Phill Ryu writes in to tell us that public voting has begun for the latest MacThemes contest (in which three of the themes will be chosen to win $1000 in software and become available for ShapeShifter). There are tons of entries (55, to be exact), and they all look pretty darn good in my civilian opinion.Overall, the public is being pretty discriminating-- the highest score I can find is 3.5 out of 5. Standouts so far are Pluto, AOR, California, and Plexis, but voting just started, and it's supposed to go through next Wednesday, so I'd expect things to change between now and then.
If you're bored, head over to MacThemes and pass out a few ratings for the cause. I guess the public rating will count for half of the final score (with judges accounting for another part of the score), so every vote counts. We should see the winners sometime after the 15th.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-10-2007 @ 9:43AM
Lerxst said...
I can't understand why people think making the 3 window buttons on the top-left identical is a great idea. So far the themes look pretty much just like any other cool-ish theme available, nothing really jaw-dropping...
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8-10-2007 @ 10:24AM
Mo said...
I'm not surprised the votes are average—very few Shapeshifter themes that I've seen don't make Mac OS X look like a badly-skinned GNOME desktop.
What would be nice would be for Apple to release a couple more colour schemes beyond “Aqua” and “Graphite”. A “Black” would be rather splendid.
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8-10-2007 @ 11:52AM
brian said...
As long as they release a theme that looks totally stock but with a non-transparent menubar for 10.5, I'll be happy. (Assuming Apple doesn't make that a settable preference.)
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8-10-2007 @ 12:21PM
Floggy said...
ANOTHER contest from this guy? Whatever happened to that dream app thing? Vaporware of course. Ryu is shady marketeer. I wish he would go away.
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8-10-2007 @ 12:29PM
Lerxst said...
Floggy, did you actually try and checked mydreamapp's site before jumping on conclusions?
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8-10-2007 @ 12:33PM
Chad said...
Unsurprisingly, I don't think any of them are all that great. Not that I could do any better. Did anyone seriously think we'd see some earth-shattering themes?
And why people are still shoveling the crap that is Shapeshifter, I'll never know.
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8-10-2007 @ 12:39PM
Alan said...
I already voted on a bnuch of them, and I have to agree with Lerxst. There isn't anything to call home about. Some people just don't know that GUIs are for ease-of-use, and so they just design with eye candy in mind. Eye candy is fine, but do it in a way that makes it easier to work.
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8-10-2007 @ 2:03PM
Martin Sketchley said...
I appreciate the work that's gone into these things and that they obviously float the boat of those who've made them, but to me it's a bit like ordering a meal in an expensive Chinese (Vietnamese, Thai, Indian - whatever) restaurant, then pouring ketchup all over it.
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8-10-2007 @ 5:25PM
soho said...
I consider the results to be honest and far from "discriminating". If you conpare the entries to well-known themes like SuMa, ETERNAL, or the new GAIA GuiKit, you will realize that the competition skins look pretty outdated and uninspiring in overall.
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8-11-2007 @ 11:40AM
Shig said...
Yup, thoroughly uninspired. Half of these are unusable, with some even painful to look at. Of the rest, a handful have some potential, but need a lot more work. Give me something that isn't either soft monochrome or metal and plastic, and I'll think about it.
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