Though at that point Adam and I were convinced that Kevin had something personal against him, we generally agreed with his and Max’s criticisms about the lack of interest in the design, and Adam went back to work. When he came back about a week later, in mid December, it was with another totally redone design that was colorful, bold, stylish, and extremely eye catching. It was basically the design you see today, but with a plain orange orange fabric background, and each item taped to the background. In a group chat with Jason, Carbon, Kevin and Adam, the response was extremely positive. Jason, having a fetish for the color orange, loved the bright hue of the site. But that was my main sticking point with the design. The metaphor didn’t quite seem to click. What was scotch tape doing on what looked like orange fabric? Plus, orange seemed a bit too bold, and, well, sort of out of the blue. So I suggested to Adam a few other background image possibilities, such as a blue texture based on jeans, or perhaps a blueprint such as the new XCode icon, which I loved. A day later, he came with the updated design, now with a blueprint as its background, and everything fell into place. Suddenly, his design made much more sense. The paperclips felt natural lying on a blueprint, and the logo was attached with pushpins. News items were pieces of paper laid out on the grid. The site design was finished. And in retrospect, Adam and I agree that the awesome result was largely thanks to Kevin, who had told us exactly what he thought of the previous attempts, and had pushed Adam into creating this much, much improved design.

The Beginning of the End

There were two weeks left, and I had a host, a working domain, and a final design. I had Jasper design a teaser image, which was a black Apple logo with a zipper down the middle (”skin your mac”), and I posted a teaser thread at MacNN. Later, Jasper created a new teaser image for me, a black present wrapped in lavender ribbons, meant to represent our launch interview with Bill Bart on Omega (which included the same colors in its design). I contacted Tom McMahon, asked if he was interested in becoming our flash artist, and the result of that was a gorgeous version of the present that softly pulsed a lavender light. On a black background, and with our tagline below it, the glowing present became the final teaser page for the site. I added the final touch: a launch date of January 1st.

Now, there were only two remaining things to finish. A working version of the final design, coded for Movable Type, and some content. But we had two full weeks! After all this planning and design work, these final steps would be easy, right?

The first thing to do was to find a coder. Adam had previously suggested Jan Van Boghout, whom he knew through a few previous projects and MacNN. As a result, Jan and I had talked a bit about the site, and he had told me he was interested, but of course he couldn’t start programming until I had a final design for him. So now that I had one, I emailed him again, and let him know that the site had to be coded as a set of Movable Type templates. It was late in the game, but Adam trusted enough in Jan’s talents to get it done in time. We talked briefly on iChat, I gave him access to the server and MoveableType, Adam sent him the final design, and he went to work. As I quickly found out, Jan was the developer of CSSEdit, and was probably the finest HTML and CSS coder I could have found in the entire Macintosh community. Thanks to Adam Betts’s connection, he was now a part of the MacThemes effort.

Meanwhile, I began writing a theme review for Max Rudberg’s Milk. Though it was not too difficult to write, I realized that there was no way I could write every review and article for MacThemes alone. But this late in the game, with an eclectic subject and without a site to show or a reputation behind me, it was going to be tough to find a writer who would be interested in contributing.

Around that time, I stumbled on aquasition.net (renamed unregardless.net), a blog run by Steven Canfield that I found to be aesthetically pleasing and well written. And there, on the front page, was a lengthy editorial on the current state of OS X themeing. Here was a writer who had good design sense, knew how to write, and was interested enough in themes to write about them. Bingo. I contacted him, and together, we came up with a format for our reviews, and wrote a couple more for the site’s launch.

On the other side, Jan was frantically trying to turn Adam Betts’s site design into a working website. As an accomplished web coder and the developer of a CSS editing program, Jan’s code had to be squeaky clean and incorporate advanced CSS, or his reputation was at stake. He told me he intended to complete the site’s code without a single HTML table. I was in awe. No tables? Before this site, I knew how annoying they could be, not to mention how much space they took up in a page’s source code, but I also assumed they were necessary. How could someone form, well, tables out of a text formatting language? But Jan was showing me in progress webpages without a single table and only a few lines of code to boot, displaying the design’s white boxes quite well. For a week or so, he continued fiddling with the code, and had it basically finished up. Then, I realized that though we were a Macintosh related site, people would still be visiting it using PC’s at work and school, myself included. I checked out the site so far on IE 6, and, surprise, found it was a total mess. Jan went back into CSSEdit, and after a couple of laborious days writing new code and checking compatibility in VirtualPC, he had it working in IE 6. At this point, there were about five days left for launch, and it was time to stick his code into MoveableType.

The Eleventh Hour

The three of us worked frantically over the next few days, putting Jan’s code into MoveableType and, with the help of my calculus teacher, finding plugins and hacks that would add the functionality to the engine that MacThemes would need. In fact, the site was doing about all that could be done with MoveableType, as of course, the engine had been designed for blogs, while our project was something more complicated than that. This process alone took several days, and by the time December 31st rolled around, there was still lots to be finished with this crucial step.

Meanwhile, where was Bill’s interview? I had sent off several questions to Bill Bart several days before, along with a request for images to use in the interview. He told me he was working on them, and there was no response after that. The interview and Omega preview was still not in my inbox, and I was getting worried. But while frantically installing another MoveableType plugin and instructing my friend on how to write the code for the site’s voting system, I got an email. In my inbox was a very impressive sight. Not only had Bill answered my questions, he had sent that crucial teaser. There it was, a small black and lavender preview of Omega’s iTunes remote. The final piece was here, and I knew it would be enough to bait the interest of the community this website was about to serve. There was an hour left until January 1st.

One moment during these last frantic hours that I remember very clearly is when I visited the MacThemes.net teaser thread at MacNN during, literally, the eleventh hour. I found extremely active discussion on the thread, with people excited about the site’s launch, and ready to stay up until midnight to see it. I realized that it was not long ago that I was in their positions, staying up for ShapeShifter, and it was quite a feeling to see that this time, they were excited about something I had created. That was what had driven me. To give back to the community, using what skills I could provide. Though technically we could have launched the site within the next 25 hours to make the release date, I made a mental note that I would somehow get the site together by midnight, remembering how late I had stayed up for ShapeShifter only to be disappointed by a delayed release.

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