Skinning OSX

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Gillette

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 6, 2005
Messages
1,317
I've seen a lot of screenshots in the Post Your Desktops threads where people have custom skins on OSX (i.e. darker themes, etc)...

How is that done? I can only assume it's 3rd party software, but what is it called and where can I find it? How's the RAM usage? Hard Drive space?

Thanks in advance
 
Most people use Unsanity's Shapeshifter: http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter

It does as good job, but some apps dont like being skinned (I have had problems with bbedit crashing, and some themes dont work aesthetically with firefox for me)

Luckily shapeshifter allows you to turn off themes for individual apps.
 
For like entirely seperately colored themes and stuff, Unsanity's Shapeshifter app is what you need, otherwise check out UNO at gui.interacto.net which will make the theme across OS X more uniform, will make all the windows the same style instead of some being brushed metal, some being aqua and etc..

All of mine are the same darker color as the new iTunes 7 theme, which I like better than the rest.

edit: blah, got beat kinda.
 
I've got a copy of ShapeShifter, but I prefer Aqua anyway. It doesn't really seem to affect the performance of the computer, though. I didn't notice an increase in RAM usage or anything such. Some of the Application Enhancers, FruitMenu being a prime example, can really increase the time it takes to start applications, but once they're up and running everything's fine.
 
Thanks for the info... Sad to see that there are such few free apps for OSX for stuff like this though.
 
Gillette said:
Thanks for the info... Sad to see that there are such few free apps for OSX for stuff like this though.
Click to expand...

Meh, UNO is free, and Unsanity has some free apps like ClearDock and such for changing the opacity/transparency and color of the dock and the triangles that mark opened programs. That's all I use, the theming from Shapeshifter isn't uniform across all apps and requires a restart, just not a very good system.

OS X wasn't made with themes in mind, that's why there is so much money in the UI development from Apple.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Actually, it doesn't require a restart of the machine. It's enough to just restart open applications.
Click to expand...

Funny, mine asked me to restart or at least log out, and it didn't take very well until I had actually done so, spotlight up top was still with the other background etc..
 
Yeah, but if you somehow managed to quit the Spotlight search gizmo, it'd relaunch and display the new theme just fine.
 
Black Morty Rackham said:
Yeah, but if you somehow managed to quit the Spotlight search gizmo, it'd relaunch and display the new theme just fine.
Click to expand...

I suppose so, but I still don't get why that's any easier than just restarting.

I guess my complaint was too broad.

Shapeshifter isn't capable of skinning some applications, I don't know why, I think it has to do with Cocoa vs. Carbon, but either way it wasn't as uniform as UNO was and UNO was free and Shapeshifter was for pay (althought I own it from a deal with a ton of other apps anyway...)

Given the choice, I'd just go with UNO and ClearDock like I do right now.
 
Uno and ClearDock for me...until 10.5 comes out.


SS is OK, but the support is just not there. I think its there with XP skinning becase the stock GUI is so poor that it demands a solution .
 
Yes, I'm the same way. UNO and Cleardock are the only "skinning" I did on OS X. It really is a beautiful OS to start with.

edit: I only use UNO to get rid of brushed metal windows. Everything else stays on default aqua.
 
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