Mac Themes Garden is complete!

What started as a crazy project back in 2023, and first saw the light of day last year, is finally complete!

What do you mean by that? Wasn't it done when it launched already?

If only 😅! When I launched the website last year, I purposefully did it in a non-finished state. I knew if I waited to have all ~4,500 schemes to be completely catalogued, I would go slightly insane.
Ever since I launched, I continued to hack away at the remaining themes, taking more and more screenshots from inside my OS 9 VM.

But as of July 29th, I'm done!12

A bunch of funny numbers

I figured it would be fun to gather some statistics and numbers. Mac Themes Garden is, at time of writing this:

  • 4,592 themes from 892 authors
  • 13,801 screenshots
  • 3,994 archives
  • According to my very quick and dirty math, 60 consecutive days of work to take all the screenshots and record all the data by hand.
  • ~65k total visits (a good 15% of that was from the first week post-launch thanks to whoever posted the announcement article to Hacker News)
  • 4,170 followers for the bot account between Mastodon and Bluesky

Here's the distribution of themes by year:

  • 1997: 1,103
  • 1998: 1,751
  • 1999: 921
  • 2000: 525
  • 2001: 196
  • 2002: 96
  • 2003: 3

The 10 authors with the most themes in the archive are:

What now?

I'm not sure! Initially I had wanted to look into extracting icons from the Kaleidoscope schemes and find a way to showcase them, but I haven't found a way to make it work in a satisfactory way. So I'm putting that on the backburner for now.

Something I do want to do and that, hopefully, wouldn't be too bad3 is find a way to serve https://macthemes.garden such that it can be loaded on Classic Macs. I will probably have to make a stripped down version of the site for this but we will see.

I also started looking into how I could archive/record themes made for Mac OS X 10.4 using ShapeShifter. More on that later :)

Footnotes

  1. Technically I do have two themes I could not archive properly because the only copies I have/could find are corrupted. ↩

  2. I meant to write this earlier but, huh, I forgot and I had other shit going on. ↩

  3. Famous last words... ↩

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