Usually I don’t give status posts on site projects, however, the FrontPage has been dormant for so long now that it seems necessary. Firstly, I’d like to apologize to our userbase for the sparse activity on the FrontPage. We originally thought that adding the “Quick Picks” section would help bring a breathe of life to the FrontPage, but we have realized that in order to make this section of MacThemes as viable and vibrant as it’s “communal” counterpart (see: The Forums) that a greater amount of end-user integration is desperately needed. We’ve been busily toiling away at an update that we hope will bring the FrontPage back to life, creating a steady flow of traffic and more areas for end-user interactions to take place. We won’t be committing to any time-tables, however, we hope this post amplifies some key points:

1. We aren’t dead… Yet - While death is an inevitable epilogue to life, MacThemes isn’t going to “flat-line” anytime soon.In fact, we have seen tremendous growth in both our monthly traffic as well as in our forum user-base, the latter of which is close to breaking 30,000 members!

2. Registration WILL reopen - Though ample reason has been given regarding our decision to temporarily close forum registration, I just wanted to reiterate that this situation will not be permanent. While we’ve enjoyed tremendous growth in the past year, we have always strived to maintain a healthy and enjoyable community environment for both GUI enthusiasts and designers alike. As a result, we felt it would be best to temporarily halt registration as we delineate the most appropriate way to manage such a large community (Not too long ago, MT merely catered to 8,000 forum-users)

3. Insiders are coming - Luis and the writing staff are hard at work creating a slew of wonderfully insightful articles for all of our design enthusiasts that they hope will satiate your aesthetics appetites.

4. Greater Transparency - While we have multiple avenues through which you can voice your suggestions, critiques, or slander, such as email and/or through the forum “Site Feedback” subsection. I want to stress that MacThemes is first a foremost a community. You, our readers and forum members, have helped create an extremely unique community that will continue to evolve as we near our 7 year anniversary and enter a new decade. Though we’ve already decided on our feature set for our imminent site update, we have started to create a list of long term goals to make MacThemes into the go-to site for everything GUI-related (both Mac and iPhone). That being said, our eyes and ears are at full attention - so please, once again, do not hesitate to email us! We will also be making more conscious effort to communicate any site-related developments as they occur.

5. Supporting MacThemes - Though site downtime has decreased tremendously since our transition to MediaTemple from Blue Host during our “Theme For A Week” contest several years ago, we have not managed to completely quell it. MacThemes averages over 1 million sessions a month, a 400% increase in the past 2 - 3 years. Keeping MacThemes afloat requires both time and money. While ad revenue has managed to alleviate any monetary stress, we appreciate any and all donations. Our moderators and writers work hard and receive little compensation for their endless hours spent working on creating such a wonderful community. And, of course, our server can always use a little extra memory to further decrease downtime! [Of Course, if you are an independent Mac or iPhone software developer, MacThemes is a wonderful source of exposure - check out our “Advertising” page in the “About” section.

To all of our users - Thanks Again! These first 6 years and 335 days have been an absolute blast. Heres to another 7 more! And of course, Happy Holidays!

Sincerely,
Jonathan Komisar and the MacThemes Staff

Let me get right to the point: It works. It allows for modification of some of the basic Leopard GUI elements. It hasn’t mangled up my system or slowed it down. Everything seems to be running fine after 4 weeks of use and a lot has changed in those 4 weeks — gone from 1.0 to its 2.1 release, added a built-in theme browser and the Sparkle update system. So on and so forth.

And in the process, the interface design has gone from awful to adequate. But there’s still plenty to improve upon; the full screen preview function is poorly designed since it either opens the image in Preview or Safari depending on whether you’ve download the theme or not. The worst bit is that some themes don’t include preview images, which is why I dislike the fact that Magnifique relies on screenshots for the preview. I would also love to see a way to update themes to newer versions as opposed to having to browse and download the latest release. My Themes section has three versions of Aqua Inspiriat.

