing images), and Aluminum Alloy didn't have the correct finder window buttons.

Other than that I'm very impressed. Can't wait for a final version.

Edit - Oh, and it didn't import the metal skin from SimpleX either.

[fireside]

Originally posted by Adramelech:
- preview didn't work

great deduction sherlock. did you figure that out all by yourself or did you read it on the website genius?


for all of those crazies complaining about how their guiKits don't work why don't you think about it. Duality is providing a workaround to get the guiKits to work, don't expect them to be all perfect. yell at Unsanity, not Carpe.

[fireside]

if your going to complain about the speed of switching, complain by using the Milk that was supplied. It takes as long as it would with ShapeShifter the first time, but afterwards its fast. like, really fast.

ps: the progress bar still doesn't work Colin :/

edit: but only in aqua.

[servo]

Originally posted by fireside:
for all of those crazies complaining about how their guiKits don't work why don't you think about it. Duality is providing a workaround to get the guiKits to work, don't expect them to be all perfect. yell at Unsanity, not Carpe.

Damn you Unsanity! Why won't your guikitty product help your guikits to work with someone else's products!

Honestly, if the Duality people want others to try their product they need to get one or two themes available made for their product. So they can put their best foot forward as it were. Don't just say "Hey, look at our great product! We have no themes but you can convert this other format and it may work sort of."

[fireside]

Originally posted by servo:
Damn you Unsanity! Why won't your guikitty product help your guikits to work with someone else's products!

Honestly, if the Duality people want others to try their product they need to get one or two themes available made for their product. So they can put their best foot forward as it were. Don't just say "Hey, look at our great product! We have no themes but you can convert this other format and it may work sort of."

HEY. GUESS WHAT? ON THE DUALITY WEBSITE, THERES A LINK FOR A .XSCHEME OF MILK. OMG!


ps: it takes forever and i have to force quit when importing a .dlta. makes no sense, since, you know, dlta is your format

[goMac]

There are a few problems with distributing themes:

1) Themes are stored in the user's home folder. The installer does not yet support writing to your home folder, although this is pretty easy to fix.
2) We need permission from theme creators to redistribute themes, this gets especially sticky in since they would not be distributed in GuiKit but rather XScheme (or technically Duality's archive of loaded XScheme's)
3) Duality stores themes as a file. The installer could overwrite this file with bundled themes, but it would delete all your old themes. The best solution to this will be to implement a folder of themes that Duality will load in at launch, much like Palm Desktop.

However, we did include a link to Milk in XScheme format on the beta web page. We are certainly looking at bundling themes. The issues above should be resolved in the next beta.

For all of you that are feature hungry we had to disable some features for this public beta (although some of our beta testers got a sneak peak at them). I'm re-enabling them for the next public beta.

[Link]

http://www.talesmud.com/duality.jpg

I had a little problem with the debug code

edit Damnit it's too wide.

[Link]

Originally posted by servo:
Damn you Unsanity! Why won't your guikitty product help your guikits to work with someone else's products!

Honestly, if the Duality people want others to try their product they need to get one or two themes available made for their product. So they can put their best foot forward as it were. Don't just say "Hey, look at our great product! We have no themes but you can convert this other format and it may work sort of."

There ARE a few test themes, and because there's sooo few xscheme themes they hacked in backwards compatibility so you could try out stuff.

I'm sure the backwards compatibility will get better with time This IS a beta and it's not nearly as far about as I thought it would be (but hey *(#@$& happens sometimes)