The short version

I've "launched" the Mac Themes Garden! It is a website showcasing more than 3,000 (and counting) Kaleidoscope from the Classic Mac era, ready to be seen, downloaded and explored! Check it out! Oh, and there also is an RSS feed you can subscribe to see themes as they are added/updated!

And yes, there is a button that you can include on your website! Grab it here! Isn't it cute?

Now, for the yapping. Note: if you're reading this in an RSS reader, you might want to open the article on my website directly as it contains a bunch of CSS demos and those won't work well in an RSS reader.

Some background

If you know me from Online, you may know that I've been running the Mac Themes Bot on Bluesky/Mastodon/Cohost for a few years now.

The idea of the bot was simple, showcasing custom themes from the Mac OS X and Classic Mac eras, on the rate of one an hour. Since I was inspired by @kaleidoscopemac on Twitter, I only started showcasing themes made for ShapeShifter by Unsanity. A while later, that Twitter account got suspended.
Since I already had the tooling in place to scrape and post themes for OS X, I figured I could add themes for Kaleidoscope (OS 7/8/9) into the mix. After trying (and failing) to get the original dataset from the author of the bot, I set on to scrape the Wayback Machine for records of the Kaleidoscope Scheme Archive.
From that point on, my bot would post themes every hour, with a classic theme on even hours and an OS X theme on odd hours^[1].

The years passed, the bot carried on, made me and a bunch of other…Read more