Magnifique also has some nice options though. In the latest release a theme mixer allows you to play Dr. Frankenstein and mix and match parts of themes to bring your own creation to life. It also lets you switch from 2D to 3D and toggle on and off CoreUI and the transparent menubar.

But interface aside, the biggest challenge for Magnifique are the same ones that ShapeShifter had: once upon a who gives a f**k anymore. Good design is hard. It takes a damn good designer to create so much as one good icon, let alone an entire OS theme. And at the moment, too many of the themes available for use in Magnifique are just mediocre modifications. Of old favorites.

So, this isn’t an app that’s going to win design awards, but we don’t need it to be. After more than a year of a themeless operating system, Magnifique provides us with a means to an end.

To that point, let me point out some of themes I do like thus far.

Aqua Inspririat 2.1: This is by far the theme I’ve used the most in the 4 weeks since I first installed Magnifique. A beautiful mix of old Aqua elements — minus the gloss — and deeply saturated colors. I’m particularly fond of the dark blue color on progress bar and scroll bar.

Mistikons Dark: This theme is, in many ways, just another Minimalist Dark theme until you start picking up on the little details. The search bar in a Finder window has a wonderful blockiness to it and a nice sense of depth. The way the Finder window changes when it’s not selected is also a beautiful touch. All about the details.

and…

Umaso: Susumu’s classic, ported for Magnifique. Enough said.

All themes are available for download within the Magnifique application.

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.

I’ve been unhappy with the front page design for a very, very long time. It doesn’t best cater to MacThemes’ core traffic: longtime readers of the site who are on the forums every day already looking for new things. For them, the front page was utterly worthless; they had already seen the releases on the forums that day, meaning the only thing the front page was useful for was the insider content. But then you get to the other problem: We never work on insiders. Too much of our time was spent making minor news posts promoting the (lovely) work on the forums, and not enough providing interviews with the actual people making them.

Here’s the usual to-do list for making a news post:

1. Go find something cool on the forums.
2. Write up a paragraph or two about the thing.
3. Fire up Photoshop and make a preview image.
4. Format it, get it edited and approved to publish.

This method is stupid. When you’re getting started as a writer, it’s easy to write 5-10 news posts and suddenly exclaim how easy it is to keep it up, but after a while, you end up spending a couple hours a week making news posts when you could have been using that time researching for an insider or writing a review. It’s tedious and boring, and frankly, something most people aren’t willing to do when they’re going unpaid. It’s the reason it failed in MacThemes 1.0, and it’s the reason it’s failing now.

But after a little while of arguing and stagnation over what to do (and further killing our updates in the meantime, for which I personally apologize), here’s what we’ve come up with.

Previously, news posts and insiders had equal priority on the front page. Today, they’re now placed in the right areas: insiders, interviews, and other original stuff remains on the largest section of the site, while the minor links and features from the forums will now be placed in the sidebar, and removed of priority for formatting and editorial attention. This gives us more time to work on the stuff you guys care about reading, and the time we’re not spending doing that we can instead use finding great forum content to link in the sidebar.

Anyway. We’ll see how it goes; in the meantime, please pardon our mess as we fix the design’s various niggles, and leave a comment with your feedback on how to make the front page as awesome as possible.

There is, I believe, a total of 47* iTunes controller apps. Their rise and fall usually follows the formula n-y3, where n represents initial excitement at some cool quirky design element; y represents the eventually realization that they aren’t worth the memory they consume; and 3 represents me failing basic algebra. And the small handful of included visual styles helps them get old fast.

So understandably, when I saw the release of Bowtie, I couldn’t help but think, “Really, another one?” Today, after a few weeks of great designers taking full advantage of the CSS and JavaScript core of the app, I’ve instead been thinking, “Really! Another one!!” So I sat down at Chateau Marmont* with coder Matt Patenaude and designer Laurent Baumann to ask them some questions on their iTunes controller addition.

