Mac Themes Garden
Damien Erambert (via Hacker News):
Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.
[…]
What I call “recording” here involves taking “live” screenshots of the themes being used on a Mac OS 9.2 installation running in UTM and combing through each archive to properly record every scheme’s informations (author and release year).
This process is, to put it bluntly, a bit bonkers because it’s mostly manual, but I feel it is worth it.
See also: John Siracusa and GUI Junkie.
6 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Back when having a Mac was fun instead of arduous in the name of performative security.
That MineShaft theme, coming a full decade before Minecraft, is really something to see.
> Back when having a Mac was fun instead of arduous in the name of performative security.
Well said!
There's certainly fun to be had when the system will let you do pretty much anything you want, including patching code, replacing resources and writing to memory you really ought not to. Naturally this means that system crashes were abundant, as anyone who used Mac OS 9 for any length of time would probably not so fondly remember, but it was certainly a lot more *fun*.
My recollection is quite the opposite! I remember System 7 through 8.1 being relatively stable, and then 8.5 getting worse and 9 being atrocious. I remember having a beige G3 running Mac OS 9, and on a near daily basis having to hard reset the system by yanking out its power cord because it froze so badly that the reset keystroke didn't work.
I think my favorite is System 7.1.
I never felt any old Mac systems were particularly unstable, apart from specific versions around 7.5. You could make them unstable by installing a bunch of extensions, but even then, it was usually easy to identify the issue and remove the extension causing the problem.
@Plume Yeah, I think the stability problems were overstated so long as you had a clean system or good quality extensions. System 7.1 was good. The higher versions of 7.5.x and 7.6 were also good.
