The Creation of MacThemes
Maybe you are a regular visitor of MacThemes, who has been coming by since our first teaser came up. Or perhaps you stumbled here without ever having heard of the site or its community before. Either way, at some point, you must’ve wondered how websites like this one are made. The story of this website’s creation may not contain the drama of large scale or high profile projects such as Amazon or Google, but it has twists (Xthemes?!), community celebrities (BBX, Adam Betts, Max, Swiz, Carbon, Jason, and more!), heated arguments, and a mad rush to the deadline of its own. This is the story of MacThemes. It began in November of 2003….
Inspiration
It was during the November of 2003, with the release of ShapeShifter 1.0, that I got really excited with the world of themeing. I had already been an enthusiastic theme user and a regular visitor of the MacNN GUI Customization forums, but Jason’s sudden release, aided with some hype and teasers, was what drew me in. Like many others, I stayed awake the night before its release, hoping that I would be able to download it at midnight. When midnight EST passed, and it was still to be released, I waited until midnight central time. Then, sometime soon after, I fell asleep and had a fitful night of sleep. The day after I continued to check Unsanity from school, with what was really an unhealthy amount of refreshing, until it was finally released during my calculus class. I downloaded it, using an ethernet cable borrowed from my teacher’s computer, and checked it out. For several minutes, I fumbled with the application, unable to figure out how to apply themes in my excited state. By that point, I had a couple of curious classmates looking over my shoulder, and the theme previews were enticing, but for some reason the apply button wasn’t lighting up! Finally, after fiddling around, I managed to apply my first guiKit. (The radio buttons in the list were tripping me up, and they have since been replaced with a more intuitive interface.) What I saw impressed me. I had never seen anything like Max Rudberg’s EYLO before, and if this was what ShapeShifter could do, the future of themeing was looking pretty rosy. And at that point, it didn’t matter that Bill Bart’s fabled Omega was not included, or that perhaps it wasn’t the end of all things as had been expected by some. I didn’t care, ShapeShifter rocked! The excitement of that day and the nights before was the beginning of my thoughts to become involved in this community somehow, to give back to it, even though I wasn’t an artist.
The next couple weeks went by very quickly, as I got sucked into the GUI community during a time of prolific theme development and innovations. I tried out the new releases that accompanied ShapeShifter with excitement and participating actively in discussions at MacNN. In addition, I befriended Jasper Hauser and gave him his first substantial icon design job. Together, we worked on icons for my family software company’s products iStorm and iChalk. With Jasper’s first icon job done, I began to look for other projects he could contribute to. I had always been a huge supporter of Adium since its first release, and over the last year or so, the lead developer, Adam Iser, had become a very good friend - a natural result after dozens of late night discussions on Adium’s interface and direction and many hours clocked together playing Warcraft III on Battle.net. Adium 2 was in sore need of icons. I recommended Jasper to Adam, and began working with Jasper again on several icons for Adium 2, suggesting concepts and icon metaphors to him, while he drew them into reality.
Meanwhile, the idea for MacThemes.net slowly bloomed. The first person I mentioned the idea to was Bill Bart. I had befriended him earlier that year, as I had pestered him for a peek at (the as of yet unreleased) BBX: Mirai more than anyone else, and he had complied, sending me a little image for my troubles. From there, we had begun to chat together about themeing and other things. Soon enough, I realized that he could make or break a theme site’s launch as a highly respected figure in the GUI customization community, so I emailed him about the possibility of an interview or a peek at his upcoming and highly anticipated theme, BBX: Omega.
I figured such a preview alone would be enough to fuel the launch of the site, and made that pretty clear in my email. He was the man who could singlehandedly launch this site with a thousand visitors. Bill replied with the promise of some sort of a sneak peek of the theme for the site’s launch, but warned me that he was worried about PC themers ripping a skin out of a mockup. “We can do an interview and I’ll try and have the iPod teaser or something for Xmas… I’m not thrilled about showing anything because the XP kids jump on this stuff faster than you realize and it’ll be weeks yet before the theme is out.” But even an interview would be enough. I was ecstatic at his response, and the project began to become reality.
The second person I contacted about the website was Adam Betts, icon designer extraordinaire and an acquaintance I had met through beta testing Cliché Software’s Stratèges. As I realize now, there wasn’t anyone better to design MacThemes, but we had first met without a thought of the site in my mind. Serendipity? It’s easy to imagine so, especially as this was just one of many accidental contacts and coincidences that made this site possible. But anyhow, Adam had designed icons for the project and I had been beta testing. Sometime in October, he had invited me to play a game, and soon enough, we were talking about Stratèges, Adium, Panther betas, and video games. Then, in late November, I popped the question of a theme site. At the time, I had no name for the site, no design, and no plans for its future besides news, reviews, and the Bill Bart interview. But I knew that it was a niche waiting to be filled, and that I could probably support the managing and writing aspects of the website. As I told Adam in an iChat conversation dated the 24th of November, 2003, it was “a completely open playing field, without a single competitor, and with a community of hardcore theme users to boot”. Recognizing the need for a successful theme site to have a good site design, Adam Betts offered his services. We began talking about the design.
The Project Begins
With the project underway, I began to consult themers Carbon and Kevin Husted (better known as Swiz) about their opinions. We agreed that the site design should probably be relatively neutral, to let the themes stand out, and went on to discuss other details. What would be the site’s tagline? Would we host theme files? Would the site have any visitors? (As Kevin noted, “the biggest hinderance to such a site is the small number of users actually using themes in OS X”.) But we figured that at least several hundred community members would visit each day. And then, of course, there was the minor matter of the name. What would we call this theme site?
There was a lot of discussion and arguments regarding this decision. Kevin suggested “OSXGUIHub.com”, which according to him, spelled out exactly what the site was about. It seemed clunky to me. “Do we really need to mention OS X in there?” I asked. “Isn’t OS 9 basically dead?”. In response, I suggested InsideMacThemes, which I thought sounded pretty good, at least better than Kevin’s suggestion, represented what the site would do with our planned “Insider” feature, and could perhaps result in a collaboration with the name’s inspiration, InsideMacGames. I emailed them about it, and they never responded. So running out of time, I wrote down a long list of possible names in my notes during one sleepy morning at biology, and showed it to a friend sitting nearby, a fellow theme enthusiast. He picked “Themed” and “MacThemes” as his favorites. Later that day, basically decided on “Themed”, I told the others (most thought of it positively, Kevin stuck with OSXGUIHub), and went to register the domain. It was already taken, so I ended up registering MacThemes.net, candidate number two.
