"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...

Guess what? Things are stirring again. Actually, they've been stirring for a while, but I've had to keep quiet about most of them. I'm planning some huge updates to the site though in the upcoming week or two.

For any MDA fans out there, if you missed it, we're running a developer competition now to select the right developers for Season 2. And if you're a developer, you'll definitely want to check it out.

MacThemes 2... is out! Huge props to Ricky, Johnny and Dave for pulling it off, and kudos to David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design for the great design refresh. The front page is now active again with a reallly excited news staff, so while I'm taking things pretty hands off, I'll be looking forward to reading all the new content.

MacHeist? Well... it's over, I guess. But it's a long break between now and the next one. Maybe we'll think of something to fill that hiatus up.

There's other stuff coming up, and I'll be making efforts soon to get some more discussion going between me and you guys. But for now, the blog is definitely continuing in hibernation. (I have over 10,000 comments in moderation, mostly spam. I don't even know where to begin.) Stick with the twitter feed for updates.

For those of you who are into the Mac GUI customization, NickelCobalt probably places somewhere near the top of your list of vaporware Mac themes. (Below BBX: Omega.) It's been over two years since Paul Johnson's NickelCobalt took 1st place in the MacThemes Theme Mockup Contest, and unbelievably, it is finally... almost here!

This has been a massive ongoing effort by Skins Factory designer Paul Johnson, master themer Max Rudberg, and Enhanced Labs designer Philipp Antoni, and the result is a very unique theme for OS X that mixes a metallic design with some cobalt blue. What truly stands out for me with NC is its feeling of depth. There really is nothing quite like it.

If you're interested in beta testing this, head on over to the MacThemesForums thread to sign up.

Click for a full screenshot.

Update: The beta is now posted here. Enjoy!

It's been in the works for forever, and thanks to some amazing work by David Lanham and Renn of Atacama Design, the new look for MacThemes is finally ready to be shown off. Of note, the nav bar itself probably took us a good three weeks to figure out as we had to come up with something functional and fitting in with the whole "designer's desk" theme we have going. Some of you designers out there can probably sympathize with the headaches the site's visual metaphor caused. But it's all good now.

To check out the designs, visit the just-started thread over at MacThemesForums here. MacThemes should be back up and running better than ever before by October. The cool part? This is only the first of some pretty cool GUI customization related news to come. I should have some pretty big news for you guys in the next week or two.

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:

Many, many, many of you guys have emailed me or messaged me on AIM over the past few days about MacThemes Forums being down. (Seriously, tons of you. You never know quite how popular something is until something goes wrong, as I found out!) Basically, the hard drive at the data center hosting the forums got hosed, and unfortunately, while we were led to believe backups were being made on separate disks, it turned out that they were being made on a partition on the same disk. Which of course got hosed as well.

The good news? The forums should be back up later today or tomorrow at the absolute latest. James Cox, who hosts the forums (as well as Growl, Quicksilver, and other cool projects at cocoaforge) is working hard on restoring everything, so hang tight. (And for the record, he's not the one to fault for the whole disaster, he's currently also giving hell to the data center.) Things got pretty hairy back there, but the worst is past. Sorry for the inconvenience everyone!

Another note: I'm currently stealing a wifi connection from a neighbor, we're cleaning up at the house now, and should be back 'home' by later today, at which point I'll announce the winner of the mini-contest. If you were planning to enter, be sure to sneak in your entry soon, as only entries submitted by 12PM EST (about 2 hours from now) will be counted.