* A gross exaggeration. I actually did the entire thing via email but tried very hard to picture the Chateau Marmont in my head the whole time.

Luis Sosa: What’s the first iTunes controller you used? Synergy? A Dashboard widget? iTunes minimized off to one side?

Laurent: The first iTunes controller I really liked was X-Tunes back in 2004. It was the first application to sport a “floater” with controls.

Matt: To be perfectly honest, I never really used iTunes controllers up until about a year or so ago. Before Leopard, I would often throw iTunes into mini-mode and keep it always-on-top in the corner of my desktop—most of my music at that point was from old CDs, so album art display wasn’t a priority for me. When Leopard came—and I could give iTunes its own space and put it permanently out of my way—I started feeling the need for an easier way to control it. At first, I just used my remote control app, TuneConnect, locally connected to my own Mac. Then I got a CoverSutra license from MacHeist, and at the time, I fell in love with it.

Luis Sosa: CoverSutra and Cover Stream are both fairly talked-about and popular iTunes controllers. At what point did your frustrations with these and other options lead you into “I’ll do it my own damn self” mode?

Laurent: I’m often in this “I’ll do it my own damn self” mode, in fact. While I loved X-Tunes’ features, I really disliked its look. That’s what led me to start thinking of my own controller, back in 2005.

Matt: Well, let me put it to you this way: I never saw CoverSutra as anything more than a set of iTunes hotkeys. It was handy, but I never felt the value in it as more than something I could replicate with System Preferences and a few AppleScripts, and it certainly wasn’t something I would pay for. The concept of an “iTunes controller” as something actually beautiful instead of just somewhat convenient wasn’t very obvious to me—until Laurent approached me a handful of months ago, fed up at every iTunes controller he’d used. I guess you could say the idea found me.

Luis Sosa: When conceptualizing Bowtie, were the features of the app something you came up with independent of other apps, or to address specific issues you had with them?

Matt: The other apps were far too bloated—I never used half of the features in either CoverSutra or Cover Stream. I wanted something fast, resource-light, and relatively out-of-the-way. That was it. Too many applications try to be the be-all, end-all of every product even remotely close to their market, and I’ve never been a fan of that (and neither, by nature, is the Mac environment). Do one thing, and do it right. Simple as that.

Luis Sosa: Laurent, you’ve actually worked and designed for Cover Stream. How would you compare the process of coming up with designs to fit another programmer’s work versus knowing you were working on such a flexible, themable app that you yourself helped conceive?

Laurent: Working on someone else’s concept is not something I used to do in the past, but sometimes you have to admit someone else had a better idea (lol). It’s not very hard, actually, as long as the developer is open to suggestions and new ideas and as long as they trust your design sense.
I would say designing my own concept is the same work-wise, but it perhaps brings a bit more pride! In Bowtie, the theming system allowed me to really work on my own, to implement my own ideas—without having to rely on someone else, and this has been a really good experience for a control freak like me!

Luis Sosa: The Bowtie website mentions Cover Stream; do you use both?

Matt: When Laurent and I started working on Bowtie, we weren’t trying to take on the big boys of iTunes control—our product is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t aim to be a jack-of-all-trades. We particularly didn’t want to cause any bad blood with the wonderful Cover Stream folks, since Laurent also worked on that project, so we decided to recommend Cover Stream for people who need something with a little more oomph than Bowtie. For a lot of people, a compact, simple, and free iTunes controller will suffice, but some people do like more. For that, Cover Stream is great.

Internally though, Cover Stream and Bowtie work very differently. Cover Stream uses the new Leopard Scripting Bridge, whereas Bowtie uses Alastair Tse’s excellent EyeTunes framework, and in the future will use the yet-to-be-named TuneConnect 3 engine, powered by objc-appscript. Bowtie is designed very flexibly, and it’s very easy to switch out the internal iTunes control engine.

