There had been rumours of the “Marble” interface, but nothing (I repeat: nothing) has changed visually as regards the general interface (bar a few luminosity adjustments and the changes required by the new functionality). Icons, scrollbars, list headers, the “traffic lights”, …, everything with which Mac OS X themes generally deal, it’s all unchanged.

Except that Apple decided to change a couple of things in the structure of its theme files, which means that a) we can’t simply copy our theme files from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and b) we haven’t a clue how to decode one of the core UI files, “SArtFile.bin”. Hopefully there will be a decoder soon.

In the meantime, I’ll be using my external drive every now and again to boot under Leopard, because the only theming tool we can use (Themepark 4) works only under Leopard.
If you are an iTunesque user, expect a bunch of new packs for Snow Leopard in the coming days/weeks.

Edit: many iTunesque packages are now available. See the iTunesque page for more details.

Anyway, if you use Aquaffic and don’t want to see the iTunes traffic lights, head over to the iTunesque page, or grab the Aquaffic updater directly here.

Here is a small updater for these resources, also available from the iTunesque page.

What’s the purpose of Shelves? It makes your Finder look as ordered as a nice, clean shelf of documents. And with a few tricks, you can apply that look to all your folders.

The basic idea is to make your Finder windows look like this:

The settings for this to work are simple: icon view, icon sizes of 128×128 pixels, maximum grid spacing, no “icon info” showing, and best keep it organised (by name here). You can apply these settings by hitting the keyboard combo “Cmd” + “J”, or going in “View => Show View Options” in the Finder.

Just like that, folders become beautiful. I found CoverFlow useful and icon view boring, but this has set a new paradigm.

However, applying it like that isn’t enough. There are a few additional steps to get it to work system-wide.

First, you need to change all the folders where you’ve set “always open with CoverFlow/list view/…”, because you want the default look to now show everywhere, right?

For that, fortunately, there is an Apple tool which you can use: Automator. Open Automator, start a workflow with “get specified Finder items”, then add a step “set folder views” (where you define the folder view just as stated beforehand). Check “apply changes to sub-folders” if you really want the changes to affect just about every folder you can possibly imagine.
Now, I got loads of errors trying to apply that workflow to the whole drive, even to folders containing loads of sub-folders, so this isn’t a perfect solution. Also, it takes time and uses up your CPU a lot. Basically, I found that it worked best if I already knew which were the folders where I’d been foolish enough to set “always open in CoverFlow”.

Next, you want this folder background to apply to the whole folder. The problem is that, if you have a folder with hundreds of items (like my “Applications” folder), the image will stop at some point (well, after 4000 pixels, to be more precise). This is a problem.

But there is a workaround: there’s a trick which allows you to force the Finder to loop any background images in icon view.

Before explaining how to do that, however, you need to fix the image, because it is a little too short to loop perfectly. The easiest way I found to fix the image was to cut off 178 pixels from the bottom, which gives a result you can download here if using the “Leather Shelves” (otherwise, you’ll have to fix the image yourselves).

Once that is done, and once you know you’ve applied the background image to all the important folders (and once you’ve made those settings the ones for the default folder [just hit the "use as defaults" button in the "Show View Options" window]), you need to apply the “hack” to make the background image work.

The way to get background images looping can be found here, as pointed out by MacThemes user Dustin. There’s one problem however: you need Property List Editor. This is a utility which comes with the Developer Tools, a set of things which are an optional install with Leopard. If you haven’t installed the Developer Tools, you can install them from your Leopard DVD, but it might be too much of a hassle just to get your background images looping…

So, here’s what you need to do, if you have Property List Editor.

• in the Finder, go to “~/Library/Preferences/” (your User library)
• find the “com.apple.finder.plist” file
• open it in Property List Editor
• hit “Dump”
• select all the resulting text
• copy it into a text file (in TextEdit, for example, but make sure you hit “Format => Make Plain Text” (“Shift” + “Cmd” + “T”)
• search “BackgroundFlags”
• the first two results should be in a section below “<key>DesktopViewOptions</key>”. Ignore those two results, and move on to the next one
• from the third BackgroundFlags onwards, change the following “<integer>0</integer>” into “<integer>1</integer>”.

