What’s all this, then?

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’ve got a brand-spankin’ new layout for the front page. As you may have ventured from the lack of posting activity, we’ve struggled keeping the front page maintained with news on a regular basis, and it was about time we revisited our system to make things interesting for the people that love MacThemes and have made it so great for all these years. Here’s our solution in detail.

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Oh, I like this.

Sometime a couple years ago I discovered David Lanham’s “Somatic” icons and fell in love with them. It’s a work of art in the scope of computer graphic design: an organic, animated style that avoids the photorealistic look of most OS X icons, while simultaneously not appearing flat or uninspired. But the set came out four years ago, and since Leopard’s release in October of last year, Somatic’s 128-px sizes and lack of a matching Dock have left it a bit dated.

Honestly, I had more or less forgotten about Somatic until I read about its update today at the Iconfactory. It’s one of the best icon “remasters” I’ve ever seen; rather than simply scaling the resolution to 512×512 pixels, Somatic’s entire aesthetic has been tweaked, shined and polished. It looks more realistic and vibrant than the old version, and the new icons included (and Dock, for that matter) feel like a perfect fit. Lanham’s release is available for free at the Iconfactory, and if you want a matching background, try perusing his personal website, dlanham.com.

(for what it’s worth, I interviewed David Lanham in September of 2007.)

Who else loves iTunes controllers?

Looking at the music you’re listening to on your desktop has become all the rage lately. For some, gazing at an album cover on your screen provides a certain level of satisfaction — a sense that the bytes that make up a digital album have a somewhat “realistic” feeling to them — akin to, say, a physical CD.

It’s time to add another player in the competition for controllers, however: Bowtie. Created by Matt Patenaude (in partnership with Slightly Pretentious Software), the little app does one thing and one thing well: controlling iTunes. It’s the user interface that makes Bowtie interesting though, by providing a completely themeable UI to achieve the kind of hyper-realism people like me are attracted to in controllers.

And with that out of the way, let’s go to the real purpose for this post: Laurent Baumann, Bowtie’s designer, has put out 11 fantastic themes for the app to sway you over. It’s an assortment of various kinds of approaches to the controller aesthetic, ranging from faux-desktop icons to my favorite: the animated, super-detailed vinyl sleeve (above image, modeled by London Calling). Get the download and enjoy; as far as free goes, Bowtie and its themes are about as good as you can get.