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Are you a skinner?

Written on December 16, 2005 by Josh Pigford and 24 people have commented

Back in my high school days (which also happened to by my Windows days), I and all of my friends found it quite eventful to skin the fire out of our Windows 95 interface. Windows themes were plentiful and we didn’t have anything better to do.

Now that I’m using the beautiful OS X interface, I’ve found that I really have no desire to alter the interface much. I just find it appealing to the eyes yet not intrusive over overpowering of the object of focus, whether that be a photo, a website, etc etc.

So the questions stands, do you alter the look of OS X in any way? Or do you just leave it be?

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  1. #1 Andew says:

    i have a custom background, and i have also changed alot of my icons, in my dock area and in the windows, and i have a custom screen saver. other than that i also them mine be…

  2. #2 Enano says:

    Yes, I can’t live without ShapeShifter, but it’s not like there’s anything wrong with the default theme, it’s just that I get a bit bored of Metal, and Aqua, so I tried UNO, or iT5 themes (both unify, one is like Mail, the other one like iTunes) as well as some other fun themes like Somatic and Aero.

  3. #3 Bobby Skinner says:

    I am a “Skinner” by name. I did skin windows, but it was ugly and needs the help. I have not looked into skinning the mac because i love it as is. Though every once in a while when i am feeling nostalgic I would like to select a Platinum or system 7 look.

  4. #4 maique madeira says:

    UNO all the way.
    i love the way it makes everything look clean and cool.

  5. #5 David Rodgerson says:

    I think it’s a high school thing. Like putting European taillights and ground effects on your car. When you get old you realize/think it’s just a tacky waste of time.

    I think the question should be: Are you a skinner, and how old are you? I think the demographics would back me up.

    So yes, in high school I used to skin. I used Aaron when Mac OS….er System 7 was around. Also, I managed to download the aborted children’s and high tech theme for Mac OS 8, and loved the high tech one to death! Now, OS X is nice by itself and the 3rd party themes don’t do anything for me. Plus I’m sick of extension hacks, and haven’t used one that wasn’t necessary since OS 9, possibly 8.

  6. #6 Wysiwyg says:

    Iridium all the way, baby. I really hate the brushed metal, and with this theme everything fells cleaner and a bit faster. And it looks really good with my iBook.

  7. #7 stevo says:

    oooh, seconded for Iridium!
    brushed metal’s a bit heavy for my eyes, so i’m not so much giving OSX a different skin, as trying to eliminate one of it’s variations :)

  8. #8 David Appleyard says:

    I just use Shapeshifter and Milk all the time - It’s effectively my default interface. Gorgeous.

  9. #9 giovanni says:

    can’t think of any reason to mess with the UI. it would be akin to cover my leather car seats with tha wolly crap.

  10. #10 Richard says:

    I just installed UNO yesterday and brushed away all of that brushed aluminum. Everything is a cool cream silver now. My only concern is stability, but so far, so good.

  11. #11 N. Godbout says:

    giovanni: What if all your car seats were different colors and shades of leather? I think you might be whistling a different tune. And to call all current options for replacement GUI’s “tha wolly crap” is pretty naive. UNO is very complete, and really more of an enhancement than a replacement.

  12. #12 Rocco says:

    Yeah, bought Shapeshifter - I like it… Kind of got sick of staring at Aqua 10hrs a day, so I change from time to time (plus it makes you look a little more “pro” in the eyes of the unelightened!).. I have a nice silver / lime / cubic theme going on right now. I was worried that it might slow my system, but ShaShi must be build very well as I’ve experienced zero problems (yet). [Editor, motion graphixdsgnr]

  13. #13 Kokopelli says:

    I am a skinner though nothing fancy. I find AlumiteX to be unbobtrusive and the uniformity of look easier on the eyes than the default hodge podge of interfaces.

    and to throw a bit of a wrench in the age theory above, I am have been out of high school for well over a decade.

  14. #14 Taylor says:

    I am an UNO man myself. I downloaded it and I like it so I’ve kept it. I didn’t like ShapeShifter too much though.

  15. #15 Steven Jay Cohen says:

    I want to thank you for the mentions of Iridium.

    I named it Iridium because Iridium is often described as a platinum-like metal. And, Apple’s last unified look was Platinum.

    My only goal was to blend all of the looks into one look that could be applied everywhere. Also, I wanted it to be free. So, iridium is opensource and incredibly stable (if I do say so myself).

    Thanks again for the mention!

    Steven

  16. #16 Steve says:

    OS X’s interface is perfection. Nobody designs UI like Apple. The only thing I change from the default is to use the graphite appearance instead of blue. The blue Apple menu title is a little too XP. Although I do sorta like the red, yellow, and green window buttons. Too bad I can’t have it both ways.

  17. #17 yj says:

    I don’t skin OS X itself much (short of switching out Safari’s brushed metal look using Saft), but I do like other things to look like OS X… I recently finished making a Tiger-inspired theme for del.icio.us (runnable using any good CSS injector).

  18. #18 Chris McElligott says:

    I make themes…

  19. #19 Kristen says:

    I use Shapeshifter but tend to use only themes that are similar to the default Mac theme. My favourite is Smooth Stripes, and I also use Milk, Leopard, Ruler AGV (not like Aqua, but still awesome), Rhapsodized (come on, Tiger update!), and FatalE (again, not like Aqua, but still great). Smooth Stripes is on my iBook 90% of the time. I like how it just smoothes out the interface and gives it a more finished look. I was a skinner on Windows, as well, using Mac lookalike themes back in the day.

  20. #20 Chris Holland says:

    i wear my hair very very short, does that make me a skinner? :|

  21. #21 Josh Pigford says:

    Chris, as a matter of fact…it does. :p

  22. #22 Chris Holland says:

    what if i was to take to taxidermy?

  23. #23 Michael Bryne says:

    I use whiteout to restore the 10.2 white pinstriped theme and get rid of (most of) the brushed metal, ClearDock to uh, clear the dock and some plain dock seperators used to group my applications into groups, no idea where I found those

    Whiteout - http://suicidegirls.com/apps/whiteout/
    ClearDock - http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/cleardock
    Dock Seperators - ?

  24. #24 Egypt Urnash says:

    I use Shapeshifter and the “Good Grey” theme because the demetallifizer hack quit working under Tiger. If that still worked, I’d be using the ‘graphite’ flavor of Aqua for everything.

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