Theoretically, that should do it. Just relaunch Finder (using the “Force Quit” window) or log off before logging in again to see the backgrounds start looping!
If this doesn’t seem to do the trick, try to find “<key>BackgroundPictureURL</key>”, and copy that and the following line (“<string>…</string>”) near every single instance where you changed the BackgroundFlags integer.

And there we go, you’ll have ordered your Finder a little more.

However, there is a huge problem with these productivity suites: the interface. No matter what features they add, they still haven’t changed the GUI (graphical user interface), and that pains me.

Why do I complain? They are excellent, fully-fledged productivity suites, and free!

The problem is that I don’t only want features. I want something usable. I want to use an application that will help me do what I hope to achieve by being as invisible as possible. And, unfortunately, the user interface in both NeoOffice and OpenOffice is an ugly remnant of five-ten years ago. To tell you the truth, I believe that even Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac was nicer than them.

And, to tell you the truth, I hoped that NeoOffice would be miles ahead of OpenOffice, interface-wise, because NeoOffice was actually created to provide Mac users with a native version of OpenOffice (before version 3, OpenOffice was not a native Mac OS X application, and used the “X11″ system). Turns out most of the NeoOffice effort goes into code and features, not the GUI.

Let’s take a look using a screenshot comparison within the word processing applications.

NeoOffice and OpenOffice both look pretty much the same, except for the icons in the toolbar. The result is this:

No offence to the developers, who are doing a great job (especially considering these productivity suites are freeware), but that looks ugly. It looked fine ten years ago on Windows 98 and Mac OS Classic. It even seemed acceptable on Mac OS X 10.1 and on the first Windows XP computers. Today, however, it’s no longer viable as an interface.

To illustrate how one of my pet peeves, Microsoft Office, has evolved on the Mac, let’s look at the interface of Word 2004:

image from here

And now, Word 2008, after changing the background image to a beautiful wood pattern:

The interface has become much more pleasant, notably because you can change the otherwise ugly and boring background image (I’ll add that you can’t change the background image in Neo/OpenOffice – in NeoOffice, you can change the colour, but that doesn’t help much), and as such, it isn’t sore on the eyes. It doesn’t distract as much (though there are elements in Word 2008 which distract me a whole lot more than in 2004, but that’s another problem).

Now, the ultimate word processing interface across which I have come is that of Pages ’08:

Pages happens to be the fastest loading application of the four mentioned. This can be understood in the case of NeoOffice and OpenOffice, because they are “all-in-one” productivity suites, whereas iWork ’08 and Microsoft Office 2008 contain separate applications for the different kinds of work.
Still, all in all, I find it much nicer to use: faster, more elegant, easier, …
The biggest shortcoming of Pages, in my experience, is its lack of a good table of contents (because it doesn’t support tiered numbers in the table of contents, i.e. the “I”, “II” and so on disappear).

But feature shortcomings don’t bother me as much as interface shortcomings and speed.
I hate opening Word, because it’s so slow and because its user interface contains way too many things (why can’t you disable the “ribbon gallery”, for example?).
I hate opening NeoOffice and OpenOffice, because they look so outdated. I don’t want to use them or discover their amazing features, because they don’t feel like the right tool.

User interface is important. To me, at least.

Now… if only I could get a productivity suite with the features of NeoOffice/OpenOffice and the speed and interface of iWork…

Here is a small updater for these resources, and sorry for forgetting about it the other day when the update came out.

Here is therefore a tutorial on how to combine elements of themes you like on Mac OS X Leopard.

Tools

Before doing anything else, the user should download some tools. Now, the free Architect exists, but it’s not exactly what you’ll want, because it requires an (as of yet) unreleased application which will cost 10 USD to apply themes.
This tutorial is therefore useless if you plan on waiting for Façade, this unreleased app. Theming with Architect + Façade is easier than this tedious method.

Instead, we’ll take a look at other tools, more “primitive”, but which will ensure that you can do the whole process for free. It’s going to be more tedious, however.

