[Mighty_Mike_T]

Hi, folks,

For sheer perverse pleasure, I'm attempting to apply a theme without the benefit of Shapeshifter. If nothing else, this means that I won't have to enable Shapeshifter for every user account to get a uniform themed interface.

I used Guikitty to decompile the guikit file, and found an Extras.rsrc file. Is this a "full" file, i.e., one with all of the ID #'s? Can I just swap this file with the pre-existing 10.4.1 Extras.rsrc file?

Thanks for any light you can shed...

Mike

[smeger]

No, it's not a full file. You'll need to use ShapeShifter at least once to apply the theme. ShapeShifter gets a 15 day trial period every time it's updated.

Once you've done so, you have three choices - you can either use ThemePark (free, but nags until you register) to import the applied theme, and then export a full DLTA. Or, dig into ~/Library/Caches/ShapeShifter/Mods and extract the full Extras.rsrc file from there. Or, use a resource management program to overlay all of the extracted resources on top of a copy of your Aqua Extras.rsrc file.

Note of course that a) I don't recommend this, b) there's a ton of stuff that won't be themed properly and c) this is most definitely not something that I recommend doing. The more different from Aqua your theme is, the less likely you are to be pleased with the results. And you'll be digging around in /System, which means that if you screw something up, you've got an unbootable Mac. Be very careful.

[Kevin]

Originally Posted by smeger

And you'll be digging around in /System, which means that if you screw something up, you've got an unbootable Mac. Be very careful.

Just make sure you have a proper Extras.rsrc and you will have no worries.

It isn't as scary as that.

[Mighty_Mike_T]

Thanks for the feedback. I decided to take the easy way out and just installed Shapeshifter. I don't mind poking around, but I'd rather not walk that far on the wild side.

[llee]

I have some information about this:

Custom Theme Installer

There's an applescript that takes the guikitty Extras.rsrc and adds the missing parts from your currently installed Extras.rsrc to make a working version. There's another script that installs the working version for you (along with the Finder.rsrc if you have that, too). In Tiger, there's a change in the authentication method for accessing root stuff like the Extras.rsrc, and I haven't updated the script yet, but if you care to, it's easy. Just replace every occurrence of "sudo" except for the one in "sudo -k" with "perl -Ue '$< = $>; system(@ARGV)' sudo". I'll do it eventually, so be sure I haven't already done it by the time you see this.

One more thing: if you do more than one replacement of the Extras.rsrc file using the script that installs your working version, clear any Extras.rsrc file out of your trash first. That's where the installing script puts your current one, and trying to overwrite the current one that already exists in the trash will cause the script to hang.