Not that you needed to know any of that, but I felt like sharing.

Luis Sosa: Have you heard any reactions from the Cover Stream crowd?

Laurent: People that used to love Cover Stream still love it, because it’s much more than just a desktop controller. There are some areas where features overlap, but that will not be the case when Cover Stream 3 will be out, since it will not rely on iTunes anymore to play music.

Matt: Explicitly, no, but I have to assume that all of the people saying “this is the best iTunes controller I’ve ever used” were using something before they discovered Bowtie was better. (Sorry, it’s hard to keep ego small.)

No, I haven’t really heard much from the Cover Stream crowd since it serves a slightly different market, though I’ve heard plenty of people saying they far prefer Bowtie to CoverSutra. Then again, I’ve also heard people saying they like CoverSutra better than Bowtie!

Luis Sosa: What was your reaction when you saw the MacThemes boards quickly taken over with [Bowtie app] tagged post?

Laurent: Very interested and excited about how much Bowtie could unleash imaginations. I saw some real gems, like the spinning CD and the typographic beauties, and I started to collect’em all. I’m glad and proud that Matt and I brought something exciting to the community.

Matt: Honestly, I was absolutely floored. I always knew Bowtie had the potential to be big, but I expected we’d need to do a lot of marketing in order to get it into the spotlight. I was shocked that just posting one link in the MacThemes forums elicited such a positive response. I couldn’t stop smiling for almost a week.

Luis Sosa: Any favorites?

Matt: I honestly haven’t found a Bowtie theme I haven’t really liked. Right now I’m using CD Original, by Abad Federico. I’m also a fan of Scotch Tape, by MisterJack (link unavailable), PHT by Emanuel Sá, an unreleased theme by Philipp Antoni (hopefully out soon), and of course all of Laurent’s themes!

Laurent: I love and use mainly Svart, Subtile, and Mail Stamp (link unavailable). But the one that really stunned me was Lustre. You will notice that I made Nano versions of the vinyl and the modern cases I did for CoverSutra in the past, but I didn’t manage to make a good classic case at this size. When I saw Lustre, I really admired how perfectly Manuel nailed the classic feeling. If he would allow me to, I would really like Lustre to be part of the default bundle for the 1.0 release.

Luis Sosa: Browsing themes has become a bit difficult for me since I’ve installed every single theme released. Any plans to revamp the theme selection screen?

Matt: Oh trust me, we’ve got plans. It’s definitely a pain with the current setup, so we’re going to shift to an iPhoto-style browser for themes. Haven’t fully developed it yet, but when that’s done we’ll be pretty close to having a working Beta 2.

Laurent: Of course, the alphabetic ordering in the latest beta was just a quick fix for big libraries like mine, too. But we plan a much better way to manage themes, indeed.

Luis Sosa: This question is for Matt: as a programmer, on a scale of 1-10 how far do you think the themes being released push the theming capabilities of the app?

Matt: Well, that’s kind of a difficult question to answer—I’d have to say maybe around 2. Immediately after release, I made a couple of small additions to the supported metadata, but the engine itself was already powerful enough that I haven’t had to make many changes.

That’s not to say that the themes couldn’t push the theming capabilities. I love working with designers to try to get special features they want ironed out. So far, it’s just that we’ve been lucky enough to not have many features that required extra work.

Luis Sosa: You’ve placed a big emphasis on simplicity here. Was there any feature you thought to include but scrapped? Was it a design decision or a programing issue? Is this a beta as in “We’re working towards a final release” beta, or the way Google uses beta?

Matt: This is a beta as in “I’m not yet happy with it, and I’ve got a lot of polishing to do.” It’ll definitely leave beta stage in far less time than Google’s products do.

