32 Flavours and Then Some

Flavours is a Mac application that allow users to create, apply and share beautifully designed themes.

Years ago there was the Mac OS Appearance Manager in Mac OS 8 and 9, and then Shapeshifter for Mac OS X. Each of these allowed users to customize the Mac user interface by altering the appearance of window decorations, widgets, and colors for the purpose of changing the theme of their Mac. The Shapeshifter project fell by the wayside and there ceased to be a reliable way to manage the appearance of OS X, until recently.

It’s a little fiddly in that you can spend a lot of time browsing themes, and a bit of a time-sink for sure, but there are some  beautiful themes ready for your Mac. It probably won’t make you more productive, unless there are certain elements that you find infuriating about OS X that can be solved with paint. For support, I’ve found their support person (Nuno) to be very responsive and quick to respond to any bugs, the last of which that affected me were resolved this week with the release of version 1.0.9.

The changes Flavours makes are purely cosmetic, but in spite of that, it was money well spent; there are dozens upon dozens damn near hundreds of contributed themes already available, and they are available free of charge! There are some real gems in there too.

Thank you for Flavours, and well done, Pedro and Nuno. I’ve had a lot of fun with your software and am really happy to see you two take up this project and the Theme Shop is especially well executed.