Max Rudberg’s BBX: Mercury X is a “remix” of Bill Bart’s original BBX Mercury for Kaleidoscope. And the difference between a “remix” and a “port” is pretty huge. Max’s own version of the classic skin brings all the best elements to OS X, with perhaps even more polish, thanks to nifty OS X innovations such as drop shadows and animated buttons.

Aesthetics
By any standard, BBX: Mercury X is a beautiful theme. Mercury is basically a mesh between highly reflective silver and black plastics and metals, and while this may sound generic, the effect is unlike that of any other theme. This is due to Max’s enormous talent at making elements that should be uninteresting, interesting.

For an example, the buttons throughout Mercury are beyond imagination. While a simple, sharp, reflective silver button is easy to imagine, Max’s go beyond whatever you could think of. Buttons have a very smooth, and realistic metal feel to them. They are not sharp and cartoony, as to be expected; instead, the push buttons pulse so smoothly, and with such a pleasant pulse, that it is hard for me to pull myself away from them to write this review. Why are Mercury’s push button animations such a cool experience? It’s hard to say, but they are clearly not a fluke. Max also revives the translucent black menus seen today in so many themes. Instead of the standard, spare black menu that cuts out from these other themes, Max’s have elegant and subtle light stripes running down each side, making the menus that much more interesting.

One minor gripe? I was personally a bit disorientated by the theme’s unique window widget symbols. Instead of the standard x/-/+, Mercury presented itself with a square, down arrow, and cross. Luckily, Max came through once more. Standard symbols are selectable in the Appearance settings of Apple’s System Preferences. Now, I can satisfy myself with standard symbols engraved on the metal.

Usability
While you’d think a shiny, metallic and plastic theme would be hard on the eyes, Mercury is not. I suspect this to be partly due to the mix of hard, reflective elements (the titlebar, menu, progress bars, and scrollbar) with much softer, smoother elements (buttons, popups, tabs). Also, here is a minor issue involving Cocoa metal windows, minus Safari. (In other words, iChat.) The reflection in the titlebar unfortunately obscures the text somewhat, though luckily, it leaves the text still totally readable. Hopefully Jason Harris will be able to fix this minor bug for a future ShapeShifter release. Nevertheless, the final result is undeniably usable. (Even Microsoft Office works in Mercury!) Just be careful about active push buttons. They tend to kill productivity pretty efficiently.

Extras
Being a Max Rudberg production, BBX: Mercury is, of course, filled with goodies. There are application skins for Safari, iChat, Addressbook, Calculator, and even an amazing one for iTunes. The iTunes skin has to be seen to be believed. Somehow, Max managed to work around the limitations, and produce a shockingly complete iTunes skin that matches Mercury almost perfectly. (Only the slight lavender tint is missing).

Also included in the package are several desktops and tile ready images by the the notorious Bill Bart. Several work very well with the theme: I especially love the Ship Plate tiles. However, quite frankly, many of these desktops are dated, and I hope Max or Bill considers adding a few more in the future. (They were designed for the original Kaleidoscope scheme many years ago.) Mikkel Madsen’s icons are also linked to from the theme package, and these are pretty amazing. Include the nifty extras such as the metallically modded Finder labels, and you get one heck of a package. This is truly a classic.

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