MacWrite was developed by Encore Systems, a company founded by a former Apple employee called Randy Wigginton. ResEdit was not included with the system software installation. If you wanted to hack your Mac, the tools were available for it, but it was not included with the Mac. In OS 9, rudimentary theme changes were provided by Apple in the Appearance control panel. Apple does not prevent or discourage anyone from theme editing on a Mac running OS X. The theme resources are more complex with OS X than with OS 9. If it were so easy, there would be several freeware applications for applying themes to OS X. As it stands, there is only one well-accepted application that doesn't seem to gut the resources or push things to the edge of stability and it is a commercial product. Even with Shapeshifter, many users complain about poor performance. I have learned how to step around Shapeshifter's land mines. It just isn't easy to get all the resources edited into a theme. Mistakes can lead to a system that boots to a messy gui that is nearly impossible to navigate or to crashes. People will hack their computer themes just as they will hack their mobile phones. I have done both and I feel both my Mac and my phone are better off for it.
MacWrite was developed by Encore Systems, a company founded by a former Apple employee called Randy Wigginton. ResEdit was not included with the system software installation. If you wanted to hack your Mac, the tools were available for it, but it was not included with the Mac. In OS 9, rudimentary theme changes were provided by Apple in the Appearance control panel. Apple does not prevent or discourage anyone from theme editing on a Mac running OS X. The theme resources are more complex with OS X than with OS 9. If it were so easy, there would be several freeware applications for applying themes to OS X. As it stands, there is only one well-accepted application that doesn't seem to gut the resources or push things to the edge of stability and it is a commercial product. Even with Shapeshifter, many users complain about poor performance. I have learned how to step around Shapeshifter's land mines. It just isn't easy to get all the resources edited into a theme. Mistakes can lead to a system that boots to a messy gui that is nearly impossible to navigate or to crashes. People will hack their computer themes just as they will hack their mobile phones. I have done both and I feel both my Mac and my phone are better off for it.
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/02/10/business/company-news-ashton-tate-s-new-products.html