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What about playback? Which apps would you recommend? I know about VLC as well as some nice replacement icons for the application. However, it wouldn't play back on a program I got got a coopy gor Movie Jukebox, which I would like it to. If quicktime could handle it already, then there would be support for it across the board.

If you don't like the way OS X looks, use a different theme. And as long as we're on the topic... [blatant plug] I have a theming site as well.

Aqua is really slick, but eventually it gets old, wheras there are dozens of really nice looking themes for KDE.

Plenty of themes exist for Mac OS X/Aqua; check out MacThemes, for example. The themes that are available range from awesome to awful, but that's true of KDE themes as well, I would imagine.

Upon RTFA I decided to give themes another try, despite the fact that like you, I always seem to end up switching back to Aqua and giving up themes. However, I found an excellent (good looking and usable) theme called Milk you might want to try. I've noticed that Milk seems to be the most common theme used (besides Aqua). I love the way Safari looks in the Milk theme.

There is an alternative, sort of. It's called XTender, and its public beta was incredibly unimpressive. The day after XTender went public an update was made to ShapeShifter, and everyone again realized how good it was.

Also, ShapeShifter has cost money since its inception. No underhanded tactics there... although it did have the big themers involved in its creation to do the things that they wanted to do. The same guy develops the theme changing and theme creating software, and he is very approachable in regards to feature requests and bug reports. ShapeShifter is technically under the Unsanity umbrella, but Jason Harris makes both. ThemePark (to create themes) also allows exporting to many other non-guikit formats, including the format native to ShapeShifter's competitor (XTheme), and the format supported by Open Source alternatives such as ThemeChanger.

All ShapeShifter guikits can be extracted into images and a Extras.rsrc file using Guikitty. They can't be directly used by another application, so in a sense it is closed and proprietary, but the above mentioned XTender was able to automatically load ShapeShifter guikits if you had Guikitty installed.

Another big point is that a lot of themes use ShapeShifter because it has features that go above and beyond what is capable with any other theme changer, even in terms of things as simple as changing text colors.

Competition is always good, don't get me wrong. But there isn't a whole lot to complain about with ShapeShifter, and any competition it has had has been crushed despite the higher price tag because of ease of use, features, and theme-changing safety (it doesn't modify any system files, or even attempt to overlay those owned by root).

And finally, theres nothing preventing the winning theme from being released in the DLTA (aka Open Source friendly) format as well, the only restriction would be if the theme requires features that are only available in ShapeShifter.

Alright, I think that about makes the case...

These are just mockups by people who don't even know how to make themes. Part of the prize for winning is having a professional themer make it a reality. Look here for some real themes.

--Adam

There are plenty of retro themes out there. I've personally found Max Rudbergs's themes to be some of my favorites. Check out his Rhapsodized and Classic Platinum skins at his site.

MacThemes.net is a good site w/ both theme reviews, news, and links to theming software.