There were a handful of features that I just said no to because I didn’t think they really fit in with the app’s goal, like network control (a la TuneConnect), music browsing, and a search feature (a la CoverSutra). Search, however, I’ve reconsidered: I initially said no because CoverSutra’s was pointless, slow, and got on my nerves, but then I remembered that I do have a bit of experience with fast iTunes searching, and wrote my own implementation. It’s different than what people are used to, and in my opinion, far more powerful and useful. More on that later though.

When I write programs, I don’t scrap ideas just because they’re programming issues. Laurent will tell you: I’ll often whine and complain if he asks me to do something that’s too hard, but I eventually end up doing it anyway. I’ve always been a big subscriber to the mentality that avoiding something because it’s more work for the developer is no excuse if it can make things easier for the user.

Luis Sosa: Let’s talk about design choices. Bowtie’s grab is mostly about giving users a choice in interface. So what was the design theory behind the persistent elements of the program—preference panes and the app icon?

Matt: In an ideal world, everything would be customizable, but that puts far too much burden on the designers, and even more on me to make sure that the app still functions properly if someone does something wrong in their theme. In making those concessions, we settled on a few fixtures of ordinary applications: the preferences window, and the application branding (icons, etc.). The preferences window conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines as nearly as possible. There really isn’t anything all that special about it, though a lot of thought has gone/is going into it to make the most common features as easy to find as possible.

As for branding, we just did our best to make it sexy and, well, Mac-like.

Luis Sosa: This question is for Laurent: of the 11 themes you created for the starter pack, some are what I’d consider standard fare for any iTunes controller. Others, however, are wonderfully inventive. The Vinyl Sleeve in particular caught my eye. It clearly shows the flexibility of the underlying programing used. When first approached by Matt about creating this app, did you have a particular theme in mind? What was the figurative “sketch on a napkin” for this?

Laurent: Honestly, all I knew is that I wanted a desktop controller; I had no idea how it would look exactly. When Matt implemented the theming system, it was an awesome experience for me. With my notions of JavaScript and CSS, I was able to experiment everything I wanted, whatever time it took. I remember having done at least 4 variants of the vinyl theme, each time trying something else.

Luis Sosa: So how long did it take you, from start to finish, to get from first draft to a beta you felt comfortable releasing?

Matt: The first draft probably came sometime in June. It was usable within a few of days, and I had it running pretty well by the first week of August—let’s say 1 or 2 months at the most? After that I just sat on it for awhile because I didn’t want it to take away from Façade and Architect development.

Truth be told, the beta I released wasn’t a beta I really felt comfortable releasing. It crashes if you quit iTunes while it’s running, and that bothers me. I wanted to get that fixed before I released it (I finally have gotten it fixed in the next internal beta), but Laurent kept begging for me to let it out of its cage, so one afternoon I finally decided it’d do for now. Probably the best decision I could’ve made.

Luis Sosa: Why free?

Matt: All of the applications I release under my own name are free. I always like to look at it something like this: it happens every so often that I’ll be surfing the intertubes and find an absolute gem of a Mac app, something that feels so natural and works so perfectly that I absolutely need to add it to my collection. Quicksilver was one of these apps. You install it, you play around with it, you fall in love. Do you know how much more amazing that feeling gets when you realize that app was free?

I try to make the best applications I possibly can, and then I give them away. It’s my way of saying that you don’t need to pay big money to get big quality.

Laurent: When Matt contacted me for the first time, it was about TuneConnect, his free application. Of course he first asked me if I had problems working on free/open source software. We talked about that many times, and we both really like this community and what you feel when everybody enjoys your work. Ho, and I also don’t like deadlines!

Luis Sosa: And finally, why Bowtie? Why not Ascot?

Matt: The initial working name for the app was just “Tunes,” but I wasn’t really a fan, so we started thinking about purpose. When I thought about an iTunes controller, I envisioned a butler who would go over to iTunes and manipulate the controls for you (that’s where the pre-beta tagline “Louder? Of course, sir” came from.) From there, we got “Bowtie,” since a) most butlers wear them, b) it’s something that’s easy to change based on your mood (like Bowtie’s themes), and c) it looks damn sexy digitally imposed onto a CD. The icon and the name evolved simultaneously.

