When I look out to the window, all I see is snow. And cars. And people. And lots of other things, but the snow prevails. It's not too unusual for this time of the year - the white substance naturally comes as a part of the bundle the nature calls "winter" here (by "here", I mean St.Petersburg, Russia, of course).
I can't say I am a big fan of the whole snow thing. Yep, skiing is fun, but the overall "freeze your butt off for 4 months of the year" experience is getting old and boring very, very fast.
However, there's an animal that enjoys snow (or at least that's the common concept about it - who knows what it thinks about snow in reality). By coincidence, the name of that animal have been picked by Apple for their last edition of Mac OS X - 10.6 - the one many of us already use and love. Or hate.
Either way, this brings us to the topic of… haxies. They haven't been updated for ages. Some have not even been updated for Mac OS X 10.5 (for a reason). And we're taking this opportunity to rewrite some of our most popular haxies for the latest and greatest OS ever.
While they are not yet ready for public consumption (even in the public beta form), I'd like to share what we've accomplished so far and also clarify on our plans.
First of all, future versions of our haxies will be compatible with 10.6 only - we're dropping 10.5 and below. If you still use an older version of an OS, you can keep using the versions we currently have out. The reason is simple - many haxies have ancient and scary code dating back to 2002. The APIs in the system have changed so much during these 8 years the code became increasingly hard to maintain - heck, some of it is no longer used because the OS has evolved but it is still there. Granted that we're now moving into 64 bit space, with lots of system calls being deprecated, it's a good time to re-engineer the code. As a side effect, we lose compatibility with the older revisions of the Mac OS X. On the bright side, however, it gives us a chance to clean up code and use more modern technologies, where available - such as Core Animation, for example.
Second, our team got bigger - we welcome one of the experts in the Mac OS X low-level programming, Cyril Murzin, to our team.
So what is the current state of things?
We got Application Enhancer working solidly under Snow Leopard - in both 32 and 64 bit modes. Obviously this was the first thing that had to be done - without it, other haxies just won't work. This part is considered done, and it ate most of the time to accomplish.
WindowShade X was largely redone, with the MIP system rewritten from scratch. It is currently in the internal beta, and requires some more attention before I could consider it "publically consumable".
FruitMenu is now in caring hands of Rosyna. It will tell you about it later, I guess. From what I can say, it runs, yet some things still have to be fixed about it.
Labels X was rewritten from scratch, and this one is probably the one closest to the public beta stage at the moment. Yes, it can colorize icons, change label colors (and they change live in the Finder), turn on and off these label bubbles -- basically, everything you expect.
Mighty Mouse is due a renewal -- Jason is rumored to work on it in February when he gets some spare time from his insanely busy schedule.
Other haxies are currently on hold. As soon as we're done with the above mentioned ones, we'll switch to our other paid haxies. I am not yet sure whether it will be possible to keep Xounds or ShapeShifter alive, however, we will keep you posted here.
You can also follow us (@haxies) on Twitter - it usually contains more inside and up-to-date information. You can also communicate with us there.
And last but not least, thank you for being here and being our inspiration. You guys rock.
Posted by slava at Here's a bit of the ol' ThemePark 4, now with Snow Leopard compatibility. If you're tired of Aqua, you can use ThemePark 4 to change your UI to whatever you'd like. ThemePark will even apply your changes safely to your operating system for you.
ThemePark 4 can:
- Safely apply themes created by other ThemePark users;
- Edit the ArtFile, SArtFile and Extras files that underlie the appearance of Mac OS X;
- Easily merge multiple themes together to mix and match appearances;
- Integrate with Adobe Photoshop™ and Illustrator™ for easy editing;
- Convert between the Snow Leopard and the Leopard versions of SArtFile;
- Edit many theme images at once for easy modification;
Oh, and ThemePark 4 is also completely free, at least for now!
In the unlikely event of a ThemePark emergency, you can revert to Aqua via the command line by entering the following command:
/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.geekspiff.themepark --revert
So what about the rest of Unsanity's products?
Unfortunately, I won't be updating ShapeShifter for Snow Leopard, nothing has changed since Leopard was released and so my previous rationale still applies. Fortunately, ThemePark 4, which is free, still allows some level of theme creation.
However, Unsanity is still hard at work on Snow Leopard compatibility for the rest of our stuff and will be announcing availability as things become ready. Look for posts from Slava and Rosyna about WindowShade, FruitMenu, FontCard, Labels X, Menu Master, and Xounds in the near future, and watch for something from me about Mighty Mouse.
In the meantime, happy theming!
Posted by jason at Cursors! At long last, here's a version of Mighty Mouse that works on Leopard. It's also got a few new UI wrinkles, and you can now easily move your cursors back and forth between Mighty Mouse and Adobe Photoshop™. Enjoy it, and report bugs!
