The Mac Observer--Mac OS 8.5: GO FOR IT! Part IV

Theme Choices In The Appearance Manager
Control Panel

Apple's Human Interface wonks are starting to give the Kaleidoscope folks a run for their money. Desktop "Themes" (much like Kaleidoscope's colorful, and sometimes offbeat Schemes) were to have been a part of the Copland OS, and the descendant of that concept appears for the first time in OS 8.5. Granted, OS 8.5's Themes implementation is pretty tame compared to what was planned for Copland (remember those screen shots of the ultra-busy Gizmo Theme??), but in a way, we found them a bit more flexible than even Kaleidoscope in some cases.

The former Desktop Pictures control panel has been merged into the six-paned Appearance control panel/application. This new applet reins in some of the confusion associated with customizing your Desktop in previous OS versions. There are new system fonts -- Sand,

Sherlock's search results.

Gadget and Techno are appealing eye candy, for a little while anyway -- new default highlight hues and patterns, and even OS event/key driven sounds. Whisking through menus prompts a light racheting sound, windows open on your desktop with a clean "whit," and disks are ejected with a firm "ka-plunk." Although it "sounds" annoying, the desktop sounds are actually quite unintrusive, and even helpful in some instances. We've decided to keep them on for the time being.

There are also options in the Appearance control panel for enabling live scrolling in windows (command-click & drag), proportional scroll bars, and font anti-aliasing, or smoothing. Through much trial and error, we can firmly recommend that, if you plan to keep font smoothing on, that you set it for fonts 14-16 points in size or higher. Anti-aliasing makes fonts unreadable and downright ugly in some applications, including SimpleText.