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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
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...
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
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.