Does anybody remember how OS 8.5 and later had support for "Themes" natively? It only came with the platinum theme, but there were a few others floating around on the web, including a "Techno" theme and a "Gizmo" theme.

Well, I was wondering if these themes will affect the classic environment under OS X? Perhaps someone could create an Aqua theme for the OS 9 classic environment, so it's not so glaringly different. I wonder if this is not what Apple had in mind when it added the unsupported themes feature to OS 8.5? I have yet to recieve my copy of OS X to play around with this.

I'll bet Greg Landwebber is working on something like this now anyway.

[Muahdib]

Kaleidoscope will do this, assuming you have a Mac OS X theme. They are hard to find because Apple jumped hard on these Kaleidoscope themes that resembled the Aqua interface.

I have Kaleidoscope running on my MacOS 9 partition and use it for my classic environment in MacOS X. The classic environment follows whatever Kaleidoscope theme I have running. Hope this helps.

[PerfectlyNormalBeast]

That's great to hear. I'm still a little curious about native themes. I'll play around with it when my system comes.

[cfoster611]

From what i've seen, all the theams that you had in OS 9 still work in the classic enviroment. But only in the classic enviroment, they don't effect the rest of the system.

One of the things people are doing is using a aqua theam in os 9 to match the aqua in the rest of the system.

I don't know if kaleidoscope still works.

[Muahdib]

Kaleidoscope does work. At least it does on my Powerbook.

[Squidgy]

The issue of "Aqua" themes for OS 8.6 - 9.0 involves Apple apparently threatening legal action and this got websites to pull their Aqua themes a few months ago.

I managed to find this link, however it looks lousy, the window buttons are all wrong, and it makes the system slow down.

I have another Aqua theme which I got off of Hotline awhile back. I have no idea who authored it but it looks like the screen shots I've seen of the OS X PB (without the transparency and drop shadows, of course). The frontmost window's title bar is gray, while background windows are blue (I think this is opposite OS X Aqua). It seems stable, although the double scroll bar arrows (double arrows at each end) worry me a bit - I turned them off. Anyway, I'd be happy to email it to anyone interested.

- Ken A.

[This message has been edited by Squidgy (edited 09-20-2000).]

[Squidgy]

Sorry - double posted.

[This message has been edited by Squidgy (edited 09-19-2000).]

[PerfectlyNormalBeast]

Yeah, I found an Aqua theme file for OS 9 that is working great. Combined with Greg Landweber's PowerWindows, it looks pretty close. I'm looking foreward to loading it on OSX PB.

Now if only Epson would release some drivers...