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Mac Contest Roundup
MacThemes.net writes "MacThemes.net has had over 45 artists submit entries to our Theme Mockup Contest, of which the top six will be created into actual themes by established themers. Prizes of over a thousand dollars of software and cash will be awarded. Until this Sunday, readers and visitors are asked to visit our entries archive and vote for the submissions. Winners are expected to be announced Monday, April 5th."
blobbo writes "iDevGames announces the opening of '21 Days Later', a programming mini-contest that is designed to motivate and educate Mac game developers. It is open to developers from around the globe, and the source code from all entries will be released as open source."
but the main thing I brought back from this is how great the original is.
I looked at every theme, and there seem to be three tendancies:
One is to make it bright, gaudy and hard on the eyes;
The other is to make it so dark it's hard on the eyes. Some of these look very nice, but I wouldn't want to risk my continued vision on them.
And the last set simply makes them as much as possible like things that already exist, which shows a fatal lack of imagination.
It's obviously a lot harder to invent a good visual look than one might think, but for the time being, I'm sticking with what Steve provided me with, with a newer, renewed respect for how hard his designers' jobs are. I even have a little sympathy for his allegedly fascist desire to prohibit the development of themes for MacOS X entirely.
D
Every single time I've used theme changers for my Mac, which has been a lot of times (more than ten) it always end with that I turn it back in to Aqua. Why? It's the most eye pleasing theme there is. The same thing now applies to Panther from Jaguar -- I can't believe that I actually used a system where the stripes were so rough before! Apple really knows what it's doing.
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
The OS X icon needs to be changed. It's already two years behind. Not that I'm complaining or anything.
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
I'm amazed at the complete lack of subtlety in any of these themes (ok, except for one of them which looks OK.
Does anyone here use the really black black themes? I find them a pain switching from a black desktop to a suddenly white browser window for example.
And some of the gaudy ones... just want to make my powerbook burst into flame
I heard about uDevGames2003 a long while ago. After the contest the source code and binaries of all of the games was supposed to have been made availble. I just took a look and I cannot find it anywhere on the idevgames site. The closest I could get was this press realease. The Downloads page is essentially empty save for the 21days readme file. Am I just looking in the wrong place? Probably I should use the Contacts page and get a hold of someone there, but maybe another slashdot reader knows so that I do not look stupid twice. I do remember that the idevgames web site 'looked' a whole lot different last year, so it seems someone is maintaining and updating it.
In comparison to what the Windows/Litestep/WindowBlinds communities have been putting out for a while now, these submissions are pretty unimpressive.
There's a similar "theme" competition also running for PC users looking for customization, called the GUI Olympics. They'll be accepting entries until May, but already they have some really nice Winamp skins and Windows themes. Anyone interested in seeing what some of the biggest names in "skinning" are up to should check it out.
Hopefully, contests like this will influence the random programmer to start developing something useful. Look at that trailblazer app that recently was cited on slashdot. Definitely awesome! A friend of mine is working on a 2d RPG similar to the old secret of mana games. He is designing it for Mac. We need more of this!
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artlu.net
whats wrong with it? I think it is great. The brushed metal is also a nice touch
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I pretty much agree with many of the other posters, the themes were dull, too dark or just plain ugly.
My problem is I want something that looks good that is easy to read. I need high contrast but not black on white because it gets too bright. The font has to be clean, sans serif or I can't read it. Bceause I also need the font size to be larger I want the frame around windows to be smaller so that I still can fit more than one window on my monitor.
I also want it to be pretty because pretty things are pleasing to the eye.
Needless to say I haven't really found a theme I like regardsless of os. I tend to choose something simple and then costumize colors and fonts as much as I can.
Sattinger's Law: It works better if you plug it in.
We're running Pixelpalooza at the Iconfactory. It's the longest running (and first?) on-line design contest for the Mac desktop -- starting in 1997.
The final submissions are being posted now and we're going to start public voting next week (April 6th.)
-ch
It's a shame that all the winning themes, if and when they are completed, will only be compatible with Unsanity's ShapeShifter. Which is fine except that it's closed source and proprietary.
I still have OSX 10.2.8 on my primary Mac because ShapeShifter seems to be the only game in town for themes on 10.3.x, and I think it was kind of sneaky the way they got all the big themers on board around a proprietary standard for theme packages and a proprietary engine and then started charging for it.
If we were talking about a doc or media formats most of you would agree that this is a bad thing, why should theme engines be any different?
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
The problem is that most people who consider themselfes great skinners have absolutely no idea about usability or have the basic skills of design. Look at all the skins for Winamp, Mozilla/Firefox/TB, Windows or what ever. 99% is crap. Most of those people consider releasing a skin every week something great. Sometimes the authors have something like 30 different skins released. WTF? Do they eat their own dogfood? I do not think so.
Look at Tunderbird and Firefox for Windows. The main theme is PLAIN UGLY, who came up with that Quake activity indicator? You are trying to reach professional users or kids? If I had a boss (and Windows) he propably would ask WTF I a wasting my time on with kids software or something.
Now have a look at those examples:
Pinstripe for TB
Does it look good? It does. Does it look professional? Yes. Does it have little skulls bouncing around? No!
I do not have anything against skinning functionality in applications, I have something against people running the skin archives coz they have no clue about the basic standards of Usability and taste. They should tell those people with 30 submitted skins to fcuk off and get a life.
this
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
oh the irony! A site that mainly does mac stuff running asp and a windows server. (would atleast thought bsd or linux or something non-windows).
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Once I changed the default system font so that my menu bar and file names and everything showed up in "sand", but that quicly lost its fun. I have my background images cycle through my vacation photos, but other than that, I don't waste my time modifying the environment.
The CB App. What's your 20?
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.
you should allow ACs for pist frosts and such. Coz most people are to lazy to sell their soul, wait for the password and instructions etc...
Quick note on PHP & MySQL on OSX. You should always include a newbie version of a howto. Since you are now using OS X the steps are:
- Download PHP,
- Drag in App folder
- ???
- Profit!!!
Maybe not so easy for php, but you will get the point. Compiling stuff from the beginning to the end is lame and something for Linux users.
The steps for getting PHP & MySQL up and running in less than few clicks are:
Download PHP from here & follow easy steps.
Download mysql from here and follow easy steps.
That's all.