Architect and Façade: Theming For Leopard

about 15 years ago

There’s good news for all you Mac OS X Leopard GUI Themer out there. While there’s Panic’s Candybar for icon customization in OS X there is no application to alter all the user interface elements of Leopard. In Tiger there was an application called ShapeShifter but since the whole GUI in Leopard changed it stopped working. Architect and Façade to the rescue.

SlightlyPretentious announced its “Theming made easy”-application Architect is coming as a public beta ~~next sunday (is it 08/31 or 09/07?)~~ on Wednesday, September 3rd. Icon Designer Laurent Baumann already posted a new sweet application icon for this app a while ago and we can expect a nice and good looking solution for theming and customization in Leopard.

Head over to the Screencast and see Architect and its UI in action.

Architect UI

While Architect will help you customizing Leopards UI and building themes out of your modifications, Façade (Laurent’s icon of it) will help you switch (and manage?) the themes. But currently there’s no word on the SlightlyPretentious website about this application.

Slightly Pretentious made Architect available as a public beta while claiming Façade will be coming in october. But Façade already has its own nice website.

Update 02/17/2009: Still no sight of Façade anywhere except the note of a Lead Developer change at Slightly Pretentious.

But meanwhile another theme manager was released: Magnifique, available as a free download.

Magnifique UI