Current List of Theme/GUI Sites?

Heres a start:

Carbon Themes

Swizcore Studios

Max's Themes

Skin-A-Dock App

IHeartNY Dock Skins

CandyBar

Pixelpalooza

XIcons.com

MacDesktops

Duality (Theme Switching Software)

ThemeChanger (Theme Switching Software)

Thank You So Much to all the themers, this is beautiful stuff!

Lee

this is a good idea.. and it should be sticky but there should be 3, one of themes one for icons/wallpapers and one for the apps. but anyway here are some more

aquaworld

IZA Scheme Archive

go here for everything

ResExcellence

for icons

RAD.E8

Hein's Icons

MMicons

As soon as I get time, I am going to put up a SimpleAqua/Sosumi page soon. I have most of the major changes I wanted to make to these themes almost done.

You're forgetting an important one (important to me, anyway)!

ThemePark, Theme Fur, iChat Enhancer

What would everyone here say if I were to try and figure out a way to have a comprehensive site for themes? Sort of a VersionTracker, but with previews, relevant information, and no ads or corporate corruption? I'm not sure quite how I'd do it yet, but what do you think?

I'd be willing to help out.

I think we need a non-theme maker start a web page for themes and such. Usualy that way no favoritism is shown and everyone can get all their themes from one place instead of a dozen pages.

Just a thought. The Kal scheme page was neat because it grouped them all together. Yet authors could still have their own site as well.

I'm working on this for macthis.org.

Very nifty. What sort of information would need to be provided about each theme? I've got this so far:

name
version
author
description
minimum version of OS X required
maximum version of OS X required
preview URL
preview width/height
download URL
includes icons?
number of styles (variations, but including the first)

Anything else? Should I worry about theme format? And if so, how should I represent it? A string leads to typos, but it might be the only way...

Looks good, but the bandwidth was kinda lacking. I know bandwidth isn't cheap, maybe we can create a fund.

It's the machine, not the bandwidth... But like I've said before, we put up with the MacNN forums being slow for such a long period of time, now didn't we?

No, I stopped coming ot MacNN when it started getting slow.

Can I volunteer for the QA part of themeing and etc?
I wouldn't mind being the people's guinea pig...


PS: To all of those great artists that have come up with some killer themes, those that came up with cool themes--I thank you all and Happy Holidayz.

Lyric 13.0

I like it!! And you could call it something like "ThemeTracker."

Also, no one mentioned MacMotiva

I Like ThemeTracker! It's catchy.

Yeah Themetracker IS a catchy name. Just don't go the Versiontracker route with all the Pro and pay crap.

ThemeTracker! Themes and information for the people, by the people--for FREE!

Excellent concept!

L13.0

Promise, no "ThemeTracker Pro" nonsense. lol. I've already made a theme description file format and a program that will parse it and spit out HTML for a folder at a time... It's extremely fast, and I can even have it run from the command line every once in a while to do an auto-update. I added "contact url" as a field for the format, but it's highly extensible, so more can be added as the need arises. The one problem with it is that it's not CGI, because the sort of advanced parsing and storage I want to do can't, by in large, be done in any language that does CGIs. I'm sure there are libraries for hash tables and whatnot in perl, but I'm certainly not gonna go out and learn them. Therefore, all this stuff needs to reside on a server running Mac OS X -- not just Darwin -- though Mac OS X Server would do fine as well. I *can* host it on mine, but I put my machine to sleep at night, so once this gets beyond the testing stage I'll need something a bit more reliable than that. Either that or someone will need to rewrite my program in perl, at which point I can host it on my school account (which is fast, always up, has no real bandwidth limitations, and supports CGIs, all for free).
Anyway, I might as well publish the tdesc format here now... it's real simple. Here's an example of one for Milk:

// BASIC INFORMATION:
name = "Milk"
version = 1.5
author = "Max Rudberg"
descrip = "A really nifty theme by Max Rudberg."

// THEME INFORMATION:
minversion = 10.1.0
maxversion = 10.2.3
icons = true
numstyles = 2

// WEB-RELATED INFORMATION:
preview = "Preview.jpg"
previewwidth = 262
previewheight = 112
url = "Milk.dmg"
contacturl = "http://homepage.mac.com/max_08/"

The order of the fields does not matter, nor do the quotes or the spaces around the equals sign, though they're all recommended for the sake of convention. The // lines are, of course, comments. Boolean values can be "true/false" or "yes/no" and are case insensitive. There are no illegal characters, including quotes and "=". "Hi, I contain a " character" will be rendered correctly, as will "Hi, I contain an "internal quote"" (that is, it will be rendered as if the outer set of quotes don't exist, but don't ever do this). The key names are case insensitive, and all of them must be present (though some can be blank or ""). The preceding .tdesc file would be rendered into HTML as follows:

<a href="Milk.dmg"><img align="left" border="0" width="262" height="112" src="Preview.jpg"></a>
<span class="themetitle"><a href="Milk.dmg">Milk 1.5</a></span><br>
<span class="author">By <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/max_08/">Max Rudberg</a></span><br><br>
<span class="descrip">A really nifty theme by Max Rudberg.</span><br>

So. How's that sound for a start to get the ball rolling? Think you theme developers can submit stuff in that format with no problems? I'd be surprised if the answer was no, considering the .dlta format is XML based, which is great if you're a computer, but not so great if you're a human trying to create a new one without a template...

[edit: obviously, the generated HTML isn't finished yet; it doesn't actually use some of the data, such as the number of styles or whether it has icons or not. That will change in the final version, naturally.]

Where can I get the "people's" DragThing?

Is it shareware?

1. I have no idea what that has to do with this thread,
2. I have no idea what you mean by "the 'people's'",
3. You can get DragThing by Dave Thomson at http://www.dragthing.com/, which should have been fairly obvious to figure out.
4. Yes, it's shareware, and worth every penny.

Actually, we were planning on something called "ThemeTracker" for ThemeChanger 0.2 (no joke, we were even using that name and all).

You might be a little late in speaking up.

Phoenix: What I mean by the People is all of us Mac users. I am using a paraphrase from one of my favorite actors--The Rock.

Thanks for the info.

Lyric--13.0

www.desktopper.net always seems to have the latest theme updates, and pretty much anything else customizing-related. It is in japanese though..

ThemeTracker--any progress on that yet?
Lets end 2002 with some great theme making items, and bring in 2003 with some HOT themes-and all the GUI we can stand to handle.

So far on my iMac (Indigo 500Mhz/20gb/10.2.2) I have the following themes: Max's xp Themes (Luna/Silver), BBX Mercury, Swiz's Simple X, Gershiz's themes, Carbon's Watercolor, and a number of others... Now I know there are bound to be a great number of new ones before the next update of Jag. I just think IMHO that now would be a good time for ThemeTracker.

Just my .13 cents.

Oh and Phoenix, DragThing Rocks. Thanks for that all important info.

I have a website.. www.yibby.com with unlimited space and I don't know how well the bandwith is but I could make it into a theme pege.. I am sure most of you don't like the name and would like themetracker.. but yea I am just throwing it out there. I am a web designer too if anyone cares. But I am also working on some themes. so yea. I have a ton of free time.

Anyone seen an update for 10.2.3 for 'Pez' (I think it was adam B's theme) - just curious, I really liked that one and used it for some time, now I am using milk for the first time - wow, what a clean looking theme...

Lee

What do you mean? I've already talked to Swiz and Max about it, they can probably vouch for that. I wanted to keep the details under wraps until we figure everything out and launch TC 0.2, how was I supposed to know that someone else was working on something similar?