So, go to MacThemes and grab ArtFileTool and ArtTools, and grab ThemePark as well.

These three tools each serve a different purpose, because they each deal with different kinds of files. So, how to know which one you’ll need to use?

Leopard’s UI: which file does what

So far, Leopard theming isn’t completely doable. It will only be considered “nearly completely doable” when Architect and the accompanying app, Façade, are officially released.

Because of the current absence of an “all-in-one” theming application besides Architect, we’ll have to edit the files separately. Here is a (simplified) summary of what each file does.

The so-called “ArtFile” is known to draw most of the UI elements, from traffic lights to the shape of buttons, via list headers.
This file can be read thanks to ArtTools.

The “SArtFile”, on the other hand, draws the menu bar (when not transparent) and the colour of the drop-down menus available from that menu bar.
This file is read thanks to ArtFileTool.

Finally, the “Extras” files (two of them) were used in Tiger, but are now only used for progress bars and scroll bars.
These are edited with ThemePark.
Note: PowerPC Mac users need only use the “Extras.rsrc” file, whereas Intel Mac users have to use both the “Extras.rsrc” and the “Extras2.rsrc” files (on Intel Macs, Extras is used for PPC apps, and Extras2 is used for Intel-only and Universal apps).

Where are the files?

This is the more annoying bit: the theme files are located deep within the Mac OS X “System” folder, and most of the few released themes come with an automated installer only, not with the files themselves readily accessible.
If you want to combine two themes, I therefore suggest the following method: install the first, copy the resulting files to your Desktop in a “Theme 1″ folder (or some other easily accessible place), and then install the second before copying the resulting files to a “Theme 2″ folder.

Fortunately, you can reach these files’ locations easily using Finder’s “Go To Folder” feature (Shift-Cmd-G).

ArtFile.bin & SArtFile.bin:

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CoreUI.framework/Resources/

Extras.rsrc & Extras2.rsrc:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Carbon.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/HIToolbox.framework/Versions/A/Resources/

And now that you have those files, you’re ready to roll.

Using the files

ArtTools and ArtFileTool are applets that will decode and re-encode ArtFile and SArtFile respectively, whereas ThemePark directly edits the Extras files.

If you want to use elements from one theme in another, here (finally) are two short examples.

Example 1: scroll bars

Say I want to use the scroll bars of iTunesque in iLeopard, because I see that iLeopard only has grey scroll bars in Graphite mode, not the blue ones similar to the iTunes ones.
Scroll bars are found within the Extras files, so, as an Intel Mac user (I have a MacBook), I have to use both Extras and Extras2. They are completely identical files when you look at the output in ThemePark though, so you can copy resources from one Extras2 into an Extras without a problem.

In the iTunesque Extras, in the “pxm#” field, I do a search by name of “scroll”, because these resources are named. If I open the iLeopard Extras and do the same search, the same results will appear, and from then onwards, it’s a simple “copy & paste” operation (select all the images in one resource of your “source Extras”, copy, and paste in the same resource of your “target Extras”). Tedious, but it works.

At the end, if you’re an Intel Mac user, be sure to “Save As” both Intel and PPC, so you end up with an Extras and an Extras2.

Example 2: traffic lights

Say that you want to use the traffic lights of iLeopard in the KISS Me theme (based on MobileMe).
Traffic lights are found in the ArtFile.bin file, so you’ll decode both the iLeopard and the KISS Me files with ArtTools.

The result is a long list of folders, all containing different UI elements. And the folder called “titlebarcontrols” contains all the traffic light resources.

Here, replacing is easy: you just copy the titlebarcontrols folder of iLeopard to KISS Me, and encode the result with ArtTools.

Applying the modifications

Saving your theme as you want it to be isn’t enough. You still need to apply it.

If you try replacing ArtFile.bin directly (or any other of the theme files), nothing will happen, because they are protected.
Instead, what you have to do is delete the file (authentication is required), and only then can you drag & drop your new theme file into the destination.
Basically, the method for applying a new theme file is not “replace” or “drag & drop”. It’s “delete, drag & drop”.

