Do you miss the golden days of Kaleidoscope on the Classic Mac OS? Are you a former scheme designer, like myself, who is DYING to create a theme for the new X OS? Well, here is the program that will help you out.
ThemePark is the "industry standard" in theme creation for Mac OS X. Like most applications there are both good and bad things about it. The best thing is that most of them are good. And the things that aren't are due to a lack of understanding on the way things work in OS X.
The strong points for ThemePark:
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STRONG photoshop integration. When I first got permission to review this application this did not exist and pasting some things from ThemePark to Photoshop didn't work very well. Now that little bug is gone. Want to alter something? Just choose the "object" and click the "Send to Photoshop" toolbar icon. Do your work, save it, then go back into ThemePark and click the "Receive from Photoshop" icon. That simple.
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Everything you need to alter seems to be right at your fingertips.
Some bad issues:
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The documentation is very sparse and is only available on-line. I had planned on putting this review up AFTER creating a theme of my own. But due to the complexity of creating a theme even with this app and not knowing HOW to do certain things I want to do I'm putting the review up early. I thought it would only take me a month to do a theme (the basic time it took me to do a great K-scheme), but I'm only about 5% complete with the theme I have in mind.
This program is a great asset if you have a strong knowledge of the inner workings of the Mac OS. But it can be frustrating and annoying if you don't. It's basically trial and error. Hopefully in the future they will have a complete manual that will not only be available on-line but also as a separate PDF download. If you want to put your mark on the Mac OS get this program, buy it, and do your magic.
UPDATE: Version 2 allows a theme artist to easily add desktops, icons, and mightymouse cursor sets to their themes. This helps to make most guikits alter about 90% of the system with absolutely no worries. All that is left is the ability to alter the login and boot panels. With this upgrade I've upgraded its rating from 5 to 5+ apples. If there was better documentation with it I would have given it the Golden Apple.
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