Cursors! At long last, here's a version of Mighty Mouse that works on Leopard. It's also got a few new UI wrinkles, and you can now easily move your cursors back and forth between Mighty Mouse and Adobe Photoshop™. Enjoy it, and report bugs!
Wait, what did you say?
"AAAAHHHHRRGG! What about ShapeShifter!!??"
Ahh, right...
ShapeShifter will never be updated for Leopard, and here's why: The way that Apple has internally implemented skinning of the UI for Leopard is very obviously a stopgap measure on the way to something new that they'll unveil in the future. To explain this, I need to go into theming history and future extrapolation a bit, so please bear with me.
themeing as old as this icon
Until Leopard was released, theming on OS X was mostly done via a single monolithic file named Extras.rsrc. Internally, this file was a Resource Manager file. The Resource Manager is a leftover from Apple System 1 (yes, seriously) and has been officially deprecated by Apple since the original release of Mac OS X. And yet, this is how theming has been implemented. Obviously, this situation couldn't last forever.
With Leopard, there's something new and spiffy — CoreUI. In the old Extras.rsrc system, the themer modified a bunch of chopped up bits of buttons and sliders and the operating system assembled them all together onscreen. CoreUI changes this idea dramatically - instead, the themer describes what should be rendered onscreen and the operating system assembles the graphics from the themer's recipe. Cabel has an old but good blog post describing this here.
Sounds great. The problem is that it wasn't ready in time for Leopard. So Apple pulled a quickie. Leopard still uses the old, late '90s era vintage Extras.rsrc system. Leopard also uses the snazarrific late '00s era CoreUI. And Leopard uses the stopgap measure called ArtFile. And all three of these completely different systems get used in different places and under different conditions, sometimes even within the same application.
coreui, straight from apple's patent filing
So, what's this ArtFile thing, then? Basically, it's two single files (with two unique file formats, of course) that contain the various images used to composite the operating system. They're both binary files, and neither one uses any sort of a documented file format. And unfortunately, the majority of theming on Leopard uses this particular subsystem out of the three that are available.
So why not convert ShapeShifter to use this system? Basically, because it would take an entire rewrite of ShapeShifter, and I know that I'd be required to do another complete rewrite as soon as the transition to CoreUI is complete. If I'm going to do a complete rewrite, I'm only going to do it a single time.
So basically, ShapeShifter is sitting out Leopard. Once we get a good look at Snow Leopard at this year's WWDC, we'll see how Apple's transition to CoreUI is doing and I'll be able to evaluate ShapeShifter for Snow Leopard more seriously.
In the meantime, themers haven't had many options under Leopard. I personally apologize for this. I haven't been following the theme world closely during the Leopard era, and when something called ArtTools came out a year ago, I thought that themers had what they needed to create themes. Façade was originally slated for release last fall and I thought it would fill the gaps.
I didn't realize until a couple of months ago when Magnifique was released that themers really hadn't had any good options, and that the situation still wasn't ideal.
So here's something to help: a new build of ThemePark that has full support for the two different types of ArtFile used in Leopard. Themers can use this to build Leopard themes. And something really new is that you can also apply these themes from within ThemePark.
This ThemePark build is basic as hell, and the themes you can create and use with it are a far cry from what you could do with ShapeShifter. There's no Unsanity APE module involved, which drastically limits what can be done.
It's also alpha software, meaning that there are known bugs and it isn't feature complete. In the event of an emergency, you can revert to Aqua via the command line by entering the following command:
/Library/PrivilegedHelperTools/com.geekspiff.themepark --revert
Anyway, a picture is worth at least thirty-six words, so here's a fun lil' screencast showing how you can create and apply a theme that will turn your Mac OS X from blue to green in under five minutes.
Enjoy!