The weblogs of Beth, Christian, and the cat: updated daily, weekly, or occasionally.
Thursday, 29 September 2005
Christian: Unifying the Mac interface
One of the biggest benefits that gets touted about Mac OS X is how everything "just works together." To a large extent, this is true, but one glaring ommision has been the visual aspect of Mac OS X.
To wit, there are three different "appearances" in Mac OS X: "Aqua," "Brushed Metal," and "Unified." The problem is that a Mac application might use any one of the three appearances, or none of them at all. While this is little more than an aesthetic annoyance, it doesn't mesh with Apple's claims that Mac OS X has a system-wide visual consistency.
Fortunately, that can be changed. The Iridium theme brings the Unified look to [almost] every program in the Mac world, including traditionally ugly ones like the Finder. Iridium makes Mac OS X look and feel as beautiful and unified as it is.
The only programs Iridium doesn't unify are programs that use their own appearance systems, such as Mozilla Firefox. By tweaking the GrApple Zaphod theme for Firefox, I've managed to get Firefox to have the Unified look as well, as you can see from the screenshot above. Finally, Firefox looks like a normal, natural Mac OS X application.
Update: There is no download here, but there is information posted about creating this effect in a later post.
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