TwitterThe Price Of Theming
November 19th, 2003
“Erik’s”:http://nslog.com “Question Of The Day (QOTD)”:http://nslog.com/archives/2003/11/18/qotd_theming.php yesterday was “Do you like and use theming?“. In a nutshell, yes.
Way back in the OS 8/9 days I used a program called “Kaleidoscope”:http://www.kaleidoscope.net/ to perform theme changing duties. I’d even go so far to changing my system appearance by using ResEdit to hack the Finder and change various resource graphics and the menu shortcuts (don’t tell Erik). I’m pretty computer saavy and being a programmer I don’t have much trouble finding my way out of trouble with anything I may break along the way. I’d also like to point out that back then Apple built in the ability to change the interface of the OS through the Appearance control panel. For some reason or another this feature wasn’t removed, but the actual themes that they were to provide where removed. One was sort of a “kid” OS theme and another was a paper type theme, pretty cool looking.
With the advent of OS X, theming seemed to be a thing of the past as the OS became very foreign by changing everything known about the Mac. Sure enough though, the art of theming would not die at the hands of OS X and several developers created new tools to hack themes into the Aqua UI. These tools were very primative to start, providing huge warnings that irreplacable damage to the OS could occur if you didn’t follow their explicit instructions. The biggest downside of these themers were that they replaced the actual core OS UI files with those of the theme and if something went wrong you wouldn’t have a functional computer except from the command line (no big deal for me) :). Most of these tools were free and the themes themselves were also free.
Yesterday, well known “haxie” (feature enhancements) developer “Unsanity”:http://www.unsanity.com released the next evolution of theming for OS X. Dubbed “ShapeShifter”:http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shapeshifter/, their $20 shareware application will now perform theming duties without having to modify any core OS files making theming almost completely harmless.
To some the “advent of paid theming is a bad thing”:http://www.maniacalrage.net/archives/2003/11/people_sure_to_buy_charge_a_lot.php. I disagree. Kaleidoscope wasn’t free and it thrived during the hay day of OS 8/9. There is no reason why Unsanity should have made this application freeware nor do I feel their $20 asking price is too high either. Maybe I’m just a snob and don’t might forking over money for useful shareware (I buy a lot), but writing a viable theming application that doesn’t harm the OS isn’t an easy thing to do so I’ll respect that and pay up. Numerous developers helped create ShapeShifter including some of the leading theme designers, how do we know whether or not those people are also getting of cut of the $20 fee?
Others feel that Unsanity shouldn’t be charging for a theming application because the theme designers themselves aren’t getting paid. If the theme designers want to get paid for their work they should charge for it. Themes take a lot of effort to create and good ones are hard to come by, I wouldn’t mind paying $5 for a good theme that I’d actually use daily.
Entry Filed under: mac