Oh, and “Ascot” is too pretentious. Sure, I work for Slightly Pretentious Software, but that goes beyond even our boundaries!

Laurent: “Tunes” wasn’t bad, but we wanted something “sexier.” The French touch, you know.

You can download Bowtie on the app’s website.

AldanH has released his version of Sony’s Microvault drives, in an assortment of rich and enticing colours. An icon that would look great sitting alongside .Parth’s new MacBook Pro which is as detailed as you could possibly expect and beautifully toned.

Shelves are apparently the new hot ticket on macthemes and Deluxive has released a hole plethora of Shelves in photoshop format for you all to have a play with. Penultimately in our big count down of the latest releases here on macthemes is Spargett’s Torrent icon. An unusual, but effective icon for all those that use bittorent software. Last, but no certainly not least is cj1224’s cute but usable MailPlane icon, fun, friendly and perfectly formed to sit in your dock.

The first release I’m going to cover is a little unusual. For some reason the idea of finder backgrounds has never really taken off in the mac community, but I have a feeling that after SpiralStairs’ latest release of shelves backgrounds, that’s all going to change.

Matthewrex has released a few batman related icons in the last week, this has to be my favourite. The level of detail on Harvey’s Lucky coin is fantastic. I’ll wrap things up with aneeshparekh’s TV Show icons. Clean, sophisticated and sharp, this set will aid any tv fans collection.

I always start out big, the largest, most detailed and biggest release of the day gets to go first. Once again Jonas Rask has released a set of stunning icons in the form of an iTunes replacement set. Packaged in three colour variations and two disc types, well worth an icon connoisseurs perusal.

Batting for the iconfactory with more consistent releases than we have ever seen from them, is Louie Mantia, following up his Wall-E drive set featured earlier this week with another icon based on the film. Microbe-Obliterator continues the film theme nicely and looks perfect in any dock. The last icon is by an unknown outsider to our little design village, Fayceless has released a great Apple hardware inspired icon for the new Cinema Displays, something new MacBook owners will surely be happy to see.

Kicking things off with the biggest release of the day. Louie Mantia of iconfactory fame has released a series of hard-drive icons based on the smash hit from pixar, Wall-E. The set contains all the usual drive variations in two styles based on the main characters, Wall-E and Eve. Accompanied by a dock and wallpaper.

The next two releases are individual icons. The first being another drive icon, this time by Janik, designed to be as close to the drive we all have in our machines as possible. Check it out here. The final release is something a little more unusual for the mac platform. Leo6247 has released a new firefox icon in cool blue and black, allowing the famous fox to sit a little more comfortably in the OSX environment.

Wallpapers are notoriously easy to create and almost as impossible to perfect. There’s something very daunting and yet ultimately freeing about having such a large space to work in that few designers manage to use the space well, but Kon is a pro. His wallpapers are effortlessly sleek. Comfortably flowing through the screen as if they should move like a babbling brook someone has dropped beautifully coloured inks into. Check out his latest release called Paranoid which comes in six stunning variation.

I really should have posted this release as soon as it came out, not for the first time however, I was a little lazy. VLC media player is almost certainly the most commonly used video player on Apple’s platform with the only exception no doubt being quicktime which is bundled in. Fantomasss has released a wonderful UI mod that changes this rather aged looking player into something apple would be proud to put their name on. Check out his Delicious mod.

Rarely is an artist so kinda as to share with the public any form of resource. The release of an icon, a desktop, a dock is a rare thing. Artists create these works for us, free of charge and we must be eternally grateful for the kindness they show us. Even rarer still, is when an icon artist is kind enough to share their resource files with us. DDrDark released his version of Apple’s Airport Express in icon and photoshop formats so we can all have a dig around.