Wait, what did you say?
"AAAAHHHHRRGG! What about ShapeShifter!!??"
Ahh, right...
ShapeShifter will never be updated for Leopard, and here's why: The way that Apple has internally implemented skinning of the UI for Leopard is very obviously a stopgap measure on the way to something new that they'll unveil in the future. To explain this, I need to go into theming history and future extrapolation a bit, so please bear with me.
themeing as old as this icon
Until Leopard was released, theming on OS X was mostly done via a single monolithic file named Extras.rsrc. Internally, this file was a Resource Manager file. The Resource Manager is a leftover from Apple System 1 (yes, seriously) and has been officially deprecated by Apple since the original release of Mac OS X. And yet, this is how theming has been implemented. Obviously, this situation couldn't last forever.
With Leopard, there's something new and spiffy — CoreUI. In the old Extras.rsrc system, the themer modified a bunch of chopped up bits of buttons and sliders and the operating system assembled them all together onscreen. CoreUI changes this idea dramatically - instead, the themer describes what should be rendered onscreen and the operating system assembles the graphics from the themer's recipe. Cabel has an old but good blog post describing this here.
Sounds great. The problem is that it wasn't ready in time for Leopard. So Apple pulled a quickie. Leopard still uses the old, late '90s era vintage Extras.rsrc system. Leopard also uses the snazarrific late '00s era CoreUI. And Leopard uses the stopgap measure called ArtFile. And all three of these completely different systems get used in different places and under different conditions, sometimes even within the same application.
coreui, straight from apple's patent filing
So, what's this ArtFile thing, then? Basically, it's two single files (with two unique file formats, of course) that contain the various images used to composite the operating system. They're both binary files, and neither one uses any sort of a documented file format. And unfortunately, the majority of theming on Leopard uses this particular subsystem out of the three that are available.
So why not convert ShapeShifter to use this system? Basically, because it would take an entire rewrite of ShapeShifter, and I know that I'd be required to do another complete rewrite as soon as the transition to CoreUI is complete. If I'm going to do a complete rewrite, I'm only going to do it a single time.
So basically, ShapeShifter is sitting out Leopard. Once we get a good look at Snow Leopard at this year's WWDC, we'll see how Apple's transition to CoreUI is doing and I'll be able to evaluate ShapeShifter for Snow Leopard more seriously.
In the meantime, themers haven't had many options under Leopard. I personally apologize for this. I haven't been following the theme world closely during the Leopard era, and when something called ArtTools came out a year ago, I thought that themers had what they needed to create themes. Façade was originally slated for release last fall and I thought it would fill the gaps.
I didn't realize until a couple of months ago when Magnifique was released that themers really hadn't had any good options, and that the situation still wasn't ideal.
So here's something to help: a new build of ThemePark that has full support for the two different types of ArtFile used in Leopard. Themers can use this to build Leopard themes. And something really new is that you can also apply these themes from within ThemePark.
This ThemePark build is basic as hell, and the themes you can create and use with it are a far cry from what you could do with ShapeShifter. There's no Unsanity APE module involved, which drastically limits what can be done.
It's also alpha software, meaning that there are known bugs and it isn't feature complete. In the event of an emergency, you can revert to Aqua via the command line by entering the following command:
/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.geekspiff.themepark --revert
Anyway, a picture is worth at least thirty-six words, so here's a fun lil' screencast showing how you can create and apply a theme that will turn your Mac OS X from blue to green in under five minutes.
Enjoy!
As promised, we have released WindowShade X 4.3. This is a free recommended update for everybody who uses Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.
I'll take the opportunity and tell you about our short term plans a little bit (long term plans deserve a separate post and I'll get to it in next few days).
Next release we'll have is Xounds 2.5, which is almost ready for the prime time, but still requires some tweaking. Then we have Chat Transcript Manager update in the pipeline, followed by Mighty Mouse for 10.5.
Regarding our other products, I will tell more about it in the upcoming long term plans post. :)
Overall, grab the WindowShade X 4.3 release, and thank you for bearing with us.
Xounds 2.5b2 is now available. This version fixes an annoying Finder crashing bug when you drag something into the Trash (I wonder if anyone remembers the Mac OS 8/9 extension where a lovely monster would pop out of the Trash icon every time you empty it… who knows how many useful files were destroyed back then just to see that appearance!).
It also fixes a bug with the preference pane being cropped on 10.4 (oops, totally forgot the window width is different).
Here here: Xounds 2.5b2
Also here is a beta of Chat Transcript Manager that now is able to scan iChat files as well as "new" Adium ones — in other words, be a nice Leopard citizen.
Linkie: CTM 1.1.3b1
I'll get back to you regarding the status of our other haxies within next few days :)