This means the installers for all Aquaffic variants are bigger now (around 45 MBs compressed), but they’ll work whether you have iTunes 7 or iTunes 8.

So, what exactly do these glyphs look like?

Here is the little mock-up Dustin made:

As you can see, the design blend rather well with the “curved pill” design included in iTunesque. I can assure you they also work well with the “rectangle pill” design, which was also included in the previous stable release of iLeopard. However, I cannot guarantee that they won’t clash with the stock appearance of the Mail & Preview button pills.

Note: the glyphs are completely independent from any theme elements and are located within the applications in question. As such, you can use them with any theme, but you may have to re-apply such modifications if Mail and/or Preview are updated.

Here is a more (but not completely) comprehensive view of these glyphs, again using the iTunesque “curved pills” (click the images to see in full-size):

Mail glyphs:

Preview glyphs:

Now, the ZIP package to which I’ll link in a bit includes an automated installer, which offers you the possibility only to install the glyphs for one of the applications or to install them for both. I myself prefer to have these glyphs in Preview and not in Mail, for some reason, but Dustin told me he is “using them right now, and [he loves] them!” Basically, your choice (as is the general philosophy of iTunesque).

You will also be glad to know that these glyphs will also be an option included in iLeopard 2.1 (according to the creator), which brings many of the iTunesque options (even one I never released here) to iLeopard in order to make the possibilities almost endless. If you are an avid iLeopard fan, I suggest waiting until you get the complete thing.

So, without further ado, here is the link to the glyphs.

Download, and have fun customising your Mac even more.

Themes

I never was interested in themes under Tiger (Mac OS 10.4), partly because I had a 1999 G3 iMac, and partly because the only tool “average users” could use to apply themes was Unsanity’s ShapeShifter (which came at a hefty price for a student, and which is a “haxie” that requires “Application Enhancer” [APE] to run, and APE has caused me a couple of problems in the past).

Then Leopard came along, and while I was very happy with the new unified metal look for all applications, the blue aqua (scrollbars, list headers, …) was starting to feel old.
So I decided to take a look at Leopard theming options.

It turns out that Apple has completely changed the way OS X draws the User Interface (UI) in Leopard, because it hopes to move towards resolution independence (something you can see in action here).
But we’re not there yet, and so Leopard uses a number of old and new sources of data to draw this UI (when resolution independence isn’t enabled – if you wish to try out resolution independence, Vector UI instructions are here).

Since the 18th of May, it is possible to theme (in great part) Leopard, by replacing images found within these different sources, thanks to the release of ArtFileTool, a tool to complement ArtTools and ThemePark.
If you are interested in theming, by using these different tools, I strongly recommend heading over to the MacThemes Wiki.

But for the average user, who doesn’t want to spend hours replacing images (trust me, this kind of time is required), what are the possibilities?

Right now, there are no “full theme” options, because theme developers are only starting to get things done with the aforementioned tools.
But if you’re interested, there are already partial themes, and there are a number of themes in development.

First of all, I’d like to mention a way to “iTunesify” your Leopard. If you prefer the iTunes look to standard Aqua scrollbars, progress bars and list headers, this kind of change is possible:
(click for full-size)

To do so, read this post. It contains links to all the required files, step-by-step installation instructions and even an installer package.
A more complete “iLeopard” theme has been released in the works.

Another partial theme is a scrollbar replacement, Ether (and an Ether-inspired theme is also in the works).

Other themes in development for Leopard include Metal Muku, Kaer and Siro.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the list isn’t very long. Yet.
Given time, a number of themes will appear to feed some spice to your Leopard.
And, a little note to (would-be) developers: a new tool to make this whole image replacement business easier is in the works, a sort of “ThemePark for Leopard”. Keep an eye out for Architect & Façade.

That’s it for this series on Leopard customisation. Hopefully, you will have learnt something useful and have found this interesting.
If you have any questions, do leave a comment, or send an e-mail address to the address on the “About” page.

Edit: updated 14th of November to reflect some recent developments.