Yeppers, it's beta time again!

THIS SHAPESHIFTER BETA DOES NOT FIX ISSUES WITH ROSETTA!!!!!!. If you're on Intel, Photoshop and Word and whatnot will still crash unless you run "sudo killall translated" from terminal before you launch your Rosetta app.

Sorry about the shouting — I've been shouting it for the last two betas and people are still reporting it as though we don't know about it. :) It's a toughie to fix, as you can probably tell by the fact that, well, we haven't.

So what does this lovely new beta do, you may ask? It makes windows with a unified toolbar "just work" for existing themes, that's what! The accompanying ThemePark release also adds the stuff to customize them individually, but I really don't recommend it. I've explained why in more detail here - long story short, you can't do much interesting stuff the way Apple implemented it. Better to just let ShapeShifter do the voodoo for you.

This ShapeShifter build also re-enables iTunes 7 app skins IF your theme's app skin was created for iTunes 7. Since the accompanying Themepark build fixes some issues with theme template creation for iTunes 7, it's unlikely that any themes like this yet exist if you're reading this 2 minutes after I posted.

This build also updates iContainer support for both ShapeShifter and ThemePark. Drag in an iContainer and watch the magic happen!

Finally, this build fixes an issue that could cause certain themes (cough, Graphite Ultra_thin) to crash during apply if iTunes 7 is on your machine. Have I mentioned that I didn't much enjoy the release of iTunes 7? :)

Okay, I suppose you want the goodies now:

• ShapeShifter 2.4b4: Unifiedtastic ShapeShifting!
• ThemePark 3.1b5: Theme Creation Nation

While our official Mighty Mouse cursors repository, ResExcellence, is down, I've whipped up a quick cursors archive hosted here at Unsanity. So if you miss the cursors, feel free to snag some:

Meanwhile, keep an eye on the blog for an Intel-compatible public beta of Mighty Mouse in the coming days. ;)

Due to popular demand, new version of Chat Transcript Manager will support (among other things) Fire.

Fire stores chat logs in three formats: the oldest, the old, and the new. Thanks to Graham Booker for some excellent insight on how to parse these, I now am ready to crunch them in.

There's a slight problem, though... I have a bunch of newer (.xhtml) format logs, but almost none of .session and .session2 format logs.

Now, drum roll, the question and request: do we want .session and .session2 log files support? How many of you have that in your Sessions folder (~/Library/Application Support/Fire/Sessions/)? Due to the format of the logs, parsing could be tricky for these.

A request: if you do think we should support .session and .session2 logs, email some that you have (the ones that are not private enough) to email: . If I get some, I'll be able to build a parser.

And thanks, as usual! <3

As part of developing ShapeShifter, I often create outlandish test cases that have a very obvious "works" or "totally broken" state. And then run my development machine using that test case for a few days to see what shakes out.

Since the test cases need to be super-obvious, they also tend to be a bit on the eye-searing side (think hot pink text on a green background, for example). I've been told quite a few times that I should show screenshots of these test cases, simply because they're entertaining in the pureness of the horror that they inspire - kinda like zombies.

So, here is the first of what is hopefully a long line of Krazed ShapeShifter Developer Screenshots!!!!

I'll call this one "Hole In My Head" for obvious reasons. Although maybe "Hole In The Wifelet's Head" would be a better name... Clickie makie biggie!

Enjoy that subtle gag reflex that you're even now trying desperately to suppress. :)