At Long Last!

We know that your eyes have been bleeding. We've heard you screaming obscenities at us. And, by gum and by gosh, we've listened!

For your occular amazement, I present ShapeShifter 2.4b1 (updated below), a public beta. It's Universal, so your Intel Mac can finally get its spank on. It's got feature-parity with the PPC version, so you can use it to apply themes from way back in the day, or customize your Intellish icons or desktops. And it's even got a big speed boost when launching and quitting the prefpane, whoot! (small print: except for the first time you launch the prefpane)

Very Important Note: This is beta software. It might kill the dolphins. It might become the mote in your eye. It might do other cleverly worded things that I'm too fried to think of right now. Long story short: Use with care, and we're not responsible if it crashes on that old G3 you were using to power gramma's pacemaker.

And, since I know people are going to ask even though I said it above, yes, this build will work fine with any old guiKit you throw at it.

Finally, please report bugs in this thread. Please do not redistribute this build, or place it on any download sites - it's beta software and will be updating rapidly. And, again, please report bugs - if you don't tell us, we don't know!

Update: Grab ShapeShifter 2.4b2 - it works around an Apple bug that causes themes using large, tiling patterns to crash Cocoa apps on launch on x86 architecture.

Summer O' Betas!

Nope, not Universal ShapeShifter yet!

But ShapeShifter depends on a bunch of underlying code that's shared with other theme-based projects, and they're up-and-running in spiffy universal form, so they get public betas. Since they use shared code, testing them helps get ShapeShifter out the door.

Important Note:: These betas both generate guiKit files that are not useable with the release version of ShapeShifter, version 2.3.1. You'll just get an error if you try, nothing cataclysmic will happen. These guiKits won't begin working until the Universal beta of ShapeShifter is seeded.

Even More Important Note:: These are betas. They might crash. They might push your grandmother down a flight of stairs. They might single-handedly remove all posibilities of peace and love for all humankind. I personally think they're completely solid, but the whole point of betas is that they're untested, except by you, brave reader!

guiTweak

guiTweak usually lives inside of the ShapeShifter preference pane and is used to tweak an existing theme, either by applying CoreImage effects, or by modifying colors. You can also use it to move variants around inside of guiKit files.

It's in stand-alone application form for this beta. If you decide you like it that way, you can always put an alias to it later - it normally lives in <your home directory>/Library/PreferencePanes/ShapeShifter.prefPane/Contents/Resources/guiTweak.app.

guiTweak Version 1.2b1

• guiTweak is now a Universal Binary.
• guiTweak no longer freaks out when creating a tweak that will result in partially-transparent images. So you can now use it to create translucent variants of your favorite themes.
• Resolved an issue that caused crashes and even kernel panics when generating a variant using guiTweak.
• Large-scale speed improvement when generating a new guiTweaked theme.
• guiTweak sliders now update as you drag them.
• Resolved an issue that prevented quitting quiTweak if an error had occurred while generating a tweaked theme.

As a side note, I can't believe that guiTweak was causing kernel panics! guiTweak consists of purely user-level code, which should never, ever, ever be able to cause a kernel panic! This is a bad bug on Apple's part. CoreImage is frickin' flakey…

ThemePark

Moving on to ThemePark. ThemePark is not an Unsanity product, but it's used to create the themes used by ShapeShifter and shares a lot of code guts with ShapeShifter, so I felt it'd be okay to include it here. And I've decided to make it freeware, removing a large barrier between prospective theme creators and their beautiful creation-in-potentialities. So it's most definitely relevant to ShapeShifter.

ThemePark Version 3.1b3

• ThemePark is now freeware! No more chasing the "Use For Free" button! Donations are, of course, still welcome.
• ThemePark is now a universal binary.
• ThemePark can now generate universal guiKit files.
• ThemePark can now read/write resource files in the little-endian "Extras2.rsrc" Intel format.
• Added "Extras2" Open Special menu item.
• Pasting multiple images simultaneously into ThemePark works properly again.
• Patterns that use more than 128 colors now render properly.
• Speed improvements and bug fixes to the ppat editor. Images that contain more than 256 colors are now treated much more nicely. The ppat editor now handles images with transparency without choking.

Download Links

What would life be without a couple of download links?

• guiTweak 1.2b1: TweaksAway!
• ThemePark 3.1b3: Theme Creation Nation

Where's My Damned ShapeShifter!?

Coming quickly. The two betas above hit most of the cases where the difference between PPC chips and Intel chips matters. And they're plain-jane applications rather than Haxies. And they're both architecturally building blocks for ShapeShifter. So what I'm trying to say in my long-winded way is that by getting those out as betas, most of the heavy lifting is done.

We'll be doing a public beta of ShapeShifter this time around as well, due to the long time that's elapsed since the Intel Macs were released, so keep your eyes peeled to this blog.

And last but not least, if you test, please report bugs. This thread is a great place to report them. If you don't report 'em, we don't know about 'em!

Please do not post these to any download sites or anything like that. The download links will only be valid as long as these are in beta, and betas move fast, so, yeah, just don't do it!

Enjoy the betas!