Take ordinary Aqua, pull out the gloss, and give it a touch of iTunes goodness. This is more or less the purpose of iLeopard, a new theme by Guillaume Campagna and several other contributors. iLeopard is one of the first full-fledged “themes” for 10.5, by providing a complete installer, extras, and a sense of ongoing development. Overall, it holds up pretty well; while there are niggling little problems that will turn away the pickiest of UI connoisseurs, the attempt holds up as a very usable iTunes skin.

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We at MacThemes love to shapeshift our computers with innovative designs and beautiful themes, but sometimes we just need to return to our interface roots. Mac OS X Leopard, released on the 26th to eager Mac users everywhere, looks to be the greatest version of Mac OS X released yet, with a brand new Aqua sitting on top of 300+ innovations. For a five year-old theme, Aqua has been given a significant facelift, and the myriad of revisions will leave the majority of Aqua aficionados very satisfied.

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Rhino is the latest theme from artist Toner. The theme is slick, combining rounded inset buttons with a nice array of grays, the result of which is a very solid and usable theme that I could use for… well, forever.

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Disingenuous, Susumu Yoshida’s latest venture in theming, released last week on his website, abandoned the colors and gloss of themes like Cats and Eternal and instead adopted an all-grey appearance. As a long-time MacThemes resident artist, everyone expects high quality in the aesthetics department of his themes and icons- but is Disingenuous a unique release, and does it attract appeal from users of themes like Cats?

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It’s not often you ever encounter a theme like GAIA, revealed by technici and Resident Themer Hirogen, along with several other contributors, a few weeks back to much anticipation and excitement, and finally released to over 7 pages of forum discussion in a single day. But does GAIA live up to its hype as a community suite, and can it become the reigning theme of a user’s desktop?

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V23, a new theme by Themesmith, was released to positive response from forum members, who hailed it as a very usable dark theme. Consisting of light and dark grays, shrunken glyphs, and bright-colored accents, its design will delight users of the author’s previous work, Frankentheme, as well as other dark themes like Ashen, Cold and Photopro; but who else will be drawn to V23, and how in-depth does the theme go?

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Neon is the newest creation by well-known themer Toner, a theme that shares roots with his first theme, Canum. The second release by the MacThemes resident artist, Neon uses Xbox-inspired greens and unified metal to create a solid, lightweight OS X theme. But despite its new color scheme and details, is it an entirely new work, or simply a variant of its predecessor?

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One of the most common traits associated with blue themes is that most share the same roots- adopting Aqua’s characteristics and good parts, and ridding of the bad parts; Canum, released by Resident Artist Toner, takes a different perspective with blue themes, using an unorthodox Aqualess appearance. But does it achieve elegance through its originality?

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