If the word Kaleidoscope means anything to you, you’re in for a treat. As spotted by Rob Beschizza (via BoingBoing), Mac Themes Garden features a collection of nearly 4,000 Classic Mac OS GUI customizations.
The site is a collection of pixelated bliss, and whether you’re already feeling fuzzy inside or have no idea what I’m talking about, you won’t want to miss out on this.
All your favorite classic Mac OS themes, and then some
Many years before Apple launched Appearance Manager, which let users natively customize the GUI on Mac OS 8, there was Kaleidoscope: “the ultimate in user interface customization, letting you completely overhaul your Mac’s user interface using plug-in Color Scheme files,” as the project’s description used to state.
Kaleidoscope offered an easy way to apply themes to the entire system, and even after Apple released Appearance Manager (for a hot minute, before Steve Jobs killed it upon his return to Apple), it remained the tool of choice to most Mac customization enthusiasts. So much so that Apple announced a tool that would easily import Kaleidoscope themes into Appearance Manager schemes. The tool was never released.
After the launch of Mac OS X, Kaleidoscope stopped working. Like Winamp skins and Geocities webpages, these themes were lost in time—until now.
Building on the work of the defunct Twitter account @kaleidoscopemac and the Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive on The Wayback Machine, French software engineer Damien Erambert launched Mac Themes Garden.
It is a comprehensive index of Kaleidoscope themes, searchable by scheme and authors. From the classic BeOS theme to an adaptation of Apple’s failed Copland OS project, you can check out screen grabs and even download the actual themes, when available.
Are you among the distinguished 9to5Mac readers who happened to catch the Kaleidoscope era? Did you have a favorite scheme? Let us know in the comments!
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