Mighty Mouse with Some Theme Sauce

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!

• Mighty Mouse 2.0b1 (2.9Mb)
  

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.

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.

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.

• ThemePark 4.0a1 (900kb)
  

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!

WindowShade X 4.3

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.

Sound of the Underground

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 :)

Welcome back.

It's been a while since this blog was updated… the same stands for our products. I believe it's about time to change that — drastically.

Today, we're releasing the Leopard-compatible version of our haxie Xounds (a public beta) as well as a public beta of WindowShade X that fixes the most annoying bugs.

In the coming days, you will see the Leopard-compatible Mighty Mouse and the final releases of Xounds 2.5 and WindowShade X. Then we will focus on ironing the remaining bugs out as well as doing further R&D work.

You may notice that our site and products branding changes over time — we are doing the rebranding and the new website is half-way ready, but it's on the low priority as we'd like to focus on products first. Above is our new logo, and all of our haxie updates will have new icons to match the updated, simpler look.

We are already doing some research on the Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to make our most popular haxies supported, as well as bring you something new.

Either way, thanks for staying around with us through all these years — it's your support that helps us going and motivates us to do the work. Despite the recent silence, we're full of energy and do our best to not let you down.

Yarr!

Download Xounds 2.5b1
Download WindowShade X 4.3b1

Spectacular Catastrophe: WindowShade 4.2b2

And thus, it is thrust upon this world.

If there are no humungous (rada rada) issues with this beta 2 of WindowShade X 4.2, then it will be cleaned up a little and released sometime next week. I strongly suggest everyone changing the update check to daily as 4.2b2 won't be around that long.

There is one small change to this update. The donate panel in the preference pane has been removed. It has been replaced with a voluntary upgrade fee (vuf) panel. This is mostly because WSX is like totally 7 years old.

Seven Freakin' Years

Anywho, here's what's new in beta 2:

• The price of WindowShade X has increased from $10 to $13.50.
• MIP windows no longer appear below the bottom of the screen in 10.5.
• MIP windows now respect the Dock size in 10.5.
• No longer uses CGSUniqueCString().
• Addressed a bug that caused a MIP window to expand into an invisible window when clicking on the Dock icon when all windows in the application are MIPped.
• Now allows windowshading of the iTunes 8 window when double clicking on the title bar.
• Fixed a crash that could occur when closing all windows (option click close widget) in Cocoa applications.
• Addressed an issue that rendered WindowShade useless in Firefox 3.x.

Some of these changes should please some people.

Download WindowShade X 4.2b2

Not much to say other than happy window shading!