[ravedog]

this is not a post to incite a flame war or even to ask how many people like or use shapeshifter to theme their mac. What it is, is more to ask of all theming is going towards the ShapeShifter method. For personal reasons, I do not want to use APE or ShapeShifter. Call it superstition or whatever, but I have my reasons.

Does that mean that there will be no other way to theme the Mac? It seems that most designers are heading towards the .guikit method or is someone going to find a way to use the guiukits without having to run software embedded at the system level like an APE app.

Please, again, I dont want to know how successful you are with APE and SS... i have read the forums extensively... its about alternatives to this trend.

Some of the real nice themes of late are only guikit avail.

[wibs]

guiKit is the present when it comes to theming. There really is no other alternative. Sure, I make DLTA versions of my themes available, but the downloads rarely top a couple hundred - which is more than none, so I still post them, but it's really close to nothing in the big picture.

In the future, I see only two things changing.

1) guiKit will continue to get better
2) XTender may (or may not) be successful

I'm not going to bet either way on XTender, but it does have quite a mountain to climb to even match ShapeShifter. Add that to people already having paid for ShapeShifter, XTender is going to need do much more than just match it in order to get any switches. Keeping in mind point 1, I really see no reason for guiKit to disappear anytime soon (other than something unforseen, like the entire unsanity team being in one place at one time and a bus crashes into them).

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't see a reason why the future won't have guiKit/ShapeShifter at its center. There are people like you who do not want to install APE, but there are more than enough who do to virtually guarantee its continued success.

[NetworkShadow]

Just so you know 'Xtender' the ShapShifter "alternative" (we'll see, I'm far from sold yet.) will work on the same principals of APE and ShapeShifter, so there's really no alternative way of changing themes other than the, (dead since Panther) resource swapping method that was far more risky to use than APE. In fact APE really is near 100% safe, and can be un-installed or disabled if something does go wrong.

A little something to read

[cube3]

I'm pretty much sold on SS at the moment, all my themes will be created for it.

[smeger]

There's a pretty simple reason why the future of theming OS X involves something like APE. Theming involves either changing files, which limits you to the constraints of Aqua, or dynamically changing behavior, which doesn't, but which does requires APE or something similar.

(I was going to talk about my coding practices when writing APE modules, but it's only appealing to fellow programmer geeks, so I'll skip it and just say I put a lot of effort into doing things safely.)

[ravedog]

all excellent and well thoughtout responses... 2 things:

1) that puts a LOT of pressure on the developers of SS to monitor every lil change apple makes to the core OS... if it breaks, havoc could be wrecked....

2) back to my argument about using the APE method, while many have success with APE, i prol could serve up as many who haven't... (i cant tell u the the number of crashes that disappeared after uninstalling APE..

its a shame too - the effort that unsanity puts into its soft is amazing the products are def WOW! but i cant afford the instability in my case about such things... with prol no basis in hard fact...


on a side note - unsanity should show apple how many people actually want these features and sell the technology to apple (anyone remember SuperClock???)

thanx for all the suportive replies...

wow, im a junior member... been lurking too long.

[smeger]

Originally posted by ravedog:
1) that puts a LOT of pressure on the developers of SS to monitor every lil change apple makes to the core OS... if it breaks, havoc could be wrecked....

Somewhat true, somewhat not. ShapeShifter includes functionality to cleanly handle OS updates and is designed to fail gracefully if the OS updates to something I didn't expect. While it's true that there are probably failure points I didn't anticipate, they'd probably be sweeping enough to hose lots of other stuff too.

That said, I keep a pretty frickin' solid eye on OS updates to make sure they're not breaking anything. But this is something all devs do, not just me.

2) back to my argument about using the APE method, while many have success with APE, i prol could serve up as many who haven't... (i cant tell u the the number of crashes that disappeared after uninstalling APE..

Dunno if you've seen this - if you haven't, you may want to check it out. There are a lot of situations in which installing APE can bring out existing lurking instabilities.

I won't say APE and ShapeShifter are perfect (although I'm not aware of any crashers). But I work damned hard to make sure everything is rock stable and in my experience, it has been.

See also this recent poll. It's a small sample size, but the trend seems pretty clear.

[goMac]

I'll just speak for myself... Carpe Stellarem gets betas from Apple so we always have a compatible version out before the actual OS update. We may not note it for NDA reasons, but we'll patch before the OS arrives.

[quandarry]

mostly i still use metamorphx to flip extras rsrc's in and out and themechanger to

change the whole shabang.

i use shapeshifter just to check out new releases. ss is not really needed in my case.

i think we may be in for a big surprise in tiger 10.4 wwdc preview later this month.

[wibs]

Originally posted by quandarry:
i think we may be in for a big surprise in tiger 10.4 wwdc preview later this month.

I don't know about that. OS X's gui has been in refinement mode (stripes gradually toned down, buttons less reflective, etc). Now that Panther has a good mix of subtlety with aqua blue, I'd be surprised if they threw that away and came out with something completely different.

I am expecting a bit of an overhaul to the Finder, but beyond that I'll be very surprised if there are massive changes.

[Sage]

Originally posted by quandarry:
mostly i still use metamorphx to flip extras rsrc's [...]

Ooh, good luck with that – That silly thing hosed my system badly, twice (should've learned my lesson the first time, the dork I am).

[digitaljames]

I'd like to see a "Themepark" for Konfabulator....auto code generation and graphic element placement.

[SitHHtiS™]

Originally posted by digitaljames:
I'd like to see a "Themepark" for Konfabulator....auto code generation and graphic element placement.

Have you seen this...........




Widget Maker

[digitaljames]

Originally posted by SitHHtiS™:
Have you seen this...........


Widget Maker

"Users still have to write the javascript needed to provide the widget's functionality."

[SitHHtiS™]

Originally posted by digitaljames:
"Users still have to write the javascript needed to provide the widget's functionality."

Well, Of course.

There are numerous books and tutorials available for this. JScript isn't that tough to learn.

This widget is extremely useful in the construction of a widget however, the developer must define what they want the widget to do.

[fireside]

Originally posted by Sage:
Ooh, good luck with that – That silly thing hosed my system badly, twice (should've learned my lesson the first time, the dork I am).

if you know the theme is made for your OS version there should be no problems with manual resource changing.

[fireside]

Originally posted by digitaljames:
"Users still have to write the javascript needed to provide the widget's functionality."

IMO its still pretty retarded if you ask me to release something like that as a widget.