3 ms·

Can these be installed on modern macs?

by ugh123 1y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
Nope. I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick. Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable. Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.
- Twisell 1y ago
  I applaud your great prose. This metaphor is so powerful and yet viscerally painful!
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Can't claim credit. Got it from some other geek. Can't remember where.
rezmason 1y ago
The short answer is, sadly, no— Apple has the modern macOS UI locked up. The long answer is, if you're willing to disable systemwide security features, you can experiment with modifying the appearance of macOS, but to my knowledge no one has made a real attempt to in a while. Furthermore, the themes on display here fit a paradigm where the UI is a composite of bitmap images, whereas the modern macOS is largely built from vector graphics. But if you vectorize every bitmap in an old theme, so that individual pixels of color are converted to vector graphic rectangles; if you learn how modern macOS builds its appearance; if you make a robust solution and thoroughly test it, so that it will work 100% of the time with every app ever; if you do _all_ of that, you will still be unable to _share_ your creation with most Mac users, because very few of us would disable systemwide security for the sake of running a third party system enhancement. That's one of the major contributors to the success of Mac OS 9 theming: third party system extensions were commonplace, they were the backbone of the ecosystem, and Apple had no mechanism for preventing their use.
- rezmason 1y ago
  I should have mentioned a couple other things: 1. Kaleidoscope (the most common OS 9 theme system extension) runs fine under emulation, so if you just want to _enjoy_ these themes, your best bet is the SheepShaver emulator (in my opinion). 2. Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. And then you can build theme support on top of something like that. But most applications wouldn't use that desktop environment for their own UI.
  - betterThanTexas 1y ago
    > Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. Yea but why use a mac at that point? I don't see anyone on the linux side of things making anything that acknowledges why people use macs in the first place; the entire ecosystem is built to reproduce the IBM PC (...in a unix/like environment). Particularly with its disastrous keybindings and perplexing UI decisions.
    - zapzupnz 1y ago
      The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver. Queue a Mac-to-Linux user to contradict this, and there's plenty of them, but we Mac users are truly the dictionary definition of the sunk cost fallacy in more ways than one.
      - DiscourseFan 1y ago
        I've been burned by ArchLinux too many times before...
      - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
        It doesn’t help matters that desktop environments that try to do things “the mac way” and don’t just mimic macOS superficially (like Pantheon/elementary) don’t exist. Everything is either Win9X-like (KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LxQt, etc) or tablet-like (GNOME). For the most part, to a longtime Mac user switching to Linux feels like switching to a bizarre alternate universe Windows that’s built around the Linux kernel instead of the NT kernel.
perardi 1y ago
As others have commented: no. There was a time, though, long ago… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity …the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming. That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.

Can these be installed on modern macs?

by ugh123 1y ago

Can these be installed on modern macs?

Nope. I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick. Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable. Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.

Twisell 1y ago
I applaud your great prose. This metaphor is so powerful and yet viscerally painful!
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Can't claim credit. Got it from some other geek. Can't remember where.

rezmason 1y ago

The short answer is, sadly, no— Apple has the modern macOS UI locked up. The long answer is, if you're willing to disable systemwide security features, you can experiment with modifying the appearance of macOS, but to my knowledge no one has made a real attempt to in a while. Furthermore, the themes on display here fit a paradigm where the UI is a composite of bitmap images, whereas the modern macOS is largely built from vector graphics. But if you vectorize every bitmap in an old theme, so that individual pixels of color are converted to vector graphic rectangles; if you learn how modern macOS builds its appearance; if you make a robust solution and thoroughly test it, so that it will work 100% of the time with every app ever; if you do _all_ of that, you will still be unable to _share_ your creation with most Mac users, because very few of us would disable systemwide security for the sake of running a third party system enhancement. That's one of the major contributors to the success of Mac OS 9 theming: third party system extensions were commonplace, they were the backbone of the ecosystem, and Apple had no mechanism for preventing their use.

rezmason 1y ago
I should have mentioned a couple other things: 1. Kaleidoscope (the most common OS 9 theme system extension) runs fine under emulation, so if you just want to _enjoy_ these themes, your best bet is the SheepShaver emulator (in my opinion). 2. Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. And then you can build theme support on top of something like that. But most applications wouldn't use that desktop environment for their own UI.
- betterThanTexas 1y ago
  > Nothing's stopping us from creating an alternative desktop environment for the Mac, such as XQuartz. Yea but why use a mac at that point? I don't see anyone on the linux side of things making anything that acknowledges why people use macs in the first place; the entire ecosystem is built to reproduce the IBM PC (...in a unix/like environment). Particularly with its disastrous keybindings and perplexing UI decisions.
  - zapzupnz 1y ago
    The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver. Queue a Mac-to-Linux user to contradict this, and there's plenty of them, but we Mac users are truly the dictionary definition of the sunk cost fallacy in more ways than one.
    - DiscourseFan 1y ago
      I've been burned by ArchLinux too many times before...
    - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      It doesn’t help matters that desktop environments that try to do things “the mac way” and don’t just mimic macOS superficially (like Pantheon/elementary) don’t exist. Everything is either Win9X-like (KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LxQt, etc) or tablet-like (GNOME). For the most part, to a longtime Mac user switching to Linux feels like switching to a bizarre alternate universe Windows that’s built around the Linux kernel instead of the NT kernel.

perardi 1y ago

As others have commented: no. There was a time, though, long ago… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsanity …the brief era of “Haxies”. There was an application called ShapeShifter that allowed for Mac OS X theming. That epoch is long gone, and I can barely even find screenshots. But it existed.