MacThemes 2 public voting has begun

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.

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.

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.

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.

Floggy, did you actually try and checked mydreamapp's site before jumping on conclusions?

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.

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.)

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.

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well-known themes like SuMa, ETERNAL, or the new GAIA GuiKit, you will realize that the competition skins look pretty outdated and uninspiring in overall.

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...