Aqua-Soft Forums[NEWSIMG]http://www.aqua-soft.org/media/news/f17f6ca17dc3c5627780825414401009.jpg[/NEWSIMG]
User VL-Tone of Macthemes has made some significant progress in theming leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) elements.
Contrary to earlier beliefs, Leopard does not rely soley on the vector engine for its UI but rather the resizing of a small handful of images.
The process involves modifying these files. Fortunately and unfortunately, these images are reused throughout the OS to theme many elements including; buttons, tabs and bars.
This will mean more limited customization, but at the same time a more consistant interface.
It also means that the task ahead for artists is considerably less, as there is less bitmaps to be modified... Certainly a relief for artists who've had experience theming Tiger!
Early creations such as 'Milk' by user esXXI or VL-Tone's gel colour mods show hope, and give an indication on the future of Mac theming. Its more minimalist, its more consistant, theres more variants, it looks promising...
At the moment, these theming experiments are still in thier early stages, and some users/themers have reported noticable performance drops after modifying elements... While others have noticed little, if any performance drops.
Unsanity, maker of 'Shapeshifter' (A utitility used to apply themes in Mac OSX Tiger 10.4+) has remained rather silent about the progress of the next Shapeshifter; Perhaps due to the complexity of theming the new OS.
These breakthroughs made by VL-Tone could later be used by Unsanity to develop its own application, and 'Themepark' by 'Geekspiff' (a utility used to create Mac themes).
For more details see the Macthemes forum thread: