Nekochan Net

hello

are there any alternative skins for the current osx available anywhere? (i mean not the x11, which is not just a different skin)
how easy how laborous would it be to make one? (I dont mind it the way it is, but i'd rather have a bitmapped one that looks like quark 2 or something and get all performance on tasks i really need)

hello and welcome

are you talking about appearance themes ?

check this topic
viewtopic.php?t=2156

yes, there are apps aimed to create themes, but you could try to use the good grey theme, it is plain, 2D godness

firstly you need to download ShapeShifter, a theme manager, then you need to get themes to use with it.

just visit http://www.macupdate.com and type in the search field "ShapeShifter", a list´ll show you the whole collection of themes available to use with that theme manager.

a couple of links:

the theme manager to be downloaded for you:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/13335

the plain 'good grey' theme:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14071

please note that there are lots of them, it is just a matter of tastes really.

hope this helps.

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hmm; your reply actually totally hits it. But now that I think about it – isn't it that the aqua surface uses 3D-rendering for its objects? I think so. Now, just changing the appearence may be an esthetic relief, and I don't despise that; however, it's unlikely to speed up performance. To that end, would we have to turn off the entire aqua level and put on a different gui altogether? Or can the effortsome 3D-factor be turned off while aqua still operating? I know it doesn't eat up cpu, it's only the 3d-rendering-module. But this still seems to be the bottleneck, at least in my machine. Serious issues.

While themes can be changed it's VERY unlikely you'll find much to speed up your machine. What specs do you have if I may ask?

There's no 3d rendering going on in Aqua, Aqua is pretty much bitmap based, the graphics card is just used for the compositing stage of things. In Tiger, whenever that's released, it'll be doing even more on the card for more speedups.

Aqua uses transparencies in it's display of graphics which is provided by the display rendering engine (Quartz) which is based on the PDF file format. Mac OS X is the first system to use PDF as a display format (previous systems used either Postscript or Pict for the display format).

What you'll find is that at this point the rendering of elements on the screen is not actually slowing the system down at all anymore. On the other hand some key graphics elements of the GUI are designed to display an effect over a certain period of time... no matter how fast or slow your system is. The fastest G5 should display something like a dialog sheet lowering into place at the same rate as a first generation G4. Most people who expect all those animations to be tied to the processor speed are usually disappointed when all those effects are pretty much unchanged. The animations in the GUI are like quicktime movies or mp3s. Your favorite song shouldn't play any faster on a fast system, it should take as long as it takes. It is the same thing here.

On a side note, Apple has changed the time needed for animations in each successive version of Mac OS X since the Developer Previews. The most noticeable change came in the jump from 10.1 to 10.2.

Also, removing Aqua is removing the application environment for most Mac applications. I, personally, have found that apps not running at all seem slower than apps that can run... but that is just me.

ok I see. The little animations don't disturb me really; what does disturb me is the fact that although I run the latest system (10.3.5) on a PowerBook 800 MHz G4 with 768 MB SDRAM, I sometimes experience out of memory symptoms in TextEdit (can you believe it?), although nothing's running except Limewire, Safari, Address Book, Mail, nothing else, which in my view shouldn't handicap my machine. And actually, it never seemed to react as fast as my old g3 did running 8.6. But apparently this isn't the way.

Wow, that is a little odd. My system has a G4/500 (with 512 MB of RAM) running 10.2 and is way faster than my 8.6 system (with a G3/500 in it). I've been known to pound away at TextEdit while having Photoshop, GoLive, ImageReady, Acrobat, Create and OmniWeb open without any noticeable slow down.

I don't think that this has anything to do with the GUI, and it is definitely not normal operation for a system of your speed (though as I recall, Limewire is not the most friendly app you could leave running on your system). You might want to check into this further.

Limewire is a performance killer in my experience. Try Poisoned for OSX instead, it does Gnutella + FastTrack (Kazaa), and is a whole lot faster.

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