11 May 2025
A new site from Daniel Erambert:
Mac Themes Garden is dedicated to showcasing schemes made for Kaleidoscope and celebrating the customization and expressiveness it enabled on Classic Mac OS.
For a brief time in the mid ’90s, it was possible to customise the classic Mac interface, creating and installing custom themes via an app called Kaleidoscope. Apple even released a theme selector in the system settings, though this was never as well used as Kaleidoscope. I have good memories of downloading and installing themes on the family Performa, with mixed results: some were great, some were terrible and some crashed the system entirely.
Unsurprisingly, Steve Jobs killed custom themes almost immediately on his return to Apple in the late 90’s and modern macOS has never had support for themes, deliberately I suspect. While the decision was probably the right one in terms of keeping a consistent UI (plus a lot of the themes were ugly or poorly finished, interfering with Apple’s clean lines), we have also lost a lot of the creativity and fun that made personal computing personal.
This site is a lovingly-created collection of nearly 4000 themes, each one manually screenshotted and added to the collection. A wonderful resource, but I can’t imagine having the patience to work through each one by hand.
Also check out Daniel’s blog post on building the site – love his attention to detail implementing the Mac OS Platinum style in CSS.