MAGICPREFS MAC OS X 10.6 SOFTWARE
MAGICPREFS MAC OS X 10.6 CODE

Now I won’t get into the whole debate about whether or not they’re better or worse than the previous ones, but they are different. With the release of Creative Suite 5, Adobe brought with it a new set of icons for all their applications. And right now, you can get an absolutely fantastic icon customizing and organizing app for free. But to be honest, Apple has improved the appearance of the OS to the point where even the most avid themed simply preferred the clean look of the standard theme. It’s sad to see theming and customization fade off into the sunset. It surely won’t be long before it can no longer customize System icons. But it’s future is most decidedly in doubt. For those like me who used CandyBar for it’s icon collection organizing feature, and the ability to quickly and easily export app icons as PNG images with transparency intact, the fact that it still works is a bit of relief. Thankfully, Panic made CandyBar freely downloadable, and updated it for Mountain Lion. For many years, CandyBar was the gold-standard of customizing icons.

MAGICPREFS MAC OS X 10.6 SOFTWARE

If you need any more evidence, Panic Software recently announced they were sunsetting their icon customization tool, CandyBar.

MAGICPREFS MAC OS X 10.6 CODE

Because of the code signing of all apps sold through the Mac App Store, altering files contained in individual apps (such as icons) rendered them either useless, or at the very least prevented you from updating them in the Mac App Store.īetween code signing, recently implemented Sandboxing rules, and the release of OS X Mountain Lion (which prevents theming of the Dock), it’s all but a dead art.

But when Apple released the Mac App Store, customizing your Mac desktop all but died. But it was never to the extent that you could in Mac OS 9.Įventually (I don’t remember if it was OS 10.4 or 10.5), theming became nearly impossible. There were themes, if only a few dozen, and of course you could still customize icons. It took a long time before creative developers figured out a way to bring customization to OS X. Mac OS X was a top-to-bottom change to the system architecture, and theming was infinitely more difficult. But that all changed when Apple released Mac OS X. There were literally thousands of options. Theming websites sprout up almost weekly, offering window themes, icons, and other theming items. Theming your desktop was so popular that it was nearly its own sub-culture. Back in the day of Mac OS 7, 8 and 9, Apple didn’t make it too terribly difficult to customize the OS with themes and custom icons.

Magicprefs mac os x 10.6