It is with a heavy heart that I report the latest victim of Apple’s overzealous legal team. Johnny, who has diligently been running MacThemes for the past couple of years, writes in with the news. Apple is shutting down my first venture, and with it, a little aqua widget dies.

The website has enabled hundreds of thousands of Mac users to customize their GUI, and now has been hit with snail mail from Apple legal. I know Steve Jobs hates GUI customization. I hope MacThemes has been a major pain in his ass over the years. It’s been a pleasure serving you, the Mac community, with your GUI customization wants and needs over the years.

Dear Readers,

Jonathan Komisar

And for the record, best effort definitely goes to IGN for their pretty amazing Legend of Zelda movie trailer.

MacThemes user VL-Tone discovers an easy terminal command to enable the fabled OS X vector user interface. Resolution independence day! (check it out)

“MacThemes’ Theme For a Week Contest’s first act has drawn to a close, and now it’s time for the user’s involvement. 55 titillating entries are competing for a chance to be one of the three winners of a software cornucopia worth over $1000. With such a grandiose prize at stake, we want to make sure that the winners are deserving, and so half of the total score of a theme will be based on the popular vote, so come one, come all, and vote for your favorite and most deserving theme. Starting today, August 8th, voting opens to MacThemes frequenters and outsiders alike, and to give the indecisive among us as much time to ponder their choice as they need, voting runs until Wednesday, the 15th.” from the contest page.

I’ll be judging these over the next few days, but from my initial peek at the over fifty theme mockups submitted, there are some pretty promising themes in the batch. (The top three winners will be fully created into a working ShapeShifter system theme.) A few of my initial favorites below (personal judge commentary coming soon on the contest page): Continue reading…

After a week of highly entertaining teasers, the new Iconfactory is finally open, and it’s never looked better. You’ll find a lot of goodies here besides the redone site (which, by the way, now includes desktops as well), including a full system icon replacement set by David Lanham to match his recently released theme, Amora, a really quirky new Dashboard widget called “Dine-o-Matic” to help choose your next dinner outing (I know it sounds silly but it’s a hilarious widget, give it a try), and a redone StockIcons.com.

And those who were concerned about Amora’s rather crazy looks will be happy to know it includes two more muted variants, including one that can best be described as a more modern, sharper Milk. Plus, there’s a really cool desktop by former collaborater and one of my favorite artists, Piotr Gajos. Intel users, just make sure you have the latest ShapeShifter beta installed to have these theme work!

Take a visit to the new Iconfactory and David’s site to grab these goodies. (And if the new IF isn’t loading for you, give it some time for your DNS to update.) Congrats to the hard-working pixel pushers for pulling this off!

Edit: Whoops, Dave’s site got dugg to death, so here’s a mirror download link for Amora: Download it!

Nearly a year ago, Iconfactory artist David Lanham shared some icon sketches with me based on Bjork’s “All is Full of Love” music video which features some really cool white plastic/black rubber sheathed robots. I told him he just had to do a full theme based on these icons, and after a loooong and rather painful (think over 17 totally different attempts at getting the Finder buttons right painful) development, the theme, titled Amora, is now finally nearing release having met David’s high standards for his work. Presenting Amora:

Something’s brewing at the Iconfactory, and for now, they’ve posted a very amusing clue at what’s coming up. The Iconfactory, of course, is probably the most established icon design group out there, with such projects as the Windows XP system icons under their belt. Gedeon promises a new pixelart movie each day until the big unveil (five days left according to the splash), so this’ll be quite a fun ride. (Seriously, it’s cool stuff. ) Enjoy!

Could it be coincidence that Iconfactory artist David Lanham has just released a teaser to an upcoming theme and iconset to be released in 7 days